Tag Archives: libraries

Racism as Malinformation

I am sorry for the long absence. Going back to in person work and then starting the semester with mostly in person classes, helping a lot of people who haven’t been on campus before, adjusting to a number of changes on campus in leadership, staff, etc. has been a time. I am seeing some glimpses now, not of “a new normal” — I don’t think I believe in normal anymore — but of a less frenetic pace.

So in the last day or so I was able to revisit an article I read in August in the relative calm just before the pre-semester rush on campus: “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Racism as a Form of Persistent Malinformation” by Nicole A. Cooke, a librarian whose work I very much admire. Cooke’s article is part of the Project Information Literacy Provocation series. You may recall I shared in earlier posts Barbara Fister’s essay on information literacy in a time of QAnon, and Alison J. Head’s essay on critical reading in college. I can’t say enough good things about the series and how it’s influenced my own work this year. In fact, an English professor colleague and I are working closely with one of her classes this fall on critical reading as a result of these essays so far.

Cooke reminds readers that approaching information critically is not enough; she came to see that the racial malinformation our culture is steeped in, “the phenomenon of how we are conditioned, socialized, and repeatedly bombarded with racist and negative images and stereotypes,” requires a different kind of literacy that considers not only what is untrue, but how. She says it so brilliantly, I will quote her:

“Critical information and media literacies address relational structures and power dynamics, which is crucial, but that wasn’t enough. Even more context and a holistic lens was needed in order to truly understand the convergences that create racial malinformation. We need to understand history, politics, design, emotional intelligence, cultural competence, and racial dynamics. We need critical cultural literacy.”

Cooke gives examples of this kind of literacy in her essay. I’ve been trying to practice it more intentionally — emphasis on practice. Here is a very recent example of this practice: reports of the protests outside the Met gala a few nights ago in New York City. First, I hadn’t heard about the protests until my daughter mentioned them this evening. I get my news primarily from headlines from the local paper my college library subscribes to (I rarely have time at work to go beyond the headlines), and the New York Times app on my phone, and had not noticed this story ineither place.

When I searched online, I initially only found reports on the protest and arrests from Fox News, email providers (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) whose stories came from various news services that relied heavily on social media accounts, and British papers. Digging deeper, I found the New York Times‘ mention — buried in an article that focuses on other details about the gala — and then an article on The Advocate‘s website by Mikelle Street, and another on The Root by Maiysha Kai. If you aren’t familiar with these, the first is an LGBTQ magazine and the second is a media website whose tagline is “The Blacker the Content the Sweeter the Truth.”

Quick aside: Kai’s story is also the only place I saw Jeremy Pope’s ensemble, and two of us in this house stayed up way too late on the 13th dissecting the gala ensembles — mainly on Vogue‘s website. Pope is black, and his”all-white ensemble was a tribute to the legacy of enslaved and exploited African Americans and the ever-lucrative cultivation of cotton on the country’s soil—the foundation of the same fashion industry being celebrated on Monday night,” writes Kai, who also notes Pope’s ensemble was “largely overlooked” in reporting. Sit with that understatement. Even the fashion press did not note what was clearly a very aesthetically interesting and thematically spot-on outfit, worn by a black man, that included a cotton picking sack that looked a little like a train.

Back to the protest coverage. In reading these accounts here is what critical cultural literacy tells me: only Fox and the British papers ran stories entirely about the protest and arrests, while other sources mentioned the protests within articles about the gala. Both The Advocate and The Root commented on the injustice of the protests. The others either reported what the police said the protestors did wrong (disorderly conduct, according to the Fox story — which by the looks of the eyewitness videos, is an apt description of the police themselves, who tackled people), or what bystanders posted on social media. So most major news outlets did not really cover the protests as a news story. They covered the wealthy attending the gala. And as noted by Kai’s article in The Root, only the wealthy who did not remind them too blatantly of America’s slaveholding past.

