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silveradeptLet's talk. Or at least try. Because, well, I like to talk about the profession. Some of what it does well, some of what it doesn't do well at all. A lot of these materials are posts from previous years, but their content is still relevant. There will be swearing. And a lot of what you see might have broader application than just to libraries. Feel free to extrapolate outward.
Getting into the library profession is not the easiest task, and that's before you have to go through a process that encourages you to see yourself as the reason why you're not getting a job. Rather than, say, a lot of people going into libraries as a second career, and not a lot of jobs being available, and a profession that can't decide whether it wants to embrace the new reality of serving all the people that are around, or whether it wants to retreat and position itself as the memory of a time gone by, trying to remember something that will get more difficult to do with each passing year. And that doesn't offer much help from already-in-place positions so that the students and interns can get both experience and money to work their own job searches from. Add on to that how difficult it is to explain to someone (repeatedly) what you do as a librarian, and there's a lot of burnout factors already in play before you even get a career off the ground.
You can see some of the tension between past and future in how libraries handle things like teenagers. Coloring books that teenagers are interested in as an article is about looking forward, for example. As is a list of ways that a librarian can make their library more appealing to teenagers. Of special importance there are the questions about policies and whether all the staff are going to take a positive attitude toward their teenagers. Because you can't have some staff thinking of those teenagers are pests and problems and others trying to court them and make them feel welcome. If the institution is disproportionately cracking down on teenagers without acknowledging what they're doing right, the institution is setting themselves up for the same situations to keep happening. It's why there are YALSA's Teen Competencies, as well.
It's not easy to have great successes in your early career, either - sometimes you run into co-workers (or managers) that want to block you because they don't understand or are afraid of your ideas. And, at least at my organization, we still haven't developed a culture that appreciates and acknowledges the less flashy and more vital work that libraries and library staff do on a daily basis. We have a vehicle to do that with. And maybe I've had the unfortunate problem of being on a team that delivers high-quality stuff so regularly that it becomes routine, rather than being recognized for the really good stuff that it is. Because that's fucking depressing, man, especially as an early-career librarian. You learn very quickly that nobody seems to care, and to really, seriously treasure the moments where someone does actually acknowledge the cool shit you've done. Doubly so if it's a member of the public doing it.
The profession has routinely positioned itself as the champion of freedom of thought against terrible censorious interests. There's a definite need to have and find ways of getting the right books into the right hands (and draw attention to forces that are trying to disappear those books from library shelves), but there's a strong case to be made that part of our remit is providing ways of facilitating difficult conversations as well. Because taking books out of classroom required reading because they use a racial slur sometimes has the intention of not causing further harm to Black students, rather than trying to avoid making White people uncomfortable about their history and the racial slurs they used. (And some still do.) But a conversation on race these days has to talk a lot more about things that still qualify as bad, but that haven't risen to the level where they're seen as bad.
Just one aspect of this conversation could be talking about the depiction of police officers in children's books - do they accurately reflect how policing is for everyone, or do they always present policing in a positive light? Perhaps a discussion on the evolution of signage to be much more than just direct messaging, but instead using humor and good advertising technique to draw the eyes and attention of a viewer. Maybe we can draw attention to the work of activists that have tried and are trying to make libraries less terrible spaces for people of color.
Or maybe we can admit that we need to be able to talk to children about race long before we think they understand anything about race, and keep trying to do that, owning up to our stumbles and our failures, until we actually get good at it. And to do more to speak out against the casual bigotry that we encounter in our lives, especially when we can use a position of privilege to counteract that bigotry and have the response come from inside the house that someone has constructed as "us", as opposed to "them".
I have much less sympathy for those that want to remove books they call "trashy" and to implement surveillance of students and inform their parents about what thy're checking out, because that's the opposite of facilitation of discussion and treating students like they can handle difficult conversations. And definitely not on trying to single out books with themes and characters that are of a certain subgroup and demand the public have control over what the library acquires about that subgroup, because that's essentially killing the collection (and the discussion) by advertising what someone is reading or looking at to the public. Nor should programs be pressured to be shut down on the reasoning of "my belief system says that this other person doesn't deserve to exist as they are."
