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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#15: "I am at the vanguard of a progressive institution."
Oh, I wish. This is the sort of thing that library school teaches the gradautes, and much like the previous library-related one, about how a new recruit can make changes in their organization, it's almost pure public-relations material, unless you happen to be in a very specific space and time.
I freely admit that the American Library Association has done a masterful job of promoting public libraries as bastions of learning, freedom of access to information, and stalwart fighters against the forces of censorship and ignorance. It helps them a lot that when confronted with challenges to these values from various outside forces, a whole lot of libraries and library workers do actually give a digitus impudicus to those that would prevent them from doing their jobs. And ALA and others are more than happy to throw not just their PR weight, but actual useful resources behind a library worker who is getting flak from parts of their community that want to outlaw any mention of queerness, or that think there's too much activisim and bodies of color in books these days, or who pull stupid stunts like claiming seeing two people kiss in Reina Telgemeier's Drama sent them on the pathway of a decades-long pornography addiction. There's the entire tawdry theatricality of Banned Books Week, which does produce useful statistical data and lists of which books have been targeted the most in schools and libraries, but then does things like promise that public libraries will resist the censorship of their materials, even if their own data says a supermajority of material challenges are focused on school districts and schools. It's one thing to say that if students lose access to materials in their schools, they can collect them at the public library, or online through specific programs that get students digital library cards and electronic access to the materials that are being restricted in their area and quite another to recognize how different the school environment is from the public library, and how many students can only access materials through their school library (or through devices issued by their school, at school) and throw a whole bunch of resources into not just yelling very loudly about the censors and their lapdogs in the administration and school board who are completely sucking at their jobs to provide students with a well-rounded and complete education because they're afraid of two boys kissing or of a book that details what's fucked up with society and how non-white, non-straight, and non-cis people have borne the brunt of that fuckery right from the beginning, (And the more intersections that someone stands in the middle of, the bigger the truck is that hits them.) but then trying to oust the censors and their lapdogs, and recruiting and running candidates against them, and endorsing those people who oppose the censors and their lapdogs when they do run. I'm forbidden from doing that in any official capacity as a public librarian. The ALA, even if they can't do it under the broad ALA banner (because certain classes of nonprofit in the United States are barred from political messaging as a condition of their tax-exempt status) certainly could spin up a subsidiary Political Action Committee that can do those kinds of direct campaigning and endorsements and then make sure that monies between the two organizations do not cross in ways that cause problems. ALPACA, maybe, if the acronym hasn't already been taken.
They won't do that, though. Because "library ethics" says a lot of things, many of them contradictory. Because library politics, and the library itself, was not popularized with the idea of being a radical space where all ideas were given freedom to express themselves. Carnegie was trying to burnish his baron of industry image with philanthropy, kind of like how you see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation showing up in all sorts of places. The libraries that he helped build, as well as several of the other public libraries that came into existence, were meant to educate, yes, but they were meant to educate the Poors and the desirable immigrants into the American Way, to leave behind what they had brought with them and assimilate into white society. Racially segregated libraries were a regular part of the library world until the ALA started saying "no, we're not holding our conferences in places where the black members are forbidden from being in the same space as the white members," hoping they could convince with the power of the purse. Plenty of places closed and disassociated with the ALA rather than integrate, at least until it became apparent their side had lost the argument and they were replaced by people more on board with the idea of racially integrated libraries and library staff. Melvil Dewey, expelled from the ALA based on allegations of sexual harrassment, wanted to employ women because he could pay them less than men. And because the library world saw (white) women as the most effective vehicle for delivering the indoctrination into the American Way by giving them a Lady Bountiful, an example of Columbia herself in their very own library. So the mission expanded, with integration, to indoctrinate not just the Poors and the desirable immigrants, but to all the other non-white people that were still being discriminated against, overtly and covertly, to sell them on the myth of the meritocracy and to offer their resources toward those ends.