That’s what I noticed about the press coverage. As for the event itself: one report noted this was a peaceful protest, that protestors were speaking out about police brutality and promoting abolitionist views such as using what protest fliers claimed is an $11 billion New York police budget to care for people who need housing and other basic needs. I live in a white town, and a few years ago, when I worked close to the state capitol, I attended some rallies and protests to support an end to homelessness, a more just budget, etc. Never was a single (almost all white — I live in NH) peaceful protester arrested let alone wrestled to the ground. Also, as Cooke herself notes in the beginning of “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies,” about the summer 2020 protests, “Despite the fact that 93% of these Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were peaceful, they were labeled as violent, destructive, unnecessary, and unproductive.”

I see this reproduced in both the assertion that the Met gala protestors were “disorderly” and the lack of attention that most of the media gave the protest or its causes. This was according to many reports on social media (mentioned in the news reports) a large crowd outside an event that was widely covered, and the protest was aimed at drawing attention to that eye-popping police budget in a city where the police have a long track record of discrimination, abuse, and murder. The same city where police used violent tactics to disperse protests in summer 2020 after George Floyd’s murder. Why? Because in America’s dominant culture, Black lives don’t matter as much as money. The major media companies’ context is that dominant culture, and they told the story of the gala, from that context.

So what do I do with this information? Talk about it with the same people I talked about the gala fashion with, seek what’s missing from stories I see in the future, try to understand whose stories aren’t being told (arguably harder than skimming headlines), find alternative sources of news that do tell those stories. Remember, as I learned in my science communication studies, that all information is mediated through various lenses, and in many cases, it’s the dominant (or hegemonic, to use the more academic term) culture’s lens. And, heed Cooke’s very wise conclusion:

“CCL requires critical self-reflection and the desire for equitable information and non-racist perceptions of others. We have to reexamine and reimagine everything we’ve been taught and ask ourselves “What perspectives and voices are missing from what I think I know? How can I do better and learn more?” When we examine our own identities, privileges, and disadvantages, we are better positioned to have empathy for others and do the work of dismantling racist malinformation with CCL. Part of this work involves pushing back against the media, publishing, and other entities that produce racist malinformation and are chronically resistant to change (because change typically involves a loss of revenue and power). But if we are diligent and take the time to explode siloed echo chambers of racist malinformation, we can slow and maybe even reverse this crisis.”

I will end on that hopeful note, and Cooke’s words. Go read the rest here.

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Conspiracy theories, info lit, the fairness doctrine, and SIFT

Project Information Literacy launched a new series of essays a couple of weeks ago with a piece by Barbara Fister, Lizard People in the Library. An adapted version of this appeared on the Atlantic site today as The Librarian War Against QAnon. Fister makes a similar point to danah boyd’s (I’ve written about her work here before): information literacy is no panacea, and can even cement conspiracy theorists’ belief that if they “researched” something and found evidence, they are right. Since there is “evidence” aplenty for nearly any view online, this is dangerous.

Fister notes that the role of information literacy, and the librarians who teach it, should ideally be to help people learn about the way information is created and spreads, and to restore faith in expertise. She notes that the distrust of media and science fanned in recent times by people in power could be countered if people learned that there are professional standards and systems of fact checking and review in media and science and that legitimate experts rely on these standards and systems.

Which is great, except that there are plenty of “news” and “science” organizations that seem legitimate and actually are nothing more than propaganda machines. This week I learned an excellent lesson in this: a database my library subscribes to that is designed to present “sides” of an issue to students, CQ Researcher, has an essay by the president of the National Vaccine Information Center as the “con” argument on the “Vaccine Controversies” page. First of all, the title of the page is clickbaity. There is no controversy: the scientific evidence that vaccines save lives and prevent suffering is well established. As is the evidence that vaccines are incredibly safe. Far fewer people are harmed by vaccines every year than say, guns.

Even more troubling, to me, than the headline, is that the National Vaccine Information Center is a misinformation machine that accepts millions of dollars in antivaxxer donations. Their propaganda ads have raised the ire of several medical and public health associations. Their misleading information is counter to any scientific evidence. And yet there they are, in a database in my library (don’t worry, I am not renewing).