Another of the big things when it comes to libraries is the consternation we have about teaching people how to discern the difference between disinformation, misinformation, and real actual facts. In an environment where we have to take shortcuts, because it's no longer possible to evaluate all possible sources laterally and in-depth. And that's before we add in the reality that there are a lot of people that are deliberately trying to mess with those sources, whether for lulz or more nefarious reasons. (Researcher boyd expounds on this at some length at SXSW in 2018. Regrettably, no official captions.)
Because libraries have a certain demographic prevalence, and, despite being so full of women, still manage to somehow put more men in management and higher positions as a profession. We don't make it an organizational priority to really commit to equity, diversity, and inclusion and to provide clear and effecive channels of communication so that bad behavior and bad institutional policy can be flagged, examined, and appropriate action taken. (Or maybe that's just my institution. Maybe yours is better.)
That high population of women also should bring to the forefront the part where libraries, as an institution, aren't doing nearly enough to make sure their staff are educated on how to deal with harassment, whether from the public, other staff people, or managers. And to make sure those allegations get treated with the seriousness they deserve. There's also the fact that in general, libraries and librarians need training on how to handle security issues, and so the specific training needed on harassment can be folded into a serious commitment to making sure that library staff know how to stay safe in all situations. Because it's already happening, and it shouldn't be dismissed as a cost of working with the public. (It's also happening in the children's book industry, but like many other places, sometimes allegations don't come forward because you still have to work with that harasser if you want to put bread on your table.)
Because one of the profession's most prominent names was also a documented harrasser of the women that worked with him or that he supervised. The profession itself is steeped in this stuff, and yet that's not the kind of stuff we were taught in library school. We've only now just gotten around to changing the name of a library award, despite having the evidence that the writer in question was unflattering in her descriptions of our first nations and had her characters perform and watch performances of blackface minstrel shows. Even if it is an author in their time, in our time we know these things aren't okay, and we shouldn't be celebrating someone with their name on the award. Some people grouse that the decision to rename to the Children's Literature Legacy award will mean the Geisel goes next, because as much as Dr. Seuss is a beloved children's staple for interesting rhymes, he also drew terrible caricatures of East Asian people in those books and did a lot of anti-Japanese propaganda as a war cartoonist. I hope those people live long enough to see their terrible worry come exactly true, and then long enough after that to see that we're actually doing better by not naming awards after people who don't reflect the best of our values.
The last few years have been incident after incident about the need to believe people when they say shit happens. Most of the regular readers here know the hashtags and movements well at this point. Black Lives Matter forces us to confront the reality that police prejudice results in unequal treatment of people based on their skin color, often with lethal results for those falling on the disprivileged side. Me Too is really only one in a decades-long string of attempts by women trying to get someone, anyone to take seriously the idea that women are sexually harassed, abused, and raped all the time, and that a woman essentially has to take into account their safety any time they choose to interact with someone else, with the added cherry on top of the shit sundae that even if they come forward to the authorities or they make public accusations with evidence to support them, there's a good chance they won't be believed, and they will almost certainly become targets for further harassment because being a woman making an accusation automatically means they're wrong and deserving of the worst possible treatment for it. We Need Diverse Books offers the simplest of questions: Why aren't the numbers of books published in the United States more reflective of the actual demographics of the United States? Statistics suggests there are already more than enough creative voices of color, of queerness, of any minority to be published in percentages that reflect the actual demographics, and that the characters in those books, since they're constructed by those authors that get published, could surely come more in line with the actual demographics of the country fairly easily. Which in turn would give children of those minorities more opportunities to see themselves as the protagonists, the heroes, the people with agency in their own stories, and that might inspire them to be the heroes and protagonists of their own stories. Teenagers who were the victims of violence in their schools took action and assumed to themselves the roles of heroes and made demands of those in power to make change. Unlike the stories, though, the heroes were told by the villains they couldn't possibly understand what they were talking about. That's rich coming from people who never had to witness the terror of being at a place of learning and having to fear for their lives and wonder if the person who was being ostracized today would be the person committing violence tomorrow, and never had to weigh what the possible consequences might be of rejecting someone that you're not interested in, or whether to fight off the assault that's happening now or let it happen because the retaliation that would follow would be so much worse.