Librarianship proper, capital-L Librarianship, requires a graduate degree to obtain as the floor, and in doing so, locks out all prospective Librarians who don't have independent wealth or someone else in their lives also contributing income. Or who can't be certain that they're going to find work that will pay them enough to pay back the loans taken out to get that graduate education. Consequently, you'll find that Librarianship is overwhelmingly white women, usually partnered, often married, with a spouse who is likely getting paid better than she is. At the levels underneath Librarianship proper, you'll find a much more representative sample of the community the library is situated in, because those positions do not require graduate degrees. Some of them do ask for a college degree, but they can be two-year degrees, and then a higher position that needs a four-year one. Entry-level shelving work in libraries doesn't always require anything more than a high school diploma or the GED or similar certification. But you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who could achieve a high standard of living on a shelver's salary, especially on a part-time shelver's salary. Of course, there are pathways, we tell ourselves, and tutition programs so that our shelvers can eventually become Librarians themselves (and by obtaining that degree, can then move into most management positions at library systems), and there are scholarships that are specifically for people who aren't represented in the ranks of Librarians to get their degrees. (And then have to contend with the possibility of being the only person who looks like them in their entire organization, with all the implicit, and sometimes explicit, bias that comes with that.) Librarianship is often high on its own supply when it comes to believing that it's got good representaion in staff, in materials, in services, and in what kinds of things it needs to notice and fight.
Library workers, on the other hand, especially the ones closest to our user base, are usually much more pragmatic about all of those things, and would prefer to have policies, procedures, and actions they can take to build the kind of place where the community wants to hang out, thinks they have good resources, and otherwise is in dialogue with the community itself about what to provide and where. This usually puts them in conflict with the people who are administrating their buildings. Because public libraries are also funded from property taxes or municipal budgets, they're subjected to the same stupid shit that happens to public schools. Underfunded libraries and underfunded schools go hand-in-hand, and both of them are routinely subjected to the whims of people who either don't see libraries (or schools) as things that deserve funding or who still believe that schools and libraries exist primarily to indoctrinate, rather than educate, and to indoctrinate that very specific Eldritch Horror Protestantism that's "normal" in USian society. Sometimes those indoctrinators are library workers and library administrators, and sometimes they're part of the library board, and when that happens, the library workers that believe in the best form of their work often end up having to take the L, if they don't want to be fired from their jobs for doing their jobs correctly.
That's some of the structural things that get in the way of a library being a progressive institution. Much of the rest of it is, to put it mildly, self-owns. And there's no bigger self-own involving library ethics, morals, or guiding principles than the one that gets taught to all the library students: neutrality. Much like journalistic neutrality, library neutrality concerns itself with making sure that if we have a book that says it's raining outside, we also have a book that says it's dry outside, sometimes even on subjects where we know that it's raining, but there are enough people who believe it's dry that we carry books on how it's dry because that's what they want to read and want it to be filed in non-fiction.
We do get to exercise some judgment on what we stock, even if we don't always get to exerise the jugment of "that author is a noted conspiracy theorist, so we shouldn't be carrying their material," because sometimes that conspiracy theorist is really popular and our administrators decide it's better for us to carry the popular material than the accurate material. But library neutrality really wants us to find reasons other than the content of the material to not include it, so we use proxy judgments like whether the reviews in the professional literature (and other places) were good, whether the book's available through our usual channels and distributors, whether the book's been traditionally published, whether it's something that we think our community has an interest in, and other things that can often do the judgment of the content for us, without us having to have an official opinion about whether or not the content itself is something that we actually want to carry.
Similarly, we don't get to exercise judgment on the content of material that goes on in our meeting rooms, most of the time. That one has some legal decisions behind it, so the room we have to maneuver is a little less expansive, but there's also plenty of people in our administrations who seem pleased (or at least unwilling to acknowledge) that sometimes our neutrality means that we have to host people who want to censor us, or who want to erase the existence of other people in our community. Much of the messaging that you'll get from a library administration that's getting big anti-queer, anti-library, anti-community groups in them is how we have to make our meeting rooms available to everyone under the same rules, and we're not allowed to censor content, and so long as they follow the rules that we've laid out, they can be there, and we don't endorse their content, just like we don't endorse anybody's content. We can afford to be "we don't endorse anybody" on things that are petty partisan shit, like whether or not we think the bike lanes should be painted with jade green or emerald green. For things that are about our community, our staff, and not just how they're represented in our collections, but whether or not they're welcomed in the place around them, we can damn well have an opinion about that. But library neturality says that's improper for us to have. We can stop behaviors in the library, of course, if someone wants to decide they're interested in doing a hate crime or harassment. But there's a long way between the things that we get to take direct action about and what people who will claim we're endorsing them by allowing them to be in the meeting room. Even the ones that are fervently anti-library will claim that we endorse them by letting them be in the meeting room, and library neutrality tells us we have to endure this and let people make up their own mind about whether they believe it, rather than being able to say "Yes, we have to let them meet, because that's settled law, but make no mistake, if we were allowed to tell them to go away, we would."
