He's Caught On With Voters

Trip Gabriel, "He's Caught On With Voters, However They Say His Name," New York Times, March 29, 2019, p. A1.

"This was supposed to be a little meet-and-greet Q. and A.," he told hundreds of people in a college gym in Rock Hill, after his event was bumped from the library to accommodate a wave of RSVPs. 

COMMENT

     Pete Buttigieg who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana is running for president. He scheduled a small meeting room at the library to launch his campaign, but an unexpectedly enthusiastic response meant he had to change the venue.  Nonetheless, the library offered space for citizens to meet a candidate in person.  This kind of space is essential for the democratic process, especially for state and local politics where there is not a lot of money. 

Sustainability: A Love Story

 

Nicole Walker, Sustainability: A Love Story, Ohio State University Press, 2018.

     Jill and her husband, Chuck, were Flagstaff icons.  Jill delivered half of the people's babies.  Chuck played music for those babies when they grew up and attended sing-alongs at the library.  He played guitar at the Hullaballoo and guitar at the Concert in the Park. He hosted sing-alongs and bonfires and they both were featured at the Viola Awards in 2013.  I saw them there. They told me they were moving to Portland.
... 

They moved to Portland because Jill would have whole days off. Whole lives without on-call shifts. Chuck could move beyond the local festivals and libraries, play big shows in the bit city.  [131-132].

COMMENT

     This is both a library success and a library failure told in practically the same breath. Sing-alongs at the library are  part of building a resilient community, but Chuck, the musician, can't make a living doing it. His ambition to have a musical career is incompatible with volunteering time at local festivals and libraries. When he decides to move away, the community resiliency of Flagstaff is eroded in order to fortify an already vibrant musical scene in Portlandia.

    Several other library stories view the library similarly as a second-rate stop-gap for things like Internet access, [1] government assistance, [2] or a social support network. [3]   It's a downside to the the library's model of sharing-- things seem to be free that are not really free. Deserving artists don't always get paid. Compromises and inconveniences necessitated by sharing space and resources come to seem like deal-breakers.

     One lesson from this story is that librarians should be mindful to support local artists and performers by hosting readings and performances that give them a chance to sell books and recordings. The Salt Lake Public Library, which has long had a local music collection,. has set up a website called Hear Utah Music (HUM) that streams a curated collection of  songs by Utah artists in order to help support the local music scene.  Maybe this collection will help draw bigger audiences which the bands play a gig so the musicians don't have to move to Portland to live their dream.

 

[1] The Gap in Broadband Access

[2] At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

[3] Baby Center

Like This or Die

Christian Lorentzen, "Like This or Die: The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm," Harper's, April 2019, p 25-33.

To be interested in literature all you need is a library card. Literature is any writing that rewards critical attention.  It's writing that you want to read and read about. It's something different from entertainment. It involves aesthetic and political judgments and it's not easily quantifiable.  Negativity is part of this equation because without it positivity is meaningless. 

... 

The past two decades have been a phase of upheaval, panic, and collapse.  The crisis of closures that has struck America's regional newspapers hit their books pages first.... But as these losses piled up, it was difficult to feel that something wonderful had been lost, even if it had real value in swaths of the country that were losing many things all at once.  What mattered most were the big city papers, especially the New York Times and, as [Elizabeth] Hardwick wrote, "All those high school English Teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction."

COMMENT

      This view of libraries is contradictory.  All you need is a library card, and yet the librarians are lumped in with those poor provincial souls dependent on Times reviews to know what to read.  The writer, a book critic, wants people to read and appreciate capital "L" Literature and engage with some national community of readers and writers. He pooh-poohs the idea that regional writing matters compared to the 750 or so books reviewed annually in the New York Times Book Review. 

  And yet he knows what's going on in publishing-- "An ever consolidating set of big houses in New York and an ever expanding array of small presses across the country."  Personally,  I find myself  gravitating increasingly towards small publishers such as Milkweed Editions or Torrey House Press, and spending more time with literary journals (I especially like Bicycle Almanac, Dark Mountain,  Orion, saltfront, Sugarhouse Review, and Terrain.org).

     I am a librarian who also writes book reviews but reading this essay I get a sense that I am probably the type of "anti-intellectual" reviewer that Mr. Lorentzen despises.  I got my start writing capsule reviews for Library Journal -- 100 words to let you know whether or not to buy the book.  Nowadays my interests have shifted to poetry and more broadly, environmental humanities.  I read reviews to decide what to read.  I write them becasue I'm convinced that they are an essential part building of a local literary culture, supporting writers and poets whom you can hear at readings and meet at book signing events.  Since small press publications are unlikely to appear in the Times, it's up to us regional  librarians to nurture regional literature.

