Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

I ended up reading Socially Just Library Management in Conservative America to see what someone might be advocating for when you're trying to do things the ALA and/or ethically library way in a place where the governing board or the state is eminently hostile to the library and its purpose.

The author of the paper is clear throughout that people are complex, and that even people who are ideologically very conservative might believe in things that would have socially just results. And that people would support things with socially just results, so long as nobody uses shibboleths to describe them. Which is true. Specific programs and outcomes are wildly popular all across ideological divides, but we can also see that support nosedive when it's described in specific ways. People really loved all the things that the Affordable Care Act did, and supported them widely. But if you called it "Obamacare," then the support sharply dropped, because "Obamacare" was a bad thing, according to the conservative media. The same thing is happening where things that have actual definitions and meanings get twisted out of shape such that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" or "critical race theory" have already been bent so far out of shape that they no longer resemble anything and are instead used to indicate "this things that might help nonwhite people that I don't like," and therefore can be used in whatever way or permutation desired, such that something that isn't DEI today might become fully DEI or CRT tomorrow if new talking points come out from Libs of Tiktok or somewhere similar. It may be an unduly cynical take on the paper, but it looks to me like the first thing that this paper says is that any library worker in a conservative area must admit and acknowledge that they have lost the war of words, and if they hope to accomplish anything, they must always work within the ideological constraints of their opponents.

That ceding of ground is also fundamental to the "pragmatism" and "interlanguage" elements of the paper, as well. The interlanguage part is essentially saying that you and your ideological opponents have to find a mutually intelligible language, with agreed-upon definitions of what words mean, so that you can frame what you are doing in the terms of that interlanguage, so nobody (theoretically) ends up decrying you and your proposals as being third rails because they appear to use the forbidden shibboleths, or that you might be saying something that suggests that libraries and their boards have historically been complicit in racism and in looking the other way on important issues so as to preserve their all-important neutrality. Admittedly, the punishment for such things tends to be swift and harsh, as we are finding out with more and more states passing laws removing protections from librarians and otherwise doing their best to insist that librarians are not allowed to be anything but ideologically aligned to whatever the state says. In that light, giving up on the idea that you might persuade anybody to see things the way you do seems like a very effective piece of advice for someone who wants to keep their job.

If that were the point the author wanted to make, though, they could have chosen a better example for someone not understanding their political situation than the one they did. The example in the paper is, I think, a better example of the possibility of public corruption rather than of a director being fired for ideological reasons. In the example, the new director does a thorough review of the budget and finds out that a fiscal officer is making more than even the director does, so the new director goes to the board and says "Hey, this isn't illegal, but perhaps we should freeze this salary until the other ones move up to be commensurate with it?" Turns out, apparently, the fiscal officer was a beloved conservative and Republican activist and while there was no official reason given for the termination of the new director, there's a strong suggestion made that it was because the new director dared to suggest that beloved activist not be given outsize compensation for their job at the library, and if the director had taken time to learn the political landscape, they might not have made such a fatal suggestion. As presented, it looks to me like the director is doing due diligence and flagging a strange situation where someone is being paid more than the job suggests they should be, which would strongly suggest some kind of possible public corruption, exactly the kind of thing that you're supposed to flag. The director then gets fired for it, which definitely feels more like retaliation for trying to bring light to potential corruption than anything to do with the political orientation of the director or the board. If there's politics being read into this example, all of the reading is being done by the board choosing to see this as a liberal trying to punish their beloved conservative activist.

If that's the case, however, that makes this example a better argument for why trying to fit yourself inside your opponent's ideological box in the name of "interlanguage" and "pragmatism," advocating for the results you want without using any of the language they don't want, is going to be stressful and ultimately may be foolish and useless. Since you can't control what someone else is going to read into a situation, you also can't control when the shibboleths are going to shift. Fred Clark (the Slacktivist) points out this phenomenon in describing how someone hired at a highly conservative religious institution suddenly found themselves no longer "missionally aligned" and was dismissed. The line of acceptable behavior and speech changed, without anyone being told that it had changed, until someone found themselves on the wrong side of it. Furthermore, the only way someone knows the line has changed is when someone gets fired or disciplined for doing exactly the same thing they had done before. For a library director, even one committed to pragmatism and finding interlanguage so they can describe their goals in terms that the conservative board or state will understand and theoretically support, the ground underneath them can always shift at a moment's notice. Legislation being considered and passed with the intent of restricting librarians and teachers in what they can teach in their classes and carry in their collections is almost always worded sufficiently vaguely so as to require the maximum spread of censorship to be sure that someone is aligned with the new goals, and often is constructed in such a way that the most fanatical of community members is given the power to dictate what is allowed in curricula and collections, usually by structuring the language so that the institution is assumed to be wrong and guilty of unacceptable shibboleths and must change themselves within a short amount of time or suffer penalties.