If public libraries (and schools) were really allowed to be progressive institutions and to work toward being the kind of place that provided for the needs of their community, rather than what a bunch of white women think, filtered through the particular experience of being underfunded and subject to intimidation by people who don't understand what's happening, but do have the ability to control how underfunded they are, we could do a lot more, and a lot better. It would take having to get rid of a lot of cherished, "traditional" values and finding ways of making sure that getting the high quality education needed for the position wasn't economically ruinous, so that we could finally get people in the profession who looked like and came from our community and would be trusted to do it right. (Or at least to get closer to doing it right.) Maybe when the demographics of librarianship look more like the demographics of the country, we'll have a better chance at achieving the progressive part. And maybe, at that point, we'll be willing to tell the people screaming at us that we're leftist-pinko-queer-woke-communists to fuck off, instead of panicking that somehow we've uninentionally stopped being neutral, and that has to be rectified immediately.
#15: "I am at the vanguard of a progressive institution."
Oh, I wish. This is the sort of thing that library school teaches the gradautes, and much like the previous library-related one, about how a new recruit can make changes in their organization, it's almost pure public-relations material, unless you happen to be in a very specific space and time.
I freely admit that the American Library Association has done a masterful job of promoting public libraries as bastions of learning, freedom of access to information, and stalwart fighters against the forces of censorship and ignorance. It helps them a lot that when confronted with challenges to these values from various outside forces, a whole lot of libraries and library workers do actually give a digitus impudicus to those that would prevent them from doing their jobs. And ALA and others are more than happy to throw not just their PR weight, but actual useful resources behind a library worker who is getting flak from parts of their community that want to outlaw any mention of queerness, or that think there's too much activisim and bodies of color in books these days, or who pull stupid stunts like claiming seeing two people kiss in Reina Telgemeier's Drama sent them on the pathway of a decades-long pornography addiction. There's the entire tawdry theatricality of Banned Books Week, which does produce useful statistical data and lists of which books have been targeted the most in schools and libraries, but then does things like promise that public libraries will resist the censorship of their materials, even if their own data says a supermajority of material challenges are focused on school districts and schools. It's one thing to say that if students lose access to materials in their schools, they can collect them at the public library, or online through specific programs that get students digital library cards and electronic access to the materials that are being restricted in their area and quite another to recognize how different the school environment is from the public library, and how many students can only access materials through their school library (or through devices issued by their school, at school) and throw a whole bunch of resources into not just yelling very loudly about the censors and their lapdogs in the administration and school board who are completely sucking at their jobs to provide students with a well-rounded and complete education because they're afraid of two boys kissing or of a book that details what's fucked up with society and how non-white, non-straight, and non-cis people have borne the brunt of that fuckery right from the beginning, (And the more intersections that someone stands in the middle of, the bigger the truck is that hits them.) but then trying to oust the censors and their lapdogs, and recruiting and running candidates against them, and endorsing those people who oppose the censors and their lapdogs when they do run. I'm forbidden from doing that in any official capacity as a public librarian. The ALA, even if they can't do it under the broad ALA banner (because certain classes of nonprofit in the United States are barred from political messaging as a condition of their tax-exempt status) certainly could spin up a subsidiary Political Action Committee that can do those kinds of direct campaigning and endorsements and then make sure that monies between the two organizations do not cross in ways that cause problems. ALPACA, maybe, if the acronym hasn't already been taken.