Do you know how many times I have heard faculty say or have seen in assignments “use library materials, not the internet?” People get uncomfortable when I say to a class that it’s not that simple. As recent events have shown, there are media outlets whose entire reason for being is to present a particular set of alternative facts that support the basest false narratives — if you think I’m being cagey it’s because I refuse to include the actual lies here in this post that recently threatened the democratic process in America. And yes you can find these news outlets indexed in databases and find the full text of these counterfactual “reports” at your library. Which is part of Fister’s argument . . . look hard enough (or even not very hard at all, depending on the topic) and you’ll find evidence for whatever you want to find it for.

Today I learned in Heather Cox Richardson’s excellent newsletter that there is a historical reason for this. We had a “Fairness Doctrine” in America, which “required any outlet that held a federal broadcast license to present issues honestly, equitably, and with balance.” During the Reagan administration, the FCC decided this doctrine was not in the public interest.

So, if anyone can pretend to be a source of “information” and send out press releases and ads that masquerade as facts, and if the internet makes the reach of this kind of nonsense endless, and if this problem is magnified by being repeated not only in social media but in other media for reasons we’ll get into in a minute, or in a misguided attempt to present “both sides,” so that people can find evidence for anything, what can be done?

Fister has a few suggestions, starting with “being willing to take a strong stand on behalf of ethical research practices, the voices of qualified experts, and the value of information systems that judiciously vet and validate information, along with a willingness to clearly reject the notion that truth is simply a matter of political allegiance or personal choice.” She also advocates for teaching people about “ethical frameworks and daily practices of truth-seeking institutions such as science, scholarship, and journalism” as opposed to those “firmly grounded in beliefs about individualism, capitalism, and consumerism.”

For Fister that second category is social media companies, but I’d say the problem is more extensive. Any media companies, even those that try to adhere to standards and principles to seek truth, are part of our socioeconomic system, so they are also grounded in capitalism and consumerism. On any given day, the challenge for the average information consumer is figuring out which content at any one company was created with ethical frameworks of truth seeking in mind and which were created with an eye to keeping paying customers (subscribers, viewers, listeners, watchers, advertisers) satisfied. I’ll grant that there are patterns and trends to spot — outlets that are more (or less) dedicated to truth than others. But the information ecosystem is incredibly complicated, and even experienced researchers and journalists have to watch out for bullshit.

Which is why I like Mike Caulfield’s work. On his Infodemic blog, he explains his SIFT method:

“Over the past four years, I have worked with students and faculty to identify the core skills and habits that students and citizens are missing that leave them vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation on the web. We have organized them into a model called SIFT: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context. We call these “moves” and we tie each one to a couple simple skills you can usually execute in 30 seconds or less. You can learn all the moves and associated skills in less than an hour, and our work with students indicates that these skills will make a dramatic difference in your ability to sort fact from fiction on the web (and everything in between).”

He starts with Stop. Why? Because media of all kinds, even media created by organizations that claim to adhere to the principles Fister champions, is designed to grab our attention, to elicit an emotional response. If we use the SIFT method, we can check our emotions, consider not only the source, but the competing coverage of the topic at hand, and try to find out more about the claims. It works.

That said it takes time, effort, and as Fister notes, a belief that there is a truth, or, as Fister says (and I know I’m repeating this, but it bears repeating) “a willingness to clearly reject the notion that truth is simply a matter of political allegiance or personal choice.”

The question is do enough people have that? And even if they do, can they resist the powerful psychological manipulation technology companies employ to hook us on online content that is then designed to play on our emotions?

It’s easier if you stop reading this and turn off your device.

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Libraries, books & hope

While Americans squabble about whether drag queen story time promotes self-love and affirmation or is evidence of our country’s depravity and legislatures propose various laws meant to discourage or ban such events, people around the world just want to read. A story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that highlighted efforts by young people in Somalia to make civil society work in their country led me to read about several book fairs, notably in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, and Kismayo.

In  Afghanistan, another country wracked by decades of war and civil strife, university students founded a nonprofit, Read Books, that takes books into rural areas and distributes them to children. I’ve written before about library services for refugees in Greece. Another story caught my eye this weekend about an Afghan man who is opening a library at the Moria refugee camp, also in Greece, originally built for 3,000 people and now housing 20,000.  In Syria, a group of friends saved books and kept a volunteer library running through years of that country’s devastating civil war; one volunteer went on to run a bookmobile.