Based on my reading of this paper, I believe the author would suggest that what you do when you find yourself on the wrong side of the board or the legislature is recalibrate yourself and work within your new constraints. A commitment to interlanguage, pragmatism, and avoiding the shibboleths leaves you very little choice in the matter but to adapt to the new situation and pray that the deal is not altered further. Which is pragmatic, but is also the kind of thing where as the opposition gets more emboldened and more threatening, you find yourself pragmatically agreeing to censor materials so they can stay on the shelves (like drawing underpants on all the butts), or to remove them to specific "adults-only" areas (because someone complained that you had queer content where a child might notice it), or not buying materials at all because you know that buying them will make the board upset and threaten (or follow through with) firing you. The pragmatic strategy is often to bide your time when the wind is against you, wait out your opponents, and do what you can within the boundaries that have been set. At a certain point, though, your pragmatism should come into conflict with your ethics, and your ethics should win.

I know this is more complicated, because given the choice between standing up for principles that might get me fired and going along with something so I can continue to provide for the people in my household, I'm not sure I'd stand up for principles, either. (Even though, as a white masc-appearing person, I am historically the least likely to suffer actual consequences for standing up for principles.) And also, many of those laws attacking teachers and librarians carry consequences of losing your ability to teach or librarian in the state if convicted, so it's not just losing your job where you are, it's having to move out of state to get another job in the same sector. Or the consequences might be getting put on a sex offender list for having given obscene materials to minors (since there's no longer any immunity for doing your job), which would presumably also tank your ability to work anywhere there are children. Even if the actual situation was "Yes, a child checked out Heather Has Two Mommies, a community member complained that it was available, and I was charged and convicted of giving an obscene book to a minor because a child selected it for themselves." Lots of places specifically say that someone who is on the sex offender list cannot be within so many feet of schools or places where children are likely to be, and once such a conviction were present, since it's a matter of public record, it would be easy for anyone to find and then brandish as "proof" that this person is an inveterate child molester and that it's okay to ruin their life. (And that the legislation is working as intended, since it got a "groomer" or some other thing out of public service so they couldn't damage Our Precious Children with books or reality.)

We are living in the cursed "interesting times." A system whose guardrails mostly consisted of "you can't do that in public, it'll give the game away!" is having a massive freakout at the possibility that more people recognize the game and either don't want to play or are complaining the rules of the game aren't fair (and haven't ever been, for certain groups). In that freakout, it becomes clearer that the rules that supposedly are there for everyone don't actually exist for specific groups and individuals, which further fuels the protests. Now we're at the phase of the freakout where the people in power are trying to openly take away as many freedoms and powers as they can from others and criminalize the idea of resisting or doing anything even slightly out of lockstep with what the people with power want. To suggest pragmatism and interlanguage with someone who wants you as a subject rather than a peer is misplaced, even if it may be the effective solution to keeping your job. Malicious compliance and plausible deniability may be the most useful things to have in the toolbox for the upcoming few years (decades.) Public support will also be a necessary thing, whether in getting you and your friends to repeatedly request queer books, non-white books, and other such instruments to get into the collection, or in publicly speaking up at board meetings as a member of the public for greater inclusion and against censorship, or it creating catchy and viral videos about how awesome your library is because it accomplishes all of these goals that a functioning society needs. (The library workers will appreciate it. They often can't do any such thing directly themselves, even though management is always swift to remind us that we are also members of the public.)