     Lorentzen sneers a the new Match Book column in the NYTBR that is essentially a readers' advisory -- "The world is full of desperate people." he writes. "Who know they were so desperate for book recommendations? Aren't those easy to come by in any bookstore or on Amazon?"  Well, sure.  Or at the library for that matter. But if people are going to discover literature at the library then the library has to collect literature, and approval plans are not very helpful.  There is a need for librarians to become acquainted with the expanding array of small presses across the country and someone (librarians?) needs to review the books published by them.  Lorentzen is right that the model of a few fancy critics writing for the NYTBR no longer works, but I think he's dead wrong about the irrelevancy of regional and local book reviews.  All those faithful librarians have a gap to fill reviewing, purchasing and collecting literature that's not covered by the NYTBR. 

     

   

Mythical Dangers of Democratic Socialism

Tom Huckin, "Mythical Dangers of Democratic Socialism," Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 2019, p,. A11.

     Sometimes we go to the downtown library to enjoy an art exhibit, hear a public lecture, borrow books and videos, etc. Oddly enough, the only thing we pay for is parking.
     I belong to a civic group called Move to Amend that aims to get Big Money out of our corrupt political system and thereby have real democracy in this country.  Guess where we hold our monthly meetings. Yep, in that same (socialist) library!

COMMENT

   Huckin is not quite accurate when he writes that he doesn't pay for the library.  I use the same public library system he does and there is a line item in my property taxes,  It costs me less than $100/year.  Still, Huckin makes his point that all the services he gets from the library are a terrific bargain.

     One of those services is a meeting room.  There is nice symmetry in the fact that the tax-supported library in turn supports civic engagement and a democratic system.   Huckin's description of library use is exactly the kind of social infrastructure that sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes about in Palaces for the People (2018), which are essential to the civic life and resilience of communities.  Nonetheless, politicians often look upon libraries as luxuries.  Klinenberg asks,

Why have so many public officials and civic leaders failed to recognize the value of libraries and their role in our social infrastructure?  Perhaps it's because the founding principle behind the library -- that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage, which they can use to any end they see fit -- is out of sync with the market logic that dominates our time. (If, today, the library didn't already exist, it's hard to imagine our society's leaders inventing it).  [p.37]

     Indeed, on the same op-ed page as Huckin's editorial, Congressman Chris Stewart (R-UT-2) announces that he has organized an Anti-Socialist Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Stewart's editorial is pure nonsense, making an utterly absurd claim that offering a few government services to citizens will inevitably end in mass graves, mass emigration and starvation (Pay no attention to those socialist Nordic countries).
 
    But Stewart's nonsense shows that Klinenberg is probably right.  If libraries did not exist, dogmatic anti-tax zealots like Stewart would never allow them to exit.  No doubt they would gripe about the unfairness of  being forced to buy books, and support art and meeting spaces that harm "individual liberty" for people who choose not to read, look at art, educate themselves or vote. It's hard to say, though, what kind of freedom is actually represented by social, cultural and political isolation. As Huckin points out, the republic that Stewart claims to admire can't hold together without supporting the public infrastructure that Stewart claims to despise.

   

What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home

Rhonda Kaysan, "What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home," New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 2019, p BU9.

Charities that will take specific donations:...
Books and other Media

• Libraries: Call first to find out their policy for taking gently used books.  Even libraries that do not generally take donations often have a collection day for annual book sales. 

COMMENT

   Some years ago I worked with an especially arrogant male library administrator who foolishly believed that libraries should be run "more like a business."  This man used his administrative power to eliminate the library book sale which was breaking although not making much money.  He claimed it was "inefficient," but I suspect that he actually just hated print books.  He strongly believed in the mythological "death of print" and thought his own advocacy to replace print libraries with ebooks was "cutting edge."

    Fast forward to now.  That same library has re-instated the book sale as a popular periodic event.  What that administrator never grasped was that library book sales are an important public service whether or not the library makes money.  People who buy books need a way to get rid of the ones they don't want to keep.  The New York Times article points out that "used bookstores buy books," but "some stores can be quite selective."  The library becomes a place to re-distribute books in order to support a culture of reading.  Unsold books may still end up in the recycle bin, but not until they have been thoroughly picked over by people who might want to read or re-sell them.

   That same administrator, by the way, failed to grasp that non-ownership is actually one of the biggest benefits of libraries.   He believed if information were cheap enough people would always prefer to store electronic files on  their computers instead of using libraries.  It's not at all clear where he got the idea that organizing digital files is a simple, pleasant or convenient task.  It's actually a great service to be able read zillions of books without having to keep and organize them.  At the library, I can always take a chance on something that I may not end up liking well enough to read all the way through.

 

The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate

Alexandra Alter. "The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith, Poet. " New York Times, January 27, 2019, p. BU4.

Monday
9:15 A.M. Get to Lewis Library on campus where the broadcast center is.  In a couple of hours, I'm scheduled to record a brief interview for an "on the Media" segment about my libretto for "A Marvelous Order." 