Yet libraries and library workers often duck the question or refuse to engage with any of this because they're still clinging to the biggest elephant in the room - the question of library "neutrality." Despite all of this, there are still enough people in the profession that are adamant about not taking sides that the mid-winter meeting of the American Library Association had a debate-like program on the question. (A summary version of the program.) What gets almost immediately lost in any discussion where someone seriously thinks that libraries can and should be neutral is that the profession itself is composed most heavily of White women, which means "neutral" values are predominantly the values of White women. Childrens' book publishers and movie producers aren't helping the perception of all the characters being a default white (or whitewashed - sorry, J. Law, but Katniss is explicitly described as not being White). Our policies are very much written to specific ideas and values, and we can't pretend that they aren't going to clash, and we definitely can't pretend not to notice when they actively cause particular effects. A policy of "only names on official identification will be used on library cards" says that a person needs to change their name on an official identification to have themselves represented authentically. That costs money. That also requires a certain amount of passing through gatekeepers, who may have their own agendas or intend to make things difficult for someone who wants to change their names. It may exclude the undocumented entirely from your library, because they lack the official identification to get their library card in the first place. Using gendered pronouns with people that you don't explicitly know their pronouns for sends a message that you may not be safe to be told someone's correct pronouns. Not having staffers that can speak he languages of your community excludes members of that community from participating in your library. As does being located somewhere that's not easily accessible by foot, bike, board, and bus. Hell, where your library is might have been a decision made by people who wanted to exclude people of color from your library a long time ago, and you might be stuck with that location because you can't convince your tax base to put you somewhere that everyone might be able to get to. If you can't get out of your building, you're only going to know about what happens in your community from the people that come into the building.
What gets on the shelves is not a neutral decision. What gets weeded off the shelves is not a neutral decision. Who is on the display and who isn't is not a neutral decision. Where the display is isn't a neutral decision. What programs are supported by the library is not a neutral decision. Whether the library charges fines for lateness is not a neutral decision. Deciding not to take a position on a social issue is not a neutral decision. How you handle the most delicate of inquiries that represent someone placing an unfathomable amount of trust in you is not going to be neutral. There will be no second chances if you screw it up. There's no way that a library can be neutral. Libraries and library workers have to be able to assess issues as they arrive and decide whether this is a situation where being informative but non-partisan is a superior position to being informative and officially opinionated on the issue. Because there are a lot of unofficial opinions that are driving policies, processes, and procedures, many under the latitude of "professional judgment" afforded to those of us who have the degree. My organization has official opinions on how the collection should be structured, what materials we acquire, and what reasons are sound ones for removing something from the collection. They're not neutral, and it would be farcical of me to say they are. The umbrella organization has official opinions on how viewpoints should be represented, who should have access to facilities and meeting spaces, and who should be allowed in and out of the profession. Sometimes the umbrella organization's values conflict with my employer's, and sometimes they're both in conflict with my personal code of ethics and implementation of what a library worker is and should value. The umbrella organization believes they're right, my employer believes they're right, and yet they're both so terribly wrong it hurts. I do not make decisions that favor neutrality, and it would be extraordinarily dishonest to claim that I do. The best that I can hope for is that my decisions are made in accord with my own morals and values, the morals and values I have chosen to adopt are good ones, and that I have the sense to realize it when I have adopted morals and values that are improper, terrible, or harmful. Own, apologize, repair. Repeat as needed.