It's exhausting to have police brutalizing people protesting the killing of civilians elsewhere (and their own government funding them with money and munitions to keep doing it), police brutalizing non-white people on principle, legislators trying to define women in terms of the men they can be servants of and the fetuses and zygotes they must be servants of, legislators requiring an inaccurate, white-positive version of history be taught, requiring that everyone must be a man or woman, no exceptions, ever, that nobody is allowed to change what they were assigned at birth, and that the only acceptable relationship configuration is one white straight Christian man, one white straight Christian woman, with the explicit intent that they produce as many white babies as they can. To fight on one of those fronts is exhausting enough without adding any others. (There's something here about fighting on your fronts as best as you can and trusting that everyone else will be doing the same on the other fronts, which sometimes seems like a fragile prospect, especially for those fronts that need allies from the group that stands to gain the most if they allow the bad end to happen to others.) The hope that things will get better in the future and that this is an extinction burst for an old set of ideologies is a useful one, but that doesn't negate the suffering that is going on now, nor the viciousness of the actions being taken. The pragmatic actions may be that you field and elect the best candidate you can, that you do the most that you can, and you put pressure on to move things in a more equitable (oop, there's a shibboleth) direction in the ways you can, and that you do so quietly, so as not to arouse the ire of those freaking out. In this day and age, though, and especially in the library world, that feels a lot more like capitulation and sacrificing ethics to entities that have already declared they will never be satisfied and there is no way that you can exist in their box.

As usual, I don't have any practical suggestions or one neat tricks to fix this problem. If I did, I'd be a Library Thought Leader, or possibly a Mover and Shaker, or maybe one of those dreaded Library Rock Stars. And I can't accurately determine what the situation on the ground is for most library workers who are in this position. I think, if I'm going to be giving advice, it would be to borrow from a religious concept where the idea is to keep commandments as best as you can, but if you are in a situation where the options are breaking the commands or dying, life is more important than adherence, and therefore do what you must to stay alive until you can get into a situation where you have the freedom/ability to keep the commands again. Where that differs from the "pragmatic" approach described in the article is that it's much more clear this is an emergency situation and these things are being done to preserve life (your own and others) rather than because you are seeking compromise with those who will happily destroy you.

[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.

( Shall we talk again about the library as a fundamentally conservative institution? I think we shall. )

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.

I have a milestone achievement in how long I've been working at my current employer this month, which is mostly coincidental to the reason why I'm writing this, but it feels odd not to mention it , since I'll be talking a little bit about history and my history. The world of libraries and librarians seems like there's at least a little bit of progress towards being an institution that is part of and responsive to its communities, rather than trying to hold itself apart from them as something above them, more perfected and rarefied than the people that use them. It's worth noting that this idea is illusory and always has been, because a lot of the things that the library believed it was above, like politics, were only that way because the society around them believed they could ignore significant swaths of their own community without consequences.

US audiences, I hope, have been following the extreme uptick in state-level actions intended to prevent free discourse and instruction in educational institutions and state-level actions intended to remove books from school libraries that talk about the experience of people who aren't evangelical cisgender white heterosexual men. Those efforts have expanded, as well, to efforts to try and get books banned from sale in states in general.

( Censorship attempts near you, and how was need to rethink Banned Books Week in light of that )

Celebrate the freedom to read in your area by crushing the fascists beneath your feet and enjoying the lamentations of their co-conspirators.

This is simply too good (as in skillful, not as in delightful) to not document. A coworker of color left The Organization, but at 30 minutes to the end of their final shift, in the channel meant for all-staff consumption, they left us one of the most masterfully executed "fuck you"s possible, a PDF of a request for reconsideration form and the response generated from The Organization about it.

Inside the document, a person took The Organization to task for one of the selections sent out by Wowbrary, a service the Organization uses to send out what are supposed to be "the 20 highest-ranked items added by the library within approximately the last 7 days." The ranks are apparently Amazon ranks, so you can guess that we're already in trouble. The Wowbrary decided to highlight for this user a book called "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America." by Charles Murray, who uses pseudoscience and misleading statistics to try and justify racism. If it was highlighted by Wowbrary, that means we must have bought a copy or two. (We have.) Probably because it was ranked highly in a category like "Stuff White People Like To Justify Their Racism" on Amazon.

So The Organization has two immediate problems. One, we bought a book by a racist. Probably because it was popular enough, or requested of us, and we are supposed to use popularity or requests, alongside things like "given favorable reviews in reputable publications" in the selection of materials. And in an organization where access and intellectual freedom are considered superior virtues to social justice and anti-racism, this kind of stuff happens regularly. The best our selectors can do in those environments is not but many of those things.

Two, we've now just broadcast to all of our Wowbrary subscribers that we buy books by racists. Nice of us to say out loud that those anti-racism and solidarity statements that we posted a couple of years ago didn't amount to shit in terms of meaningful or actual change! To the person who saw the "recommendation" from Wowbrary, it was traumatizing to see us promoting a clear racist's work.

As we go further through the document, we get the official response to the reconsideration from the newly installed director of collection services. It took about seven months, but because of the upheaval involved, and then wanting to make sure things were done right, it's still about five months too long to have waited to give a response. Especially because the content of the response itself was not encouraging.