 COMMENT 

     It seems the life of a poet is not as relaxing as one might think!  As the poet laureate of the U.S., Smith is described as "an evangelist for her medium."  She is also a professor of creative writing at Princeton and on this particular day she is using a studio at the library to record a radio broadcast.

     These days, when a lot of poetry is often published on the Internet poets are often asked for a recording to go with the text version of a poem.  I've used the campus library for that purpose myself in order to get high-quality sound (For example, see: Can Opener by Amy Brunvand in Terrain.org)

    The library is a good place for a shared public recording studio because it's a neutral campus space, not controlled by a single department.  One department might use it to record educational podcasts, while another might use it to read poetry, and another for student projects.  Having the expertise and equipment in neutral library space means that the priorities can be set by users telling the library what they need.      

     

   

Nebraska Governor Won't Honor Book by 'Political Activist' who has Criticized Trump

Lisa Gutierrez. Nebraska Governor Won't Honor Book by 'Political Activist' who has Criticized Trump. Kansas City Star, Jan. 8, 2019.

     Nebraska’s Republican governor Pete Ricketts has refused to sign a proclamation honoring a book about a farm family in the state, calling the author a “political activist” and suggesting the book is divisive.
...
     “This Blessed Earth,” written by Nebraska writer and journalist Ted Genoways, is the 2019 “One Book One Nebraska” selection chosen by The Nebraska Center for the Book. The nonprofit, affiliated with the Library of Congress, “supports programs to celebrate and stimulate public interest in books, reading, and the written word,” according to its website.
...
     “It’s an award-winning book,” Rod Wagner, director of the Nebraska Library Commission, told the World-Herald. “It’s received national attention. Of course there are ideas in the book that people will not agree to, but I think that’s also a reason why it makes for a good one to consider and discuss. “It’s a contrast of the modern farm with that of 40 years ago. It’s one that’s a subject of interest across Nebraska. People who have disagreements with ideas in the book will be able to talk about those.”

COMMENT 

    The governor has failed to understand that some aspects of his job are purely ceremonial.  It makes him look like a book-burner to reject a book award because of his own politics. After all, he does not represent the organization that gives the award and he doesn't get to veto the award the way he could veto a bill.  The book also won a 2018n Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and was selected for state reading programs in Iowa. What's more, the book is about  issues facing family farmers-- the kind of thing that the governor of Nebraska should probably care about.

   I haven't read the book (yet) either, but apparently in it Big Agriculture doesn't play well with others and farmers are worried that leaks from the  Keystone XL pipeline will contaminate the aquifer that supports irrigated farming throughout the region.  Does the governor think that suppressing knowledge of these problems will somehow cause them to disappear?

     One hopes that the governor's petty behavior draws more readers to the book.  The danger is, if politicians think the librarians who are advocating freedom to read are advocating partisan political positions they might try to cut off public funding for libraries.

They Believe King's No Bigot, But They Agree He's Finished

Trip Gabriel, "They Believe King's No Bigot, But they Agree He's Finished," New York Times, Jan. 18, 2019, p. A10.

     Opponents of Mr. King, and even some of his supporters, have long been frustrated by the impression he gives to non-Iowans who think his 16 years in office prove that his constituents are racists.
     "I'm embarrassed by him," said Amy Presler, 48, a librarian in Fort Dodge, who grew up on a farm as the youngest of 10 siblings. "I don't want people in the nation and the world to think that Iowans are behind him and support that sort of talk.  We don't."

COMMENT

     Representative Steve King (R-Iowa-4) is in disgrace for making an outrageous statement, "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization-- how did that language become offensive?" 

     There's a photo of Presler in the article.  She looks like, well, a librarian-- hair pulled back in a ponytail or bun (hard to tell), glasses with thick plastic frames and wearing an elaborately lacy cardigan.  There's a shelf of library books behind her which suggests that the reporter went to the library to find her.  The article follows the the standard practice of locating die-hard Trump-supporting conservatives in the kafeeklatsch at a local diner [1].  The library seems like an obvious place to find someone more  open-minded. 

     The article makes a point that Presler is as local as they come.  Though it does not mention her party affiliation, it's hard to miss the association between books and more enlightened politics. Did she become a librarian because of her tolerant attitude?  Or did she learn tolerance through the practice of librarianship? 

[1]Paul Krugman. "The Economy Won't Rescue Trump," New York Times,  Jan. 21, 2019.  "Although there have been approximately 100,000 media profiles of enthusiastic blue-collar Trump supporters in diners, the reality is that Donald Trump is extraordinarily unpopular."

All Natural

 Sophia Hollander, "All Natural, The New Yorker. 94.33 (Oct. 22, 2018): p24.

