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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
I know that we're not supposed to over-identify with our work, as, after all, our work will never love us back, but the first community that I thought of when I was coming up with the idea of this December Days was the greater group of people who call themselves children's librarians. (And teen librarians, a bit, too. I've been professionally teen-adjacent for all of my career, even if I've never officially been a teen librarian.)
I've been saving a bit of spite for this entry, mostly because I really hope that Amanda Jones gets to stick Dan Kleinman where it hurts and get him to have to give up on things, possibly in an Alex Jones-style of being reduced to penury for saying things that are demonstrably false and defamatory. If you're not familiar with Dan, we've known about him for decades, where he's been pushing the idea that libraries and librarians are actively throwing age-restricted pornography at minors. First, he was harping that the Internet at the library meant that kids were getting pushed porn through that, and in the latest ramp-up of censorship, he's apparently joined the brigades that are accusing librarians of cultivating sexual relationships with children and pushing pornography in print as well as online at them. Ms. Jones' complaints are but a sampling of what Dan has been doing for decades, but he is an exemplar of what the tactics and accusations are of the people who want to censor library materials over their queer content (because queerness is automatically sexual in a way that straightness just isn't). And so I'd like to see him made an exemplar of what kind of Finding Out comes from Fucking Around to the degree that he has been, and for all the time that he's been doing it.
He even visited here once, although he didn't stick around to argue anything. And searching back through my journal, the first time I mentioned him and his crusade in my journal was 2007.
The key part of the potential damage that can be done is the same damage that's threatened in the Project 2025 document: if being a librarian and giving a child a book that has queer content is "pushing porn" or "grooming" them, then the children's librarian is going to be charged and prosecuted as a sex offender, which will certainly make it hard-to-impossible to continue their livelihood as children's librarians, and will definitely negatively impact their ability to get any other kind of job, as well, because most employers require you to disclose your felony convictions or similar restrictions on what audiences you can work with, and they'll likely also check the offender registries and the like. These accusations against school librarians, teen librarians, and children's librarians are a brazen attempt to force us into choosing between never being able to work in our profession again or acquiescing to ridiculous censorship demands that will ensure our collections are stripped of anything that might even hint at the possibility of queer people (or brown people, or anyone else who isn't the hegemon.)
Okay, moment of professional spite over.
The community of librarians in general, every time that it gets measured, returns back more than a supermajority of people working in libraries as women, and more than a supermajority of people working in libraries as white, so it's not a stretch to say that a supermajority or more of people working in libraries are white women. (And if you're thinking about the demographics of the last U.S. political election, and which way various demographics broke, yes, that means there's a strong possibility that at least some of the people in the library coalition voted for the incoming administration.) That makes me a bit of an outlier, in the send of being nonbinary and working in libraries (there's plenty of people in the trans umbrella working in libraries, yes, but as a percentage of workers, still rather small) a much bigger outlier in the sense that I'm AMAB and working in libraries, and even more of an outlier that I'm AMAB and working in children's services as a degreed librarian. My organization, for a very long time since I started there, did not have two AMAB degreed librarians in the youth services cohort. I disclaim that this work situation gives me any special insight into the community of women. And there are times where there's the "this thing happened in the men's room, would you go look?" happens, but I consider that in the same vein as someone saying "Tall Person, could you get this for me?" It has more to do with the convenience of someone who will make it less awkward to do things, if necessary, than a foisting of responsibilities off on someone because they're a man. There has been the occasional, "Sorry, was that TMI?" when things get discussed, but I'd rather be someone that my coworkers feel comfortable around rather than pretend to a squick that I don't have.
Being white does mean that I try to at least be aware of it and be supportive to my colleagues of color when they're getting the brunt end of someone else's racism. I'd love to say that it doesn't happen, but of course it does, and some times the best thing that you can do in the situation is get the person out of everyone's hair and ask if the other coworker needs some additional time away from people afterward. It would be nicer to be able to say "You're asking for someone else because you don't believe my Black colleague is capable of this, so instead, you can take your device and get no help at all," but the behavior administration would agree warranted a dismissal like that is usually bad enough that it would warrant sanctions under the other rules of conduct as well. And the profession is not good about retaining and providing supports for people who aren't white women, or the demographics of library services, and children's services, would have shifted by now into something that looked more like the actual racial makeup of the country.