The most important thing to note about this last story, by Guardian reporter Sam Wollaston, is that “Moria is hell, a stain on 21st-century Europe, where bureaucracy, politics and simply not caring enough have left tens of thousands in limbo – people fleeing war and danger, looking for a future for themselves and their children and not finding it. Moria’s existence is a disgrace, a failure of morality.”

And yet, people make sure that “humanity survives in hell” as Wollaston writes. And wherever hell on earth exists, in war zones, in terrorized places, in corners of the world that many of us manage not to think about on a daily basis, people keep reading, and sharing books, and helping children learn, and promoting the values that libraries stand for: education and literacy for all.

These stories for me put into perspective how incredibly privileged it is for people in America to argue over what’s on our libraries’ shelves and who reads stories to our kids. I just finished reading The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and this sentence, published in 1951, seems incredibly prescient as I consider the world today: ” Yet to have more does not mean to be more.”

We have so much. We could be more.  The incredibly brave and selfless people who make these libraries and schools and book fairs happen in Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, and overcrowded refugee camps in Greece are.

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Another reason libraries are vital

I finished reading one of my Christmas gifts, Educated, on Friday evening. You can read my thoughts on this memoir by Tara Westover over at bookconscious. This morning I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End of Normal” and it got me thinking about why Educated has resonated so strongly with readers of all kinds (I’ve had more people recommend this book to me than any other I can think of). And why Educated illustrates the importance of libraries, even though Westover doesn’t necessarily say so (although she mentions several libraries in the book).

I watched a brief interview Westover did with Bill Gates, where she talks a little bit about divisions in our world and describes the potential of education as “this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.” She also describes the way some schools become “an instrument of that division” because of the way “we self-segregate, and schools become reflections of people’s homogeneity.” In other words, depending on where a child grows up, they may or may not learn the same history as a child who grows up somewhere else, even in the same city or town.

Now, I’m not saying everyone should learn one official version of history. We need what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude” — where the many threads of being human in America and the world are included in the overall fabric of the history we learn, instead of the majority controlling the narrative. And education, ideally, should present that plenitude, instead of whatever the dominant narrative is. And what Westover was discussing with Gates is that if we really meant what we say about providing a good education for all, we might actually have less division. Because if you know someone’s stories, they become familiar, and you begin to see how they are also like your stories, and how they are different, and since we are born curious, you also start to wonder why.

This morning, I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End Of Normal” and I think one reason Educated is so powerful is that Westover’s experience, while extreme, explains the divisions we currently face. Knowing only one version of the story of humanity, particularly one that justifies fears in the face of a changing world, leads to what Kakutani quotes Richard Hofstadter as calling “the paranoid style” that Westover’s father embodies. If people then reinforce their views by limiting the scope of information they take in to what they agree with, as Kakutani notes that many people whose world views rely on “alternative facts” do, you can end up with extremes.

Westover provides some hope that anyone who can read and think (potentially, most people) can discover for themselves what has happened in human history and is happening in the world now. So people who are insulated from reality can potentially learn that their “truth” has been mediated and their accepted narrative controlled – but the scary flip side is that if enough people don’t ever learn that we end up where we are now with nationalism on the rise all over.  You probably know where I’m going with this if you’ve read Nocturnal Librarian before: libraries and librarians can help counter division because we help make it possible for people to expand their views and embrace narrative plenitude.

Information literacy, the skills and habits that allow people to find, evaluate, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem, is at the core of what academic libraries do. We teach students to consider the ways information is mediated, what mechanisms are in place to safeguard facts while still presenting persuasive arguments in journalism and academic writing, and how to recognize and critically assess those. Public libraries also foster information literacy, and they act (when they are at their best) as some of the last egalitarian public spaces, where all citizens regardless of where they live or go to school have access to the same resources. Libraries of all kinds support lifelong learning, and collect and preserve all kinds of narratives that are part of our shared human story. They can also promote civil discourse either explicitly through programming or implicitly through their collections.

So, if you want to