They won't do that, though. Because "library ethics" says a lot of things, many of them contradictory. Because library politics, and the library itself, was not popularized with the idea of being a radical space where all ideas were given freedom to express themselves. Carnegie was trying to burnish his baron of industry image with philanthropy, kind of like how you see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation showing up in all sorts of places. The libraries that he helped build, as well as several of the other public libraries that came into existence, were meant to educate, yes, but they were meant to educate the Poors and the desirable immigrants into the American Way, to leave behind what they had brought with them and assimilate into white society. Racially segregated libraries were a regular part of the library world until the ALA started saying "no, we're not holding our conferences in places where the black members are forbidden from being in the same space as the white members," hoping they could convince with the power of the purse. Plenty of places closed and disassociated with the ALA rather than integrate, at least until it became apparent their side had lost the argument and they were replaced by people more on board with the idea of racially integrated libraries and library staff. Melvil Dewey, expelled from the ALA based on allegations of sexual harrassment, wanted to employ women because he could pay them less than men. And because the library world saw (white) women as the most effective vehicle for delivering the indoctrination into the American Way by giving them a Lady Bountiful, an example of Columbia herself in their very own library. So the mission expanded, with integration, to indoctrinate not just the Poors and the desirable immigrants, but to all the other non-white people that were still being discriminated against, overtly and covertly, to sell them on the myth of the meritocracy and to offer their resources toward those ends.
Librarianship proper, capital-L Librarianship, requires a graduate degree to obtain as the floor, and in doing so, locks out all prospective Librarians who don't have independent wealth or someone else in their lives also contributing income. Or who can't be certain that they're going to find work that will pay them enough to pay back the loans taken out to get that graduate education. Consequently, you'll find that Librarianship is overwhelmingly white women, usually partnered, often married, with a spouse who is likely getting paid better than she is. At the levels underneath Librarianship proper, you'll find a much more representative sample of the community the library is situated in, because those positions do not require graduate degrees. Some of them do ask for a college degree, but they can be two-year degrees, and then a higher position that needs a four-year one. Entry-level shelving work in libraries doesn't always require anything more than a high school diploma or the GED or similar certification. But you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who could achieve a high standard of living on a shelver's salary, especially on a part-time shelver's salary. Of course, there are pathways, we tell ourselves, and tutition programs so that our shelvers can eventually become Librarians themselves (and by obtaining that degree, can then move into most management positions at library systems), and there are scholarships that are specifically for people who aren't represented in the ranks of Librarians to get their degrees. (And then have to contend with the possibility of being the only person who looks like them in their entire organization, with all the implicit, and sometimes explicit, bias that comes with that.) Librarianship is often high on its own supply when it comes to believing that it's got good representaion in staff, in materials, in services, and in what kinds of things it needs to notice and fight.
Library workers, on the other hand, especially the ones closest to our user base, are usually much more pragmatic about all of those things, and would prefer to have policies, procedures, and actions they can take to build the kind of place where the community wants to hang out, thinks they have good resources, and otherwise is in dialogue with the community itself about what to provide and where. This usually puts them in conflict with the people who are administrating their buildings. Because public libraries are also funded from property taxes or municipal budgets, they're subjected to the same stupid shit that happens to public schools. Underfunded libraries and underfunded schools go hand-in-hand, and both of them are routinely subjected to the whims of people who either don't see libraries (or schools) as things that deserve funding or who still believe that schools and libraries exist primarily to indoctrinate, rather than educate, and to indoctrinate that very specific Eldritch Horror Protestantism that's "normal" in USian society. Sometimes those indoctrinators are library workers and library administrators, and sometimes they're part of the library board, and when that happens, the library workers that believe in the best form of their work often end up having to take the L, if they don't want to be fired from their jobs for doing their jobs correctly.
That's some of the structural things that get in the way of a library being a progressive institution. Much of the rest of it is, to put it mildly, self-owns. And there's no bigger self-own involving library ethics, morals, or guiding principles than the one that gets taught to all the library students: neutrality. Much like journalistic neutrality, library neutrality concerns itself with making sure that if we have a book that says it's raining outside, we also have a book that says it's dry outside, sometimes even on subjects where we know that it's raining, but there are enough people who believe it's dry that we carry books on how it's dry because that's what they want to read and want it to be filed in non-fiction.