It was, however, entirely in keeping with a different piece of information that our newest administrator sent us a little while ago, a presentation meant for Boards of Trustees about intellectual freedom and the role of the library and its trustees in upholding intellectual freedom. One of the slides very specifically told Trustees that a request for reconsideration should never address the content of the material, and no decisions should ever be made about reconsideration based on the content of the material, only on whether or not the appropriate procedures for selection were followed in the acquisition, cataloging, and placement of the material.

As I noted in sending my thousand-word-plus objections to the content of that presentation, it's entirely possible that such a refusal to look at the content of a challenged material is meant to be a feature, rather than a bug, since it absolves the people working on the reconsideration request of any responsibility at all at deciding the case on its merits, and, theoretically, prevents trustees or administrators from injecting personal animus or improperly wielding their institutional powers to push personal agendas about what is "appropriate" for a library to carry. As if one could expect that a sufficiently determined censor would feel constrained and not engage in censorship because it would be an improper use of their power to do so and would damage the institution's credibility to be seen acting in such a nakedly partisan way.

[beat, knowing stare at the camera.]

Except, of course, there's the other thing that gets in the way of smug, self-congratulatory satisfaction at doing your job impartially and without letting "feeeeeelings" get in the way. Once again, the 9th principle of the ALA Code of Ethics, adopted 02021:

We affirm the inherent dignity and rights of every person. We work to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice in our libraries, communities, profession, and associations through awareness, advocacy, education, collaboration, services, and allocation of resources and spaces.

So, if a work by a well-known racist is in our collection, and it is brought to our attention that a work by a well-known racist is in our collection, what's the ethical thing to do with it, then? If we remove it, the racists will cry "Censorship! Partisanship! WOKENESS! HYYYYYS-TERIA!" and one of the other ethical principles says that we oppose censorship in all its forms. Of course, if we let the book stay on the shelves and do nothing about it, then we're certainly not advancing racial and social justice, so that's not an ethical course of action, either. Guess we'll have to decide which of our principles is superior to the other, and which we choose to enforce when it's merely convenient to do so.

So, it took seven months to respond, and then the response was essentially "Yeah, he's described as a racist, but intellectual freeeeeedom!" Which is where we pick up with the Discourse that erupted from the posting, a Discourse that the person leaving the system doesn't have to do anything about, because they're already gone, and that they can probably watch through someone feeding them the information and making sure they've got lots of popcorn. Because there have been apologies for the length of time that it took to get a response, and there's been a blaming of the outside service that we have no control over, excepting of whether we subscribe to them or not. The new administrator, the one who shared the slides, has said that she's going to have to take time to digest and formulate a response. (She's also holding drop-in sessions on intellectual freedom in the next couple of weeks, so our departing co-worker has also thrown a firebomb into what might have been expected to be an anodyne or mostly-sympathetic discussion punctuated by a few firebrands trying to get The Organization to actually take a stand on something, whether it's actually doing the work or whether they want to do lip service and look like they're on board with the necessary changes, but won't ever actually do anything. Pass the popcorn.) Between her and the person blaming the outside service, there's been no other administrator in the thread saying anything, which is pretty par for the course when it comes to issues like that. The Director has departed, not her problems any more, and the new Director isn't formally installed for a little while. The other administrators are generally very silent about such things as it rages in the lower ranks, before someone gets chosen to speak ex cathedra on the matter.

Anyway, there's a fairly solid contingent of comments in sympathy with the reconsideration request and asking why The Organization gave both such a delayed and wholly inadequate response to the situation. And, because there's always going to be at least one, late-arriving to the situation is a library worker who wonders what all the big fuss is about, because the library is supposed to be neutral and not get into politics, and by the way, she complained about a board book that we were giving out as a summer reading reward last year and was told that we were keeping the book, even though she'd said it was offensive. (It was probably Pink Is For Boys, a book about how color and gender have nothing to do with each other at all except in the minds of people who want to enforce rigid gender binaries.)

There was an invitation by another staff member to disclose what book this was that was so offensive, delivered in the textual equivalent of the tone that one uses when uttering the phrase "By all means, keep digging." Unfortunately, the original poster did not rise to the challenge, and instead proclaimed they wouldn't be doing so because "there is only one accepted ideology at the library," with the clear implication that hers was not the accepted ideology. Based on the evidence presented so far, in this and other postings on the subject, I think the claim that "neutrality and non-politicalness" is not the favored ideology is laughable. (I also know that people of that type often find it easier to believe they are the oppressed, so as not to have to contend with the reality that they are sympathizing or participating with the oppressors.)