Last week, as female activists swarmed Capitol Hill to denounce the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, another group of women gathered at a law library in Chelsea to push back against a more local threat: the imminent closure of the Mount Sinai West Birthing Center, one of the last remaining natural-birth strongholds in the city which also offers full access to a hospital.

COMMENT

The organizer put out a call on Facebook to organize a protest; the library provides a space for the activists to meet in person.

Women's health is a political football.  As a woman myself, formerly of reproductive age, I can attest that when you yourself become the target of a patronizing person who wants to make your medical decisions for you  the attack feels very, very personal.  Anyone who has given birth in a U.S. hospital has probably experienced the invasive tactics of medical people who think that their training gives them the right to bully women in labor.  Even this mostly sympathetic article comes off as condescending towards women who want a respectful, calm birth experience that isn't framed as a medical emergency waiting to happen.

The U.S. is one of the most dangerous places in the developed world to give birth.  I'm pretty sure I know the reason.  When I had my baby in a hospital, I was unnecessarily injured.  When I complained about it, a medical person actually yelled at me for being selfish. She said, (and I quote) "The baby is the patient. Not you." (Although the injury did in fact make me into a patient).  In a nutshell, that attitude is the reason that birthing centers should be the norm, not the exception.

Also,  Brett Kavanaugh's crying jag over his own sense of entitlement showed the he does not have the temperament to sit on the Supreme Court.

Shale Play

Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

     I grew up in Westmoreland County during the 1970s, when steel mills started closing along the rivers of Pittsburgh. Surface mining operations and slag heaps, abandoned coke ovens, and coal patch towns were just familiar parts of the industrialized, rural landscape I called home.
     With this project, I returned to those places with purpose, opened my laptop in the Pennsylvania Rooms of public libraries and in the Coal and Coke Heritage Center on Penn State’s Fayette campus. I talked to people in diners, attended public meetings and scribbled a lot in my notebooks. Jim Rosenberg and the Fayette Marcellus Watch group welcomed me to their monthly meetings at chain restaurants on the strip outside Uniontown, and I visited the homes of some of the group’s members. Typically, I told people I wanted to write about fracking and asked if I could transcribe their experience in their own words.  [pxxiii]

COMMENT

     You wouldn’t guess it from the research methods, but this writer was working on a book of poetry. 

     The Environmental Humanities have created a new clientele for special collections and archives that focus on local history. Writers and  artists are making use of place-based collections to inform work about the relationships between people and places. Library collections like the Pennsylvania Rooms and academic special collections hold a key to interpreting place-based identity that in turn informs community resilience and the possibility of sustainable change.

      Not that fracking is sustainable. The stories in Shale Play are unbearably sad ones about people trading their forests, farms, rivers, animals, good health, dignity and sense of community for a pocketful of money. Even so, the poems attest that the wounded land and damaged communities are still there despite the overlay of colonial industrialization. Perhaps in some form they will manage to outlast the bastards. 

Preservation Acts

Nora Caplan-Bricker, "Preservation Acts: Towards an Ethical Archive of the Web," Harper's, vo. 337 no. 2023, Dec 2018, pp.59-63.

     After eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in  Ferguson, Missouri, Bergis Jules found himself worrying not only over the horrors of the present, but also over how little of the present was likely to be preserved for the future.  The best reporting on the aftermath in Ferguson was being produced by activists on Twitter, a notoriously ephemeral medium.  Jules, then an archivist at the University of California, Riverside, had the impulse to start saving tweets but wasn't sure how. "That whole weekend, watching things unfold, I thought, 'This is a really amazing historical moment; we should think about capturing it,' but I was just talking to myself," he says.  The following week, attending a Society of American Archivists conference in Washington D.C., he voiced his fears en route to drinks at the hotel bar.  He caught the ear of Ed Summers, a developer who just so happened to be the author of a Twitter archiving tool-- and who promptly programmed it to vacuum up #Ferguson tweets.  Within two weeks, he had amassed more than 13 million. 

COMMENT

  The Internet is a real-time performance, not an archival medium. The fact that history unfolds on social media these days is a big problem for historic preservation. If you don't collect Tweets right away they disappear. But it's not as easy as just scraping websites.  Not only are there serious privacy issues (the Department of Defense showed an unhealthy interest in the #Ferguson archive),  trying to gather everything doesn't even create a useful database (the Library of Congress has tried and failed).

      To some librarians and archivists, the Internet makes curation seem unnecessary.  They argue that any human selection is inherently biased and that any decision to exclude information will create an information gap.  This fear of missing something important can be so paralyzing that nothing at all is saved.