Despite all of the reasons that people have not to, libraries and library workers are seen as an institution that the public trusts. For reasons that turn out to be interesting - like how helpful we are, or that we're providing services to the long tail of people who are only reluctantly joining the online sphere, or are confused by the speed in which it moves. And our commitment to privacy - although there are plenty of companies that would rather we not be so private with our user data, dangling the possibility of better services in exchange for that data. We need to be better about deserving the trust of our users as an institution and organization, and fixing some of the concerns put out in this post and elsewhere would go a long way toward maintaining that trust. It's going to take some wrangling, some thinking, some policy-making (and retraction of interpretations and policies when it turns out they're wholly inadequate or have knock-on effects that we don't want, like inviting -ists inside the building and making it sound like they can be -ists without consequences in our spaces.) and a lot of owning up to our mistakes and doing better if we want to maintain the trust that we already have and to make inroads toward trust in places that have every right to tell us to get lost. Those places are the ones that are going to save us when it comes time to justify our continued existence. We have to be able to call bullshit when it shows up, even if that means looking like partisans because one side has a loose-to-nonexistent relationship with truth and facts. Fidelity to truth, especially when that truth is a difficult one to acknowledge, will earn much more trust than proclaiming that we're only providing information and our users have to make up their own minds about things.
It is part of our duties to house opinions that are wrong, philosophies that are destructive, and ideas and narratives that are horrifying, because one of the best ways to be able to combat wrong opinions, destructive philosophies, and horrifying ideas and narratives is to be able to study them in their own words. Our goal is to be informative, but we should be able to express that those opinions are wrong, those philosophies are destructive, and those ideas and narratives are horrifying, because our goal is also to be truthful. Most of the time, we have to be subtle about it -- making sure our recommendations and displays are stocked with people of color and queer people, instead of a solid list of white dudes, for example -- because hammers and anvils are blunt objects and a lot of people will resist blunt methods, but when the time comes, and the anvil needs to be dropped, we should be willing to do so fearlessly. We live in an era where trust in everything is eroding through concerted efforts to exhaust and overwhelm people with lies, both small and big, until they give up trying to sort what's real and what's not. And yet, people still trust the library, sometimes even explicitly on the idea that we're not trying to bullshit anyone and will give them the straight truth when they ask. We should take advantage of that trust by doing exactly what's expected.
I guess I should try to sum all of this up, and I might even have a couple sentences that can manage it. A person should be free to read what ideas they are interested in. They should be able to access expert help in determining the veracity and toxicity of those ideas. If they should decide to act on those ideas, or any other ideas they have, they should receive all the consequences earned for those actions, regardless of whether those actions are directed at the public or the staff (or both).
We can do all of that. We should be doing all of that. Why aren't we doing all of that already?
Getting into the library profession is not the easiest task, and that's before you have to go through a process that encourages you to see yourself as the reason why you're not getting a job. Rather than, say, a lot of people going into libraries as a second career, and not a lot of jobs being available, and a profession that can't decide whether it wants to embrace the new reality of serving all the people that are around, or whether it wants to retreat and position itself as the memory of a time gone by, trying to remember something that will get more difficult to do with each passing year. And that doesn't offer much help from already-in-place positions so that the students and interns can get both experience and money to work their own job searches from. Add on to that how difficult it is to explain to someone (repeatedly) what you do as a librarian, and there's a lot of burnout factors already in play before you even get a career off the ground.
You can see some of the tension between past and future in how libraries handle things like teenagers. Coloring books that teenagers are interested in as an article is about looking forward, for example. As is a list of ways that a librarian can make their library more appealing to teenagers. Of special importance there are the questions about policies and whether all the staff are going to take a positive attitude toward their teenagers. Because you can't have some staff thinking of those teenagers are pests and problems and others trying to court them and make them feel welcome. If the institution is disproportionately cracking down on teenagers without acknowledging what they're doing right, the institution is setting themselves up for the same situations to keep happening. It's why there are YALSA's Teen Competencies, as well.
It's not easy to have great successes in your early career, either - sometimes you run into co-workers (or managers) that want to block you because they don't understand or are afraid of your ideas. And, at least at my organization, we still haven't developed a culture that appreciates and acknowledges the less flashy and more vital work that libraries and library staff do on a daily basis. We have a vehicle to do that with. And maybe I've had the unfortunate problem of being on a team that delivers high-quality stuff so regularly that it becomes routine, rather than being recognized for the really good stuff that it is. Because that's fucking depressing, man, especially as an early-career librarian. You learn very quickly that nobody seems to care, and to really, seriously treasure the moments where someone does actually acknowledge the cool shit you've done. Doubly so if it's a member of the public doing it.