What I would like to say, were it to be consequences-free for me, is to invite that person to resign their position at the library, if they are sufficiently convinced that they are philosophically disfavored, and to let the position pass to someone who will be more in accord with the values of the library, as they are only going to make themselves miserable having to suppress their true feelings for the sake of conformity and their job. I could say that, confident that the underlying point of how so many workers of color have to do just that every day in the predominantly-white world of libraries would fly completely overhead, undisturbed by a thought.

I should also mention that we're finally going to start seeing what are hopefully concrete action steps and the results of all the work the upper administration has been doing with a DEI consultant for the last several years. I don't expect them to actually amount to much, but I am willing to be pleasantly surprised. And to find all sorts of places to apply Nick Fury's Principle of Intelligent Rules to what comes out so that the framework or the considered actions actually move in a Principle 9 positive direction instead of the way they will actually go in practice. I don't expect to be able to spot them easily, or consistently, but I do hope that those who do will be willing to share with the rest of us.

I have to give my thanks to the departed co-worker for a popcorn-worthy "Fuck You," even though I suspect that after some amount of sound and fury from the front-line contingent, since there's no actual power invested in them, the administration will wait out the upset, send out the person who is rapidly becoming the only person who at least listens, and then do what they were going to do (or not do what they weren't going to do) anyway. And then wonder why they can't seem to keep the people they need the most to help them achieve their stated goals about anti-racism, inclusion, and equitable practices. Every time we have the opportunity to do better, the "do better" side is always left waiting for the administration to, in fact, do better.

I have a Banned Books Week story for all of you. And, even better, it's a story about censorship, so it's both temporally and thematically appropriate for everyone.

For the people who are unaware, Banned Books Week is a production of the American Library Association (ALA)'s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF), set for the last full week of September. The most famous element of this annual entity is the Top Ten Most Challenged Books list for that year, based on the reported challenges to OIF.

The usual way that Banned Books Week is celebrated in most public and school libraries is something that could charitably be described as "tawdry carnival theatricality," as a co-worker of mine so effectively put it. Photo-booths where people could take a picture of themselves behind bars for "reading banned books" and splashy displays of which books have historically been challenged a lot (but by "historically," they usually mean things like Nineteen Eighty-Four, To Kill A Mockingbird, or Slaughterhouse-Five) and the reasons for those books being challenged. It's supposed to be a celebration of the freedom of people to read or view the materials that they desire without interference from others.

( The story )

To bring it back around to where we began, how could Banned Books Week stop being about tawdry carnival theatricality and focusing on the past in a way that paints libraries as saviors? Can libraries tackle having real and meaningful conversations about ongoing efforts to classify queer material as automatically adult? Can we host forums about the moral panic about the idea that even if individual white people don't do a conscious racism, they still benefit from structures that are racist and that have been going on for generations? Can we tell groups who want to use the library as a legitimizing institution for their efforts to get lost if their beliefs are in conflict with our core values? Can we talk about the ways that people who are expressing their own beliefs are doing a censorship, even if they believe they're right and the unmarked default?

I have only a small censorship story to share with you for this Banned Books Week, but my small censorship story is neither unique nor isolated. The response should neither be small nor isolated.

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

This is a more personal thing, I suppose, but one of the things that happens out in the world outside is that you learn to ask certain questions of yourself before you take actions, and one of the important ones is "Is it worth it right now?" But that's not the question we're asking for this entry.

Why are people so concerned at people being "deserving"?

( Here's your context, in what is probably a giant subtweet (sub-blog?). )

To summarize all of the above into something more compressed, the question of "deserving" and "undeserving" is a speck-plank problem, and it always says a lot more about the person who is asking the question than about the person the question is directed at. So my recommendation is to avoid it and try to set up and support situations where there are no judgments about "deserving", only people getting the help they need from a pool of resources large enough to provide for everyone that asks (and a few more that might be asking for the first time).

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

A variation on a previous theme of December Days, and based on a question that I asked elsewhere in a completely different context, which has nothing to do with public libraries.

What are things people understand the least about working in a public library?