 I've noticed is that there is nearly always a library information gap with regards to citizen activism.  Libraries have collections of government publications but they don't necessarily have the citizen response to government policy because it's largely contained in born-digital gray literature and social media.   The  librarian perception is that the citizen response is biased, and so it is.  But government publications are also biased by the views of whatever party is currently in control.  Biased information is not necessarily  bad or even wrong if you know the bias.  When reference librarians ask the  question, "who cares about this issue and why?" and lead patrons to search for activist gray literature the research strategy often takes off in an entirely  different direction than the  usual method of searching for journalism in books and articles.

    What is an archivist to do?  I think that Jules is on to something with the idea of curating an event-based collections, striving for more sound and less noise.  One of the best such curated collections I've seen was published as a book, We Are Wisconsin. [1] Editor Erica Sagrans reacted to an unfolding protest against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by selecting essays, blog posts and tweets compiled  into a book that records a narrative the historic moment. Likewise, Jules contacted Ferguson activists for oral history interviews instead of trying to letting the collection of Tweets alone stand as the historical record.

   Rather than worrying about saving every Tweet, librarians might do better to focus on saving a record of local citizen action groups and their concerns.  Every library could have its own local version of the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, NY.


[1] Erica Sagrans, ed. "We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the Words of the Activists, Writers, and Everyday Wisconsinites Who Made it Happen, Tasora Books, 2011) 

   

At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

Mark Miller, "At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length: Fewer Field Offices and Longer Waiting Times as the Number of Beneficiaries Mount," New York Times, November 25, 2018, p. BU5.

Along with other community leaders, Ms. Holt mounted a campaign to save the office, proposing ways to the Social Security Administration to reduce expenses.  But the Quincy office closed anyway, in March 2014-- a casualty of the cuts required by eight years of Congressional budget tightening.
     For anyone without a car, public transportation to Tallahassee is severely limited: There is a once-daily commuter bus, s. Holt says, and it is often overflowing with riders.
      Social Security did install a video kiosk in the Quincy library. That kiosk connects benefit claimants with the Tallahasssee office; today it serves 75 to 100 people daily during library hours. But it's not a trouble-free solution, Ms. Holt said. " We have people who can barely read because of vision problems, or hiring problems. Video is not the answer for many of these people." 

COMMENT

     Since 2010, Social Security has closed 67 field offices causing long wait times, a jammed phone line and long delays in solving appeals and errors. Meanwhile, each year  about one million more people begin to receive benefits.  When this particular Social Security office closed, the public library became a substitute for a staffed office.  However, it's not a very good substitute. The video kiosk,  is not accessible to people with certain kinds of disabilities and is staffed only by librarians who lack institutional knowledge about  Social Security and can't trouble-shoot problems. 

     Social Security has tried to address budget shortfalls by increasing the use of technology, but has run into a problem that would be familiar to any librarian -- the digital divide.  Older people, people without internet access, people who lack of computer literacy, people who are not fluent in English, homeless people, people with disabilities -- all sorts of people have trouble using computers un-aided.  What's more, technology is hardly ever really do-it-yourself.  Customer support and human intervention are needed to help people fill out complicated forms correctly. For instance, the complexity of IRS forms has created an entire industry of tax-filing software and accountants. 

     When libraries used to hand out paper tax forms it was always problematic that people wanted advice about which forms they needed, but they were asking the wrong people for help.  The reported 75 to 100 people per day is a lot of people in need of help.  It seems like one solution might be for Social Security staff to periodically visit the library kiosk in order to offer personal help, similar to the way some large urban  libraries staff social service desks to help homeless people.  While it's a great idea to  put a Social Security  kiosk at the library, but it's still not free. The library clearly needs more support in order to make it work. 

The Gap in Broadband Access

Steve Lohr, "The Gap in Broadband Access," New York Times, Dec. 5, 2018, p. B1.

The country seat, Republic, has basic broadband service, supplied by a community cable TV company owned by residents. But go beyond the cluster of blocks in the small town, and the high-speed service drops off quickly. People routinely drive into town to use Wi-Fi in the public library and other spots for software updates, online shopping or schoolwork, said Elbert Koontz, Republic's mayor. 

COMMENT

     The gist of this article is that the U.S. government has about $4 billion available for grants and subsidies in order to bring broadband to rural areas. Microsoft wants some of that money, especially because, " it enlarges the market for their products and services."  Does anyone see a problem here?

   Note how the article frames the public service offered by libraries and coffee shops as a nuisance. Maybe using the library and coffee shops for occasional fast Internet is not actually as onerous as Microsoft claims it is. Maybe people like to go into town now and again to buy groceries or have coffee or borrow a library book.

     While Microsoft says 162.8 Americans lack fast Internet, FCC numbers suggest that a lot more people in rural areas already have Internet. It's just slow. The device Microsoft is proposing to use to provide access costs "just" $300 (!) which might sound cheap to Bill Gates.  Microsoft plans to reach 3 million rural residents.  To me it sounds like Microsoft plans to suck $900 million directly out of  the pockets of disadvantaged rural people under the guise of helping them.