We do get to exercise some judgment on what we stock, even if we don't always get to exerise the jugment of "that author is a noted conspiracy theorist, so we shouldn't be carrying their material," because sometimes that conspiracy theorist is really popular and our administrators decide it's better for us to carry the popular material than the accurate material. But library neutrality really wants us to find reasons other than the content of the material to not include it, so we use proxy judgments like whether the reviews in the professional literature (and other places) were good, whether the book's available through our usual channels and distributors, whether the book's been traditionally published, whether it's something that we think our community has an interest in, and other things that can often do the judgment of the content for us, without us having to have an official opinion about whether or not the content itself is something that we actually want to carry.
Similarly, we don't get to exercise judgment on the content of material that goes on in our meeting rooms, most of the time. That one has some legal decisions behind it, so the room we have to maneuver is a little less expansive, but there's also plenty of people in our administrations who seem pleased (or at least unwilling to acknowledge) that sometimes our neutrality means that we have to host people who want to censor us, or who want to erase the existence of other people in our community. Much of the messaging that you'll get from a library administration that's getting big anti-queer, anti-library, anti-community groups in them is how we have to make our meeting rooms available to everyone under the same rules, and we're not allowed to censor content, and so long as they follow the rules that we've laid out, they can be there, and we don't endorse their content, just like we don't endorse anybody's content. We can afford to be "we don't endorse anybody" on things that are petty partisan shit, like whether or not we think the bike lanes should be painted with jade green or emerald green. For things that are about our community, our staff, and not just how they're represented in our collections, but whether or not they're welcomed in the place around them, we can damn well have an opinion about that. But library neturality says that's improper for us to have. We can stop behaviors in the library, of course, if someone wants to decide they're interested in doing a hate crime or harassment. But there's a long way between the things that we get to take direct action about and what people who will claim we're endorsing them by allowing them to be in the meeting room. Even the ones that are fervently anti-library will claim that we endorse them by letting them be in the meeting room, and library neutrality tells us we have to endure this and let people make up their own mind about whether they believe it, rather than being able to say "Yes, we have to let them meet, because that's settled law, but make no mistake, if we were allowed to tell them to go away, we would."
If public libraries (and schools) were really allowed to be progressive institutions and to work toward being the kind of place that provided for the needs of their community, rather than what a bunch of white women think, filtered through the particular experience of being underfunded and subject to intimidation by people who don't understand what's happening, but do have the ability to control how underfunded they are, we could do a lot more, and a lot better. It would take having to get rid of a lot of cherished, "traditional" values and finding ways of making sure that getting the high quality education needed for the position wasn't economically ruinous, so that we could finally get people in the profession who looked like and came from our community and would be trusted to do it right. (Or at least to get closer to doing it right.) Maybe when the demographics of librarianship look more like the demographics of the country, we'll have a better chance at achieving the progressive part. And maybe, at that point, we'll be willing to tell the people screaming at us that we're leftist-pinko-queer-woke-communists to fuck off, instead of panicking that somehow we've uninentionally stopped being neutral, and that has to be rectified immediately.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 12:19 pm (UTC)So what's to object to here?
no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 06:18 pm (UTC)I remember my most tense moment working in my library. I had a public patron come in - clearly not a student and probably not an instructor - and ask for any books about the president, Donald Trump. The student on the front desk asked for my help. I told her we didn't have any, and she asked why. I was very concerned this could turn into a scene. I explained that (a) our collection was oriented towards courses that the university taught, and his presidency was too new to have been evaluated by historians in a scholarly way, and (II) he was current events, and we don't carry books on current events and that she'd have better luck at the public library as they were much more likely to have such books.
And she was content with my answers and no scene ensued.
I've had people ask for a lot of stuff, and if they're students and we don't have it, I can search other campuses and get stuff via ILL. But we don't ILL for public patrons because there are costs involved.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 08:13 pm (UTC)Yeah, there's definitely a relationship where the more money you have, the more money you want to hold on to. And yes, that does often result in skewed priorities, as the people with the money get to dictate what's important and what isn't.