( And your answers. )

So those are the two most common errors that people have about public library work. It's not a cathedral of silence where there's all sorts of spare time to read books and improve upon our reader's advisory skills by knowing the collection better. It's also not the place where profound and deep questions that require research and resources tend to get asked, at all. So the public is disappointed that their stereotypes are wrong, and the librarians find out a lot of what they learned in school while they were paying attention doesn't turn out to have a lot of use when confronted by the reality of their assignment. (Or, at least, it's not useful in the ways it was taught to them. A lot of those skills are useful and helpful all the same, but in forms that are very different than the way they were taught or introduced.) It's a fun time for everbody!

Today, apparently, is the perfect day for me to be salty about the presence of TERFs in places where they don't belong, and oh-my-gods how awful the library profession is about not kicking them out as swiftly and effectively as they can, because they believe other things are more important than their communities.

So, mostly just as a note, the author of the Harry Potter books was back on her TERF bullshit today. No links, because I'm not giving her the eyeballs and because she's got a big enough platform that you can find plenty of people yelling about her TERFy bullshit. So, at least at this point, about the only thing that I'm going to say that's good about the author of the Harry Potter series is that she's going to be the person who a generation of fans and fandom cites as the author they choose to exercise Death of the Author on. As far as I'm concerned, the novels are not particularly good fic about the story of a magical school and its inhabitants.

I doubt, however, that the library system is going to yank the books off the shelves because the author is terrible. They're still very popular, after all, and circulation statistics are one of the easy measures to point to as a way of justifying one's continued relevance in a world of shrinking budgets. We still carry Orson Scott Card, after all, and plenty of other books that have served this purpose for their generations. And if you ask librarians, you'll find that at least some of us have given thought to collection development and management and are weighing the pros and cons of putting popular books in the collection, putting books that represent the great variety of people respectfully (and preferably from people whose own origins are in that culture or community), and the tendency of librarians to want to put books that we think are good quality in front of our communities. Given how much librarians have been an institution for promoting very specific, very white, cis, het, Christian points of view, that instinct sometimes has to be squashed, rather than let out to say hello.

( And now we talk about Seattle Public Library and the award they got )

Here's a thing that's not anxiety-making and more incandescent anger-making.

The Organization went out for a ballot measure this year. Because an initiative passed by an anti-tax wealthy person passed in the 90s, public entites such as The Organization are restricted to only collecting 1% more in revenue from fiscal year to fiscal year, plus the bonus of any new construction taxes for that year, assuming that the taxing entity isn't collecting its maximum taxing authority. This 1% cap applies regardless of inflation, cost increases, or any other event that happened in the year that made expenses go up. And again, there's a maximum levy amount that can be assessed in relation to property values, so if values tank (like they did in the recession), even with your 1% increase, you're going to eventually run into a wall about how much you can raise versus the unchecked ability of your expenses to grow.

There is an exception to the 1% rule - if the voters approve, a taxing entity can suspend the 1% ceiling and assess their maximum allowable rate. Which has the benefit of continuing services and, perhaps more crucially, establishing a new floor from which the 1% increase cap next year will be calculated. This ballot measure is expensive to produce for those entities that have the capability to do so, and really can only be useful in times when property value increases have outpaced the 1% significantly enough that there's room in the rate to do the jump. Unsurprisingly, the ballot measure is generally only used when necessary, so as to not annoy the voters.

This year, it was necessary, or within a few years' time, The Organization's costs due to inflation and expenses would result in the closure of locations and layoffs of the people. The last time The Organization went out for this bid, the voters passed it. That was 12 years ago, and I can owe my career with The Organization to the fact that the voters passed it. The initial time period that The Organization promised to not go back to the voters for another was six years. So they've managed double their promised period from the last one, and they gave promises to the voters that they would increase hours, staffing, and materials available with the extra money. (This year's promise, just for being able to keep the lights on and keep going as we have been, is for making it last for five years before considering going back to the voters to ask again.)

There were no persons who wanted to form a committee to say no to The Organization's ask, so there was no statement against in the voter booklets.

And as of this post, while it looks like Aye has won out, the margin of difference between Aye and Nay is less than a half of a percentage point. And it could have been swayed one way or another if all the people who didn't actually register an opinion had done so.

This should not have been this close.

( And now, about a 500W bulb's worth of heat )

[It's August already, and that means I should be thinking about a new topic for this year's December Days. Any suggestions? I'm not sure I can do another year's worth of the same idea, but maybe there's a related topic somewhere.]