There are parts of programs that are about learning things, whether they're motor skills, technical skills, or social skills, but if I'm doing my job well, the educational part of it is part of the fun part of it, and not separated from the fun part. I still dislike being called "Teacher" by anyone, because "Teacher" is someone whose primary intent is educational, and who has a different degree and certification than I do. I can't stop anyone else from saying it, but when they do, I worry that my programming is being used primarily as a way to try and cudgel a child into learning something, which they get more than enough opportunity to do at school. Children's librarians are performers more than they are teachers. Sometimes facilitators and scaffolders and people who guide and hint and ask questions to get a participant moving in a productive direction, but rarely lecturers and instructors with a program in mind and the ability to get a commitment from the very young to follow through the whole program. That's mostly asking for trouble, unless you are in a space where the grownups are very intense about their extracurriculars for their children. And if they are that intense, then library space can adjust itself to be a relief from those pressures, rather than adding on to them. For clarity, there's still a strong strain of librarianship, including children's librarianship, that believes the librarian is there for the edification and instruction of its users. It's a coin flip as to whether those librarians are also aware of the ways those attitudes have been used in the service of making the library a place where the Poors and the Not-whites are supposed to learn the mannerisms and behaviors of bourgeois white people, so they can function in a society that doesn't want to do anything more than it has to with regard to understanding the needs and methods of people who aren't white and bourgeois. (This attitude is part of the moral panic mentioned above - if the library acknowledges queer people and not-white people, then white children will be exposed to these things and might think of them as normal or even desirable or resonant, which will make it far more difficult for fearmongers and demagogues to use queer people and not-white people as the enemies of their comfortable white society. Therefore, the library must be cleansed of such things and the workers there brought to heel with threats so the library doesn't start becoming an institution that acknowledges and works with all of the communities in its service area.)
There's a certain amount of professional ambivalence that comes to helping grownups enforce their desires and demands on their children. We'll enforce library rules about behavior, yes, but children's librarians are not always on board with the further restrictions that a grownup puts on a child in their care about what materials are permitted and what are forbidden. My responsibility is to the child, first and foremost, and that means trying to find materials that will be enjoyable and exciting for the reader. Grownups who get in the way of that responsibility often get the gentle lecture about how free choice of reading is an important part of encouraging a reader, and that children are generally very good about putting back something they're not interested in. I have yet to have a grownup decide that I'm right, despite the fact that what I'm saying has research backing it, and be more flexible about their child's choices. If the research suggestion is unpersuasive, spite and malice often comes out after that. Not in the attitude that is shown to the grownup, but the books that get picked for the reader are things the reader finds enjoyable and that I usually can discern, from previous knowledge, or from reading the promotional material, will contain at least passing references to the things that the grownup is disapproving of or thinks the child is not ready for yet. (Spite and malice does not happen if the child themselves volunteers what they're looking for. I've heard it from the child, I will do my best to fill that request according to what the child wants. It's when the grownup is trying to prevent me from doing my job and is artificially imposing barriers on me that I get progressively more spiteful in my selections. Which occasionally also means moving at child speed so as to get a few moments for the child to tell me what they want. None of this is pushing age-restricted material on kids, of course, because, well, age-restricted material is not in the children's section, no matter what other people think. My selectors don't buy age-restricted material for the children's section.
Children's librarians also borrow from each other and share regularly about what's working for them, what techniques they've used, which performers are good and which ones aren't, and other such things. We're very much a networking profession, when we have the tools and time to do so. We swap stories about the problems we're having, our laments about attendance, administration, or those people who are determined to make everyone's library experience miserable, and what we may have been able to do to try and make the library a welcoming space for all the people who want to use it. We talk about our successes and the things that have gone well, too, because things that go well at one location often get asked if they can be borrowed wholesale for other locations or other library systems. (The good library stories, and many of the really horrific ones, however, generally only get told in person, to each other, and in a space where we're very sure that nothing that gets said will get back to administration or shared more widely than the group that's there for it. The ones, anyway, that didn't get media coverage.)
We'd like to get paid more, because library school debt is often crushing to someone who's working part time, and it still takes ten years of public service to get the loans forgiven, assuming that you stay eligible and employed for all of those ten years. We'd also like a less bureaucracy and a lot more funding for our spaces and services, rather than having the funding dollars all going to police presence and their "need" to purchase surplus military hardware to feel "safe." There's a lot of social services work that gets dumped onto the library because we're information-finders and because libraries generally try not to exclude anyone form using them. That statement should be caveated to say "Libraries generally try not to exclude anyone who hasn't well-earned exclusion from using them," but an awful lot of library administrators have bought into vocational awe and the ideal of being the last truly open and free place for everyone. And a fair number of the library staff themselves have either bought into vocational awe or had vocational awe pushed on them as the reason why they keep having to do more with less resources and support from the places that should be taking on many of the issues and crises that arise in the library space.
Oh, and the librarians are not judging your reading. If they're asking about it, it's because they want to keep a title in mind to recommend to others, or they want to take your reading experience as a good reason why to avoid recommending something to someone else. The first and important thing is to cultivate a community that enjoys the materials and services, or finds value in having them available, or uses them frequently. Because if you get to the point where your community says "I don't care what happens to them," then you're almost certainly sunk for any kind of funding request to keep the doors open and the services and staff working there.