The profession has routinely positioned itself as the champion of freedom of thought against terrible censorious interests. There's a definite need to have and find ways of getting the right books into the right hands (and draw attention to forces that are trying to disappear those books from library shelves), but there's a strong case to be made that part of our remit is providing ways of facilitating difficult conversations as well. Because taking books out of classroom required reading because they use a racial slur sometimes has the intention of not causing further harm to Black students, rather than trying to avoid making White people uncomfortable about their history and the racial slurs they used. (And some still do.) But a conversation on race these days has to talk a lot more about things that still qualify as bad, but that haven't risen to the level where they're seen as bad.
Just one aspect of this conversation could be talking about the depiction of police officers in children's books - do they accurately reflect how policing is for everyone, or do they always present policing in a positive light? Perhaps a discussion on the evolution of signage to be much more than just direct messaging, but instead using humor and good advertising technique to draw the eyes and attention of a viewer. Maybe we can draw attention to the work of activists that have tried and are trying to make libraries less terrible spaces for people of color.
Or maybe we can admit that we need to be able to talk to children about race long before we think they understand anything about race, and keep trying to do that, owning up to our stumbles and our failures, until we actually get good at it. And to do more to speak out against the casual bigotry that we encounter in our lives, especially when we can use a position of privilege to counteract that bigotry and have the response come from inside the house that someone has constructed as "us", as opposed to "them".
I have much less sympathy for those that want to remove books they call "trashy" and to implement surveillance of students and inform their parents about what thy're checking out, because that's the opposite of facilitation of discussion and treating students like they can handle difficult conversations. And definitely not on trying to single out books with themes and characters that are of a certain subgroup and demand the public have control over what the library acquires about that subgroup, because that's essentially killing the collection (and the discussion) by advertising what someone is reading or looking at to the public. Nor should programs be pressured to be shut down on the reasoning of "my belief system says that this other person doesn't deserve to exist as they are."
Another of the big things when it comes to libraries is the consternation we have about teaching people how to discern the difference between disinformation, misinformation, and real actual facts. In an environment where we have to take shortcuts, because it's no longer possible to evaluate all possible sources laterally and in-depth. And that's before we add in the reality that there are a lot of people that are deliberately trying to mess with those sources, whether for lulz or more nefarious reasons. (Researcher boyd expounds on this at some length at SXSW in 2018. Regrettably, no official captions.)
Because libraries have a certain demographic prevalence, and, despite being so full of women, still manage to somehow put more men in management and higher positions as a profession. We don't make it an organizational priority to really commit to equity, diversity, and inclusion and to provide clear and effecive channels of communication so that bad behavior and bad institutional policy can be flagged, examined, and appropriate action taken. (Or maybe that's just my institution. Maybe yours is better.)
That high population of women also should bring to the forefront the part where libraries, as an institution, aren't doing nearly enough to make sure their staff are educated on how to deal with harassment, whether from the public, other staff people, or managers. And to make sure those allegations get treated with the seriousness they deserve. There's also the fact that in general, libraries and librarians need training on how to handle security issues, and so the specific training needed on harassment can be folded into a serious commitment to making sure that library staff know how to stay safe in all situations. Because it's already happening, and it shouldn't be dismissed as a cost of working with the public. (It's also happening in the children's book industry, but like many other places, sometimes allegations don't come forward because you still have to work with that harasser if you want to put bread on your table.)
Because one of the profession's most prominent names was also a documented harrasser of the women that worked with him or that he supervised. The profession itself is steeped in this stuff, and yet that's not the kind of stuff we were taught in library school. We've only now just gotten around to changing the name of a library award, despite having the evidence that the writer in question was unflattering in her descriptions of our first nations and had her characters perform and watch performances of blackface minstrel shows. Even if it is an author in their time, in our time we know these things aren't okay, and we shouldn't be celebrating someone with their name on the award. Some people grouse that the decision to rename to the Children's Literature Legacy award will mean the Geisel goes next, because as much as Dr. Seuss is a beloved children's staple for interesting rhymes, he also drew terrible caricatures of East Asian people in those books and did a lot of anti-Japanese propaganda as a war cartoonist. I hope those people live long enough to see their terrible worry come exactly true, and then long enough after that to see that we're actually doing better by not naming awards after people who don't reflect the best of our values.