There are certain types of things in a library that are legitimate requests, but that might not be suitable for a certain staff member to take on, because that staff member feels they would be unable to do a good job at it, because the person asking is doing it to harass or shock that staff member, or because the material involved might be triggering or harmful to the staff member but doable by another. There's an earlier entry in this series about learning how to gracefully pass off those kinds of tasks so that the people who would be hurt by them don't have to do them if there's an alternative available.

And then there are tasks that won't get done. Because they run afoul of policy, because they use improper procedure, because they're way out of scope for us, or they're going to eat so much of our time and resources that we can't do them. (Among other reasons, but those are usually the big four.)

For example, a lot of librarians point-blank told the ALA that they would not be using their newest guidelines about meeting rooms because those guidelines were explicitly welcoming to hate groups and people who would cause disruption and policy problems. The ALA Council rescinded that interpretation and went back to the drawing board for better language, with the understanding that librarians everywhere in the United States would be keeping a very close eye on what came out for round two.

There are also (and I think I've covered some of this in an earlier entry as well) requests that come in from groups and government entities that seek to interfere with the policies and programs of the library. An example here is the Mayor-President of the Lafayette parish in Lousiana declaring an intent to review how a Drag Queen Story Time was approved by the Lafayette Library. The Story Time itself will be presented by members of the UL Lafayette Provisional Chapter of Delta Lambda Phi, a social fraternity founded by gay men with membership open to all men who share their values, who support the Story Time. There's an interesting tangent to pull on this Story Time thread about how it's members of a fraternity doing this and not necessarily, say, active drag queens in the community, who I would think exist in and around the area. I can see that DLP has values and ideals that suggest they're not going to be terrible about it, but what I don't see in the articles I've read so far is that the people doing the Story Time are drag queens, and not people who are dressing up in the way of a drag queen for the event. Representation still matters, even in this situation. (Especially so since in one of the articles that will be linked to later on, a Lafayette-based drag queen is explicitly quoted, so they definitely do exist in the area.)

Here's the mayor's quote:

"In response to public requests, LCG [Lafayette Consolidated Government] is working to determine how this event was approved as a programmed event of the Library, who has authority to cancel or move it, and the process for doing so.

The library has an Executive Director that is appointed by and answers to the Library’s Board of Control. As Mayor-President, I have one appointment to the Library’s Board of Control and the Lafayette City-Parish Council has the remaining seven appointments.

I will be discussing cancellation of the event or privately-owned location alternatives with my appointment and encourage the Council to do the same. I will also be asking the Library’s Board of Control to conduct a thorough review of its programming and approval process for taxpayer funded events.

Our parish libraries are public spaces, with venues that any group or individual can reserve, on a non-discriminatory basis, as required by law. We have to be certain, however, that our internally approved programming is both appropriate and serves the needs of Lafayette Parish.

That is the only way our library system will continue to enjoy the support from our community that it has historically received."

So despite admitting that the Mayor-President is not in charge of the Library Board and has only one spot on said Board under his control, the Mayor-President is still convinced that he has some kind of authority to insist the Board review their processes and come to a different conclusion than the one they already have about the program.

And also, stating that something has to be aligned with your community values and implying that your community is against such a thing blows up in your face when the people who come to a meeting to express public comment on the program itself are almost universally in favor of letting it happen, even if some of them might not personally agree with the program itself. (The only quoted opposition in the article seems to be from a group of pastors who think that the Mayor-President is doing well by following their religious rules about gender presentation.) Several persons volunteered to host the story time in their residences or businesses if it cannot be held at the library. If someone was expecting a silent majority, they find themselves confronted instead with a vocal one.

I have every confidence that the library Board of Control will listen to the Mayor-President's objections and requests, assuming they are filed appropriately, made at the correct times and places, and follow the correct procedures, and then they will be put into the archives as comments made and nothing will be done about them. (Unless the Mayor-President has powers that are not detailed in the articles, like the ability to zero out the library's funding or something similar. But it doesn't look like that's the case.) Yes, the Library Board of Control is going to be responsive and appreciative of the comments made and the input that is being given to them and the willingness of the Mayor-President and others to be civically engaged and interested in the Library's programming (because I suspect many of our library Boards do actually appreciate interest from the public), but the Board and the library itself is governed by their written policies, interpretations of those policies, and the procedures that derive from those policies, and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that those policies insist that the library be a welcoming place that provides a diversity of viewpoints to the community and that no program should be barred from consideration at the library based solely on the feelings of a community member or a portion of the community that may object to it.