     It irks me that the government has $4 billion to help Microsoft market products and services, but no money for libraries that have already found a way to immediately fill the community need for fast Internet. I admit, it might not be quite as convenient of having your own, but it's up and running right now and it doesn't have $300 in upfront costs to use it.  With a little ingenuity, local people are making it work for them.  Maybe if the library got a piece of the pie for rural Internet access they could make things work even better.

    But what about the digital divide?  Sadly, it's real, but fast Internet access is no magic bullet.  I've had some experience with it since I use slow internet myself.  At school my kids are forced to use clunky software that has very little educational value but which has once in a while caused them to actually fail classes because of the way it limits  teachers' ability to adjust grades and assign extra credit work.  One year the school failed to hire a competent math teacher.  The administrators told the kids to just use videos from Khan Academy.  If you ask me, a mitigating factor for the digital divide is a gap between overblown expectations for what computers will do and what computers actually do.


   

 

   

Baby Center

Jennifer Case, “Baby Center: An Essay on Place,” Orion, 35 (4&5), 2016.

BabyCenter was easy to participate in: all I had to do was log in. In-person gatherings were harder to devise. And yet I craved those, too, which is why I attended the local La Leche League meeting.  Some nights I hardly said anything at all. I just sat there in the basement of the library, nodding, nursing my daughter, comforted by the presence of others, other women with children, who talked about what they struggled with, what they loved, what they feared about having more children— if the tongue tie would cause latch issues again or if they’d ever sleep through the night. 

...

I haven't been on BabyCenter much lately. I've spent entire afternoons reading academic research about social networking sites and motherhood, yet I haven't returned to those sites.  

COMMENT

The author describes compulsively logging into an online discussion board to read about pregnancy, babies and motherhood. Despite this obsession, she never admits to using a library to find books with information about these topics. Rather, she craves to learn directly from other women who are going through similar experiences. In a transitory American college town, she lacks a real-life community of moms and the La Leche League is one of the few organizations around that invites honest discussion about the experience of becoming a mother.

While the author claims that social networking was emotionally supportive, it is clear that it also made her feel isolated and sort of crazy.  Once she makes some real friends she quits using the website.  She also doing actual library research, this time not to find out about babies and parenting but trying to understand her own uncharacteristic behavior. 

The essay contrasts social interaction in physical and virtual space. Meeting strangers at the library is a not-quite-adequate substitute for sisters, aunts, grandmothers and neighbors.  However, it's clear that a virtual library with just access to information would not not have done the trick. The library meeting room works as a stopgap until the real thing comes along. 

Let's Talk Climate

James Westwater, "Let's Talk Climate" [Letter to the Editor], Salt Lake Tribune, November 23, 2018, p. A10.

The climate is changing, and not for the better.  The whole planet is warming. CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are accumulating exponentially in the atmosphere.
...
     What's causing all this, and what should be done? The Utah Valley Earth Forum has assembled a select team from Utah's four largest universities to discuss the climate crisis and address your questions. It's happening Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. at the Orem Public Library.  Details at UtahValleyEarthForum.org.

COMMENT

     This letter to the editor invites people to a panel organized by a citizen group that is concerned about climate change.  It's happening in Utah Valley, home to Brigham Young University. It's a majority Mormon and deeply red (for Republican) part of the state.  These citizens have taken it upon themselves to try to cut through the politics, and they chose to do that at the public library.

     I was so delighted when I got to the end of this letter and discovered that the writer was using library resources to help start a dialogue on community response to climate change. This is exactly what we librarians wish for-- public use of our open-access spaces to support citizen engagement and democracy.

God is Going to Have to Forgive Me

Elizabeth Dias. “‘God is Going to Have to Forgive Me’: Young Evangelicals Speak Out,” (Election 2018 The Voters),  New York Times, November 2, 2018, P. A13.

     I was pulled out of Smith College in 2015 when I told my parents that I was rethinking the legitimacy of anti-gay theology. I thought, “God is going to have to forgive me. I am not going to die in this culture war.” I was Republican like them. Before, I supported whatever my church told me about candidates and issues. I never questioned or read outside material on these subjects. I secretly started borrowing books from the library. I gave a communion message in 2016— it was, “Our God chooses to die the death of all these marginalized people. He dies like Matthew Shepard, like a kid at the hand of the state. He was a refugee.” My church reprimanded me for “abusing he pulpit.” Other members used it to openly stump for Trump and say hateful things about Muslims and L.G.B.T. citizens.