I know that we're not supposed to over-identify with our work, as, after all, our work will never love us back, but the first community that I thought of when I was coming up with the idea of this December Days was the greater group of people who call themselves children's librarians. (And teen librarians, a bit, too. I've been professionally teen-adjacent for all of my career, even if I've never officially been a teen librarian.)
I've been saving a bit of spite for this entry, mostly because I really hope that Amanda Jones gets to stick Dan Kleinman where it hurts and get him to have to give up on things, possibly in an Alex Jones-style of being reduced to penury for saying things that are demonstrably false and defamatory. If you're not familiar with Dan, we've known about him for decades, where he's been pushing the idea that libraries and librarians are actively throwing age-restricted pornography at minors. First, he was harping that the Internet at the library meant that kids were getting pushed porn through that, and in the latest ramp-up of censorship, he's apparently joined the brigades that are accusing librarians of cultivating sexual relationships with children and pushing pornography in print as well as online at them. Ms. Jones' complaints are but a sampling of what Dan has been doing for decades, but he is an exemplar of what the tactics and accusations are of the people who want to censor library materials over their queer content (because queerness is automatically sexual in a way that straightness just isn't). And so I'd like to see him made an exemplar of what kind of Finding Out comes from Fucking Around to the degree that he has been, and for all the time that he's been doing it.
He even visited here once, although he didn't stick around to argue anything. And searching back through my journal, the first time I mentioned him and his crusade in my journal was 2007.
The key part of the potential damage that can be done is the same damage that's threatened in the Project 2025 document: if being a librarian and giving a child a book that has queer content is "pushing porn" or "grooming" them, then the children's librarian is going to be charged and prosecuted as a sex offender, which will certainly make it hard-to-impossible to continue their livelihood as children's librarians, and will definitely negatively impact their ability to get any other kind of job, as well, because most employers require you to disclose your felony convictions or similar restrictions on what audiences you can work with, and they'll likely also check the offender registries and the like. These accusations against school librarians, teen librarians, and children's librarians are a brazen attempt to force us into choosing between never being able to work in our profession again or acquiescing to ridiculous censorship demands that will ensure our collections are stripped of anything that might even hint at the possibility of queer people (or brown people, or anyone else who isn't the hegemon.)
Okay, moment of professional spite over.
The community of librarians in general, every time that it gets measured, returns back more than a supermajority of people working in libraries as women, and more than a supermajority of people working in libraries as white, so it's not a stretch to say that a supermajority or more of people working in libraries are white women. (And if you're thinking about the demographics of the last U.S. political election, and which way various demographics broke, yes, that means there's a strong possibility that at least some of the people in the library coalition voted for the incoming administration.) That makes me a bit of an outlier, in the send of being nonbinary and working in libraries (there's plenty of people in the trans umbrella working in libraries, yes, but as a percentage of workers, still rather small) a much bigger outlier in the sense that I'm AMAB and working in libraries, and even more of an outlier that I'm AMAB and working in children's services as a degreed librarian. My organization, for a very long time since I started there, did not have two AMAB degreed librarians in the youth services cohort. I disclaim that this work situation gives me any special insight into the community of women. And there are times where there's the "this thing happened in the men's room, would you go look?" happens, but I consider that in the same vein as someone saying "Tall Person, could you get this for me?" It has more to do with the convenience of someone who will make it less awkward to do things, if necessary, than a foisting of responsibilities off on someone because they're a man. There has been the occasional, "Sorry, was that TMI?" when things get discussed, but I'd rather be someone that my coworkers feel comfortable around rather than pretend to a squick that I don't have.
Being white does mean that I try to at least be aware of it and be supportive to my colleagues of color when they're getting the brunt end of someone else's racism. I'd love to say that it doesn't happen, but of course it does, and some times the best thing that you can do in the situation is get the person out of everyone's hair and ask if the other coworker needs some additional time away from people afterward. It would be nicer to be able to say "You're asking for someone else because you don't believe my Black colleague is capable of this, so instead, you can take your device and get no help at all," but the behavior administration would agree warranted a dismissal like that is usually bad enough that it would warrant sanctions under the other rules of conduct as well. And the profession is not good about retaining and providing supports for people who aren't white women, or the demographics of library services, and children's services, would have shifted by now into something that looked more like the actual racial makeup of the country.