(And also, a program like that probably had to go through a few levels of the management, get approval, get collaboration, and get scheduled. There's no way this would have been the work of a single person, unless that single person has all the necessary powers to do the thing and no supervisor to have to report to or give a heads-up about the program for. The library gave this program careful consideration and thought and probably checked it against their policies and values before giving it the green light, knowing that it might draw attention and negative commentary.)

Which brings us to the personal anecdote part of the post, on matters that are of significantly lower stakes than potentially upsetting a member of the local government with a program.

I ended up going out to the desk to check on the status of a 3D print running, and one of the desk staff turned and said to me "Ah, and here's the person I was just going to call." Understand that I have been blessed with that kind of timing for most of my life, and so the only thing this certified was something strange was about to happen. The woman-appearing user at the desk proceeded to tell me that there was a person in the back, and that while she wasn't concerned that he was probably homeless and was sleeping in the library, she was concerned that he was exposing himself in the library.

That phrase has specific meaning to those of us who work in an environment where some people get their jollies by masturbating to porn at the public computers, and either don't care of think it's part of the thrill to do so visibly. So someone exposing themselves means a potentially serious problem that needs to be taken care of. So I ask the person to tell me who it is and where they are so that I can go talk to them about it.

The person they described was a big man-appearing person with a bundle of possessions near their seat, wearing a shirt, pants, socks, and shoes. The shirt was not well-fitting in this person's particular sitting pose, showing a fair bit of their stomach and their navel. They appeared to be asleep.

So I gathered their attention, said that it looked like they were having a nap, which wasn't allowed, thanked them for using the library, and then went on to wake someone else up in a different area who also looked like they were having a nap as well. The first person made a low-volume complaint as I left that they weren't sleeping. They may not have been.

The woman-appearing person who made the initial complaint came back and said that I hadn't talked to the person about exposing themselves inappropriately. And that they did not care about how this person was probably homeless and didn't have anywhere to go, but that this person needed to be talked to about their inappropriate exposure.

I suspect at this point that some of you have an idea what the actual complaints being brought are.

I explained to the complainant that there was nothing exposed that I needed to take any policy or behavioral action on. Had it been genitals, immediate action was necessary, but that midriffs were not forbidden from being shown.

The complainant asked if I thought it was appropriate for the children around to see that exposure, after denying again that they cared at all about the assumed homeless status of the other person. I pointed out that I still don't have a policy reason to act on clothing choices that exposed midriffs. (I don't. I looked it up afterward just to be sure. The policy says that people must wear shirts and shoes in the library. I found out from a coworker later, after relating this story, they had once had to ask a person who wore shirt, shoes, buttfloss, and naught else to leave, but it wasn't because they were improperly dressed for the library. At least according to the policy.)

Then the complainant asked me if it were a woman, if the response would be any different. I said no, because there's still no reason for me to go after someone with an exposed midriff. I may have been thinking about some of the fashion options that both men-appearing and woman-appearing people have chosen to wear into the library that still qualify as acceptable dress for the library by this point.

After this final question, the complainant gave up, realizing that they weren't going to get me to fat-shame and/or homeless-shame someone for being themselves in public, even as they reiterated they were not concerned about the person being homeless in the library and implied yet again that this person was inappropriately showing themselves by being fat in public.

I look forward to the next one-to-three star review our location gets about librarians who don't care if people expose themselves inappropriately around children. I just hope that they make clear how much they don't care about how the person in question was fat, homeless, and showing off his stomach, so that everyone that cares to read their way through knows what kind of values the person has that's making the complaint and can decide whether those values are ones they share or are appalled by.

I can't say that I would expect a library school education to teach me the finer points of how to pleasantly obstruct someone until they give up, since they're really rather more focused on fulfilling requests and making sure they're done well so there's repeat business. After all, the profession routinely finds itself painted as a vestigial organ of the Internet-connected world, mostly connected with print materials, poor people, old people, and others that your average techbro believes aren't important or that can be brought into the fold with the latest piece of their company's equipment. An ill-advised opinion published and then retracted from Forbes Magazine's online portal suggested replacing public libraries with Amazon bookstores, as if a place to be and some things to read were the only relevant functions of the library anymore, and Amazon could do us all a favor, turn a profit, and relieve a certain drain on the tax base by providing those spaces and things themselves. The profession sometimes even believes these things and goes through a reinvention fit and tries to make itself something more appealing to that particular part of the population before remembering where our bread is buttered and returning to serving the marginalized, underserved, and oppressed.

Which occasionally means that you have to stand firm on your policies and your ethics and not help someone. And that's not something I learned in library school.