COMMENT

     I used to teach an online course on how to do library research. My students had to select a topic for a final project bibliography.  Occasionally I would get a student who tried to challenge me by picking an overtly religious topic like “the truth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”  They thought I’d tell them no and then they could complain about being persecuted by those godless liberals at the University

     But I always told them, yes, that’s a great topic. The only problem, I’d say, is it’s not focused. I advised them to imagine that they were writing a sermon. Perhaps they could focus on the meaning of some specific teaching of Jesus? Or on how Christian theology informs some particular moral issue? The students who proposed religious research were always surprised to find out that there is a vast body of scholarly literature about theology and the Bible.  They thought the people at their church were the only authority. 

  The 22 year old woman in the article describes growing up in a culture where disagreeing with church authority was actually dangerous.  She was pulled out of college for questioning a quasi-biblical teaching and shamed by other members who ignored her message of Christian compassion.  What does it mean that she used the library and  not the Internet to start questioning the politics of her church?  Perhaps in such an intellectually repressive environment her home didn’t have the Internet. Maybe she used the library because she didn’t want anyone looking over her shoulder during her secret reading. Or maybe the Internet just doesn’t work well for this kind of questioning because online information has a tendency to amplify what you already believe. In any case, the young woman in the interview says she is still a Christian but she has changed her party affiliation to Democrat. 

     

Invisible Hand

Andrew Marantz, "Invisible Hand," (Talk of the Town), New Yorker, October 15, 2018, p.

Last Monday night, about fifty New Yorkers of diverse ages and nondiverse politics showed up at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for the first in a series of “Midterm Explainers”—informal talks ahead of the November elections, followed by cheese and screw-top wine. The evening’s topic, according to a flyer, was “The invisible hand of the super PAC.” The explainer was Zephyr Teachout, who was identified as an anti-corruption activist and a “veteran candidate”—a polite way of saying that she ran for governor of New York, in 2014; for Congress, in 2016; and for state attorney general, this year, all without enduring the potentially corrupting effects of winning.

COMMENT

   Here is an example of a public library fostering civic engagement by hosting a political lecture series.  
   In the article, Teachout is attempting to give an information literacy talk about how to follow the money in politics. Her audience, according to the reporter anyway, is surprisingly unreceptive considering that they all showed up to hear her talk. When she tries to tell them how to use Facebook to uncover the source of funding behind political ads they say, "we don't use Facebook," and then claim never to watch political ads.  As Teachout keeps pointing out, it's not about them.  It's about the people who do get their political information from Facebook ads. 
     When she asks if anyone knows who their state senator is about 1/3 of the audience raises their hands. This is actually a much higher than the rate than I have ever observed, especially among young voters.  When I ask college undergraduates if they can name the politicians who represent them they can all identify the president; a few know who their congressman is; but only once did I have a student who could name the governor.  The State Legislature (the ones who can allocate finding and make rules that affect the State system of higher education) are a complete mystery to students.  
     I believe that this ignorance of State-level politics is because young people do not read local newspapers. In part the currant breakdown in American politics is due to too much emphasis  on national politics and not enough knowledge of state and local politics where individual values can have a far more direct influence. Despite overblown hopes, the Internet and citizen journalism have turned out to be inadequate substitutes for local news reporting.  
     In some places without local newspapers libraries are trying to fill the gaps, in some cases by actually publishing community newsletters. It's an imperfect solution. Libraries have an obligation to both-sideism that, as lazy journalists found while reporting on the 2016 elections,  leaves the gate ajar for inadvertently spreading deliberate disinformation and propaganda.  Also, unlike real reporters librarians can't leave work to report breaking news.

On Planes, in Bars, Around Phones, a Nation is Transfixed

Jack Healy and Farah Stockman. On Planes, in Bars, Around Phones, a Nation is Transfixed. New York Times. September 28, 2018. P. A1

     Travelers on airplanes cried as they watched it on their seatback televisions. College students holed up all day at library computers and streamed it on their phones, drowning out their lectures.  Friends sat together, stunned and still, on living room couches. Television screens at mall salons, sports bars and hotel lobbies were tuned to nothing else.
     All day on Thursday, though eight hours of tears, anger and exasperation, it seemed like the country could not look away.

COMMENT

     The article is about the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at the Supreme Court hearing of judge Brett Kavenaugh whom she accused of attempted rape. Back before everybody had a computer in their pocket libraries used to wheel out televisions for big events. I can remember being at a library watching events like the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (1986), the testimony of disgraced congresswoman Enid Green Waldholtz (1995)  and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (2001). In each case the shared experience was important.

     In this account students are using library computers and cell phones at the library (I assume for fast wi-fi and streaming) but the library doesn’t seem to have set up any shared viewing space where students could watch together. Perhaps the newspaper reporters just didn’t notice it, or maybe librarians really are so detatched from current events that they didn't recognize the emotional power of the hearing and left it up to sports bars and hotel lobbies to provide community space.  If so, that’s too bad. Libraries claim a role in civic engagement, and this seems like a missed opportunity. 