There are parts of programs that are about learning things, whether they're motor skills, technical skills, or social skills, but if I'm doing my job well, the educational part of it is part of the fun part of it, and not separated from the fun part. I still dislike being called "Teacher" by anyone, because "Teacher" is someone whose primary intent is educational, and who has a different degree and certification than I do. I can't stop anyone else from saying it, but when they do, I worry that my programming is being used primarily as a way to try and cudgel a child into learning something, which they get more than enough opportunity to do at school. Children's librarians are performers more than they are teachers. Sometimes facilitators and scaffolders and people who guide and hint and ask questions to get a participant moving in a productive direction, but rarely lecturers and instructors with a program in mind and the ability to get a commitment from the very young to follow through the whole program. That's mostly asking for trouble, unless you are in a space where the grownups are very intense about their extracurriculars for their children. And if they are that intense, then library space can adjust itself to be a relief from those pressures, rather than adding on to them. For clarity, there's still a strong strain of librarianship, including children's librarianship, that believes the librarian is there for the edification and instruction of its users. It's a coin flip as to whether those librarians are also aware of the ways those attitudes have been used in the service of making the library a place where the Poors and the Not-whites are supposed to learn the mannerisms and behaviors of bourgeois white people, so they can function in a society that doesn't want to do anything more than it has to with regard to understanding the needs and methods of people who aren't white and bourgeois. (This attitude is part of the moral panic mentioned above - if the library acknowledges queer people and not-white people, then white children will be exposed to these things and might think of them as normal or even desirable or resonant, which will make it far more difficult for fearmongers and demagogues to use queer people and not-white people as the enemies of their comfortable white society. Therefore, the library must be cleansed of such things and the workers there brought to heel with threats so the library doesn't start becoming an institution that acknowledges and works with all of the communities in its service area.)
There's a certain amount of professional ambivalence that comes to helping grownups enforce their desires and demands on their children. We'll enforce library rules about behavior, yes, but children's librarians are not always on board with the further restrictions that a grownup puts on a child in their care about what materials are permitted and what are forbidden. My responsibility is to the child, first and foremost, and that means trying to find materials that will be enjoyable and exciting for the reader. Grownups who get in the way of that responsibility often get the gentle lecture about how free choice of reading is an important part of encouraging a reader, and that children are generally very good about putting back something they're not interested in. I have yet to have a grownup decide that I'm right, despite the fact that what I'm saying has research backing it, and be more flexible about their child's choices. If the research suggestion is unpersuasive, spite and malice often comes out after that. Not in the attitude that is shown to the grownup, but the books that get picked for the reader are things the reader finds enjoyable and that I usually can discern, from previous knowledge, or from reading the promotional material, will contain at least passing references to the things that the grownup is disapproving of or thinks the child is not ready for yet. (Spite and malice does not happen if the child themselves volunteers what they're looking for. I've heard it from the child, I will do my best to fill that request according to what the child wants. It's when the grownup is trying to prevent me from doing my job and is artificially imposing barriers on me that I get progressively more spiteful in my selections. Which occasionally also means moving at child speed so as to get a few moments for the child to tell me what they want. None of this is pushing age-restricted material on kids, of course, because, well, age-restricted material is not in the children's section, no matter what other people think. My selectors don't buy age-restricted material for the children's section.
Children's librarians also borrow from each other and share regularly about what's working for them, what techniques they've used, which performers are good and which ones aren't, and other such things. We're very much a networking profession, when we have the tools and time to do so. We swap stories about the problems we're having, our laments about attendance, administration, or those people who are determined to make everyone's library experience miserable, and what we may have been able to do to try and make the library a welcoming space for all the people who want to use it. We talk about our successes and the things that have gone well, too, because things that go well at one location often get asked if they can be borrowed wholesale for other locations or other library systems. (The good library stories, and many of the really horrific ones, however, generally only get told in person, to each other, and in a space where we're very sure that nothing that gets said will get back to administration or shared more widely than the group that's there for it. The ones, anyway, that didn't get media coverage.)
We'd like to get paid more, because library school debt is often crushing to someone who's working part time, and it still takes ten years of public service to get the loans forgiven, assuming that you stay eligible and employed for all of those ten years. We'd also like a less bureaucracy and a lot more funding for our spaces and services, rather than having the funding dollars all going to police presence and their "need" to purchase surplus military hardware to feel "safe." There's a lot of social services work that gets dumped onto the library because we're information-finders and because libraries generally try not to exclude anyone form using them. That statement should be caveated to say "Libraries generally try not to exclude anyone who hasn't well-earned exclusion from using them," but an awful lot of library administrators have bought into vocational awe and the ideal of being the last truly open and free place for everyone. And a fair number of the library staff themselves have either bought into vocational awe or had vocational awe pushed on them as the reason why they keep having to do more with less resources and support from the places that should be taking on many of the issues and crises that arise in the library space.
Oh, and the librarians are not judging your reading. If they're asking about it, it's because they want to keep a title in mind to recommend to others, or they want to take your reading experience as a good reason why to avoid recommending something to someone else. The first and important thing is to cultivate a community that enjoys the materials and services, or finds value in having them available, or uses them frequently. Because if you get to the point where your community says "I don't care what happens to them," then you're almost certainly sunk for any kind of funding request to keep the doors open and the services and staff working there.