The last few years have been incident after incident about the need to believe people when they say shit happens. Most of the regular readers here know the hashtags and movements well at this point. Black Lives Matter forces us to confront the reality that police prejudice results in unequal treatment of people based on their skin color, often with lethal results for those falling on the disprivileged side. Me Too is really only one in a decades-long string of attempts by women trying to get someone, anyone to take seriously the idea that women are sexually harassed, abused, and raped all the time, and that a woman essentially has to take into account their safety any time they choose to interact with someone else, with the added cherry on top of the shit sundae that even if they come forward to the authorities or they make public accusations with evidence to support them, there's a good chance they won't be believed, and they will almost certainly become targets for further harassment because being a woman making an accusation automatically means they're wrong and deserving of the worst possible treatment for it. We Need Diverse Books offers the simplest of questions: Why aren't the numbers of books published in the United States more reflective of the actual demographics of the United States? Statistics suggests there are already more than enough creative voices of color, of queerness, of any minority to be published in percentages that reflect the actual demographics, and that the characters in those books, since they're constructed by those authors that get published, could surely come more in line with the actual demographics of the country fairly easily. Which in turn would give children of those minorities more opportunities to see themselves as the protagonists, the heroes, the people with agency in their own stories, and that might inspire them to be the heroes and protagonists of their own stories. Teenagers who were the victims of violence in their schools took action and assumed to themselves the roles of heroes and made demands of those in power to make change. Unlike the stories, though, the heroes were told by the villains they couldn't possibly understand what they were talking about. That's rich coming from people who never had to witness the terror of being at a place of learning and having to fear for their lives and wonder if the person who was being ostracized today would be the person committing violence tomorrow, and never had to weigh what the possible consequences might be of rejecting someone that you're not interested in, or whether to fight off the assault that's happening now or let it happen because the retaliation that would follow would be so much worse.
Yet libraries and library workers often duck the question or refuse to engage with any of this because they're still clinging to the biggest elephant in the room - the question of library "neutrality." Despite all of this, there are still enough people in the profession that are adamant about not taking sides that the mid-winter meeting of the American Library Association had a debate-like program on the question. (A summary version of the program.) What gets almost immediately lost in any discussion where someone seriously thinks that libraries can and should be neutral is that the profession itself is composed most heavily of White women, which means "neutral" values are predominantly the values of White women. Childrens' book publishers and movie producers aren't helping the perception of all the characters being a default white (or whitewashed - sorry, J. Law, but Katniss is explicitly described as not being White). Our policies are very much written to specific ideas and values, and we can't pretend that they aren't going to clash, and we definitely can't pretend not to notice when they actively cause particular effects. A policy of "only names on official identification will be used on library cards" says that a person needs to change their name on an official identification to have themselves represented authentically. That costs money. That also requires a certain amount of passing through gatekeepers, who may have their own agendas or intend to make things difficult for someone who wants to change their names. It may exclude the undocumented entirely from your library, because they lack the official identification to get their library card in the first place. Using gendered pronouns with people that you don't explicitly know their pronouns for sends a message that you may not be safe to be told someone's correct pronouns. Not having staffers that can speak he languages of your community excludes members of that community from participating in your library. As does being located somewhere that's not easily accessible by foot, bike, board, and bus. Hell, where your library is might have been a decision made by people who wanted to exclude people of color from your library a long time ago, and you might be stuck with that location because you can't convince your tax base to put you somewhere that everyone might be able to get to. If you can't get out of your building, you're only going to know about what happens in your community from the people that come into the building.