     On that Thursday women especially were in a state of shock and emotional turmoil. Screens often isolate people, but in some cases (movie theaters, Super Bowl games, Sound of Music sing-alongs, etc...) they can also create a shared experience. It strikes me as sad that college professors and librarians tried to press on with business-as-usual instead of pausing for a day to let students participate in a shared  experience of civics and community grief. In the old days, librarians used to know better. 

Recently Returned Books

Gabbert, Elisa,” Recently Returned Books (Letters of Recommendation), New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9, 2018, pp 20-21.

My favorite spot in my local library — the central branch in Denver — is not the nook for new releases; not the holds room, where one or two titles are usually waiting for me; not the little used-book shop, full of cheap classics for sale; and not the fiction stacks on the second floor, though I visit all those areas frequently.  It’s a shelf near the Borrower Services desk bearing a laminated sign that reads RECENTLY RETURNED
…

The “recently returned” shelf is perhaps the subtlest most indirect way of advising readers, nudging them towards what others in the community are reading — an index of local interests, a a record of your neighbor’s whims.

COMMENT

     The most charming thing about this essay is how the author experiences the returned book shelf as a community connection. She imagines other people reading the books and wonders if they might be personal friends. I wonder if the librarians ever thought of it that way? The shelf is probably just there so that librarians can locate books in transit and so that shelvers can sort them onto carts.  

     As far as selecting what to read, the author lists her favorite ways to find books, none of which are keyword searching in an online catalog which is how librarians think people find books.

      I used to work with a library administrator who fancied  himself a prescient futurist. He loved to talk about how book circulation is going down and how "useless" books should be weeded so that shelf space could be put to “better” use. The circulation statistics he cited were deeply flawed, but never mind. He was utterly convinced that digital reading was The Future and that libraries should therefore purchase everything on clunky ebook platforms (the kind that will become instantly obsolete if technology ever really does replace print). 

    This administrator seemed to believe that book circulation arises from internal information needs of individual readers. He could never quite grasp that librarians (and booksellers) can persuade people to check out more books simply by putting more books in front of them. Likewise, librarians can suppress circulation by hiding books in onsite storage and remote repositories where nobody will ever stumble across them.

Branching Out

Nalini Nadkarni. "Branching Out," in Nature Love Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness. ed. by Thomas Lowe Fleischner, 2017, pp. 27-40.

                Although immense amounts of knowledge are contained in the science libraries around the world, rates of deforestation, climate change, species invasion, and over-consumption if tree-derived products are increasing.  Humans— especially those living in urban environments and working in windowless cubicles— are more and more separated from their connections to trees, soils and wind.  Midway into my academic career, I realized that communication of all my scientific findings to scientists — through my academic papers and talks at ecology conferences —did very little to fulfill my childhood dream of being a grownup who protected trees. [p. 31]

COMMENT

 The fact that so much academic writing has no market has misled some academic librarians into misunderstanding the motivation and interests of academic authors. Often, academic writing is an indirect path to the rewards of scholarly reputation, job promotion and successful grant applications, valued according to citation statistics. Some librarians therefore assume that scholars only care about reputation. However, in this case Nadkarni has a much larger goal. She wants her writing to create change in the world. This ambition places her squarely into an academic no-man’s-land between science and activism.

      There has long been an ongoing debate among scientists regarding the role of activism in the sciences and where to place appropriate limits. In his classic textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), Eugene Odum hoped that ecology would emerge as an  interdisciplinary bridge between science and society.  Instead what happened is the vocabulary shifted.  "Ecology" became more scientifically focused and integrated in Biology departments. The term “environmentalism” gained favor to imply ecological activism. In the academic environment, biological scientists criticized environmental studies as  being a “church of the environment” for idealistic students.  Eventually, the word “environmentalism” was deemed too narrow and after the Brundtland Report (1987) it was replaced by the word “sustainability." Sustainability was defined by a triple bottom line of ecology, economics and society, an attempt to deliberately pull science and society back together.  However, once again scientists balked at the fuzziness of social science and policy. The ideas of sustainable development, criticized as insufficiently evidence-based, spun off  “sustainability science” on the one hand and “resilience” on the other.  And so it goes.  As each new term becomes “tainted” by association with activism, scientists imagine that the next effort to save the planet will succeed due to rigorous standards of objectivity.

     In the end, Nadkarni was not able to create change within the context of pure science. Instead she engaged with humanities by inviting “forest novices” to help interpret what she was seeing —  artists, dancers, musicians, and indigenous people from the Arctic who have never seen a tree.  

 

     Academic librarians like to structure collections and organizations to mirror the structure of  academic departments at a university, but that means libraries are bound by the same limitations. Interdisciplinary ideas can end up marginalized, or caught in a tug-of-war of words and definitions. I wonder how many of the science libraries that have Nadkarni’s academic papers also have a video of the dance performance inspired by her work?