What gets on the shelves is not a neutral decision. What gets weeded off the shelves is not a neutral decision. Who is on the display and who isn't is not a neutral decision. Where the display is isn't a neutral decision. What programs are supported by the library is not a neutral decision. Whether the library charges fines for lateness is not a neutral decision. Deciding not to take a position on a social issue is not a neutral decision. How you handle the most delicate of inquiries that represent someone placing an unfathomable amount of trust in you is not going to be neutral. There will be no second chances if you screw it up. There's no way that a library can be neutral. Libraries and library workers have to be able to assess issues as they arrive and decide whether this is a situation where being informative but non-partisan is a superior position to being informative and officially opinionated on the issue. Because there are a lot of unofficial opinions that are driving policies, processes, and procedures, many under the latitude of "professional judgment" afforded to those of us who have the degree. My organization has official opinions on how the collection should be structured, what materials we acquire, and what reasons are sound ones for removing something from the collection. They're not neutral, and it would be farcical of me to say they are. The umbrella organization has official opinions on how viewpoints should be represented, who should have access to facilities and meeting spaces, and who should be allowed in and out of the profession. Sometimes the umbrella organization's values conflict with my employer's, and sometimes they're both in conflict with my personal code of ethics and implementation of what a library worker is and should value. The umbrella organization believes they're right, my employer believes they're right, and yet they're both so terribly wrong it hurts. I do not make decisions that favor neutrality, and it would be extraordinarily dishonest to claim that I do. The best that I can hope for is that my decisions are made in accord with my own morals and values, the morals and values I have chosen to adopt are good ones, and that I have the sense to realize it when I have adopted morals and values that are improper, terrible, or harmful. Own, apologize, repair. Repeat as needed.
Despite all of the reasons that people have not to, libraries and library workers are seen as an institution that the public trusts. For reasons that turn out to be interesting - like how helpful we are, or that we're providing services to the long tail of people who are only reluctantly joining the online sphere, or are confused by the speed in which it moves. And our commitment to privacy - although there are plenty of companies that would rather we not be so private with our user data, dangling the possibility of better services in exchange for that data. We need to be better about deserving the trust of our users as an institution and organization, and fixing some of the concerns put out in this post and elsewhere would go a long way toward maintaining that trust. It's going to take some wrangling, some thinking, some policy-making (and retraction of interpretations and policies when it turns out they're wholly inadequate or have knock-on effects that we don't want, like inviting -ists inside the building and making it sound like they can be -ists without consequences in our spaces.) and a lot of owning up to our mistakes and doing better if we want to maintain the trust that we already have and to make inroads toward trust in places that have every right to tell us to get lost. Those places are the ones that are going to save us when it comes time to justify our continued existence. We have to be able to call bullshit when it shows up, even if that means looking like partisans because one side has a loose-to-nonexistent relationship with truth and facts. Fidelity to truth, especially when that truth is a difficult one to acknowledge, will earn much more trust than proclaiming that we're only providing information and our users have to make up their own minds about things.
It is part of our duties to house opinions that are wrong, philosophies that are destructive, and ideas and narratives that are horrifying, because one of the best ways to be able to combat wrong opinions, destructive philosophies, and horrifying ideas and narratives is to be able to study them in their own words. Our goal is to be informative, but we should be able to express that those opinions are wrong, those philosophies are destructive, and those ideas and narratives are horrifying, because our goal is also to be truthful. Most of the time, we have to be subtle about it -- making sure our recommendations and displays are stocked with people of color and queer people, instead of a solid list of white dudes, for example -- because hammers and anvils are blunt objects and a lot of people will resist blunt methods, but when the time comes, and the anvil needs to be dropped, we should be willing to do so fearlessly. We live in an era where trust in everything is eroding through concerted efforts to exhaust and overwhelm people with lies, both small and big, until they give up trying to sort what's real and what's not. And yet, people still trust the library, sometimes even explicitly on the idea that we're not trying to bullshit anyone and will give them the straight truth when they ask. We should take advantage of that trust by doing exactly what's expected.
I guess I should try to sum all of this up, and I might even have a couple sentences that can manage it. A person should be free to read what ideas they are interested in. They should be able to access expert help in determining the veracity and toxicity of those ideas. If they should decide to act on those ideas, or any other ideas they have, they should receive all the consequences earned for those actions, regardless of whether those actions are directed at the public or the staff (or both).
We can do all of that. We should be doing all of that. Why aren't we doing all of that already?
no subject
Date: 2018-10-09 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-13 02:49 am (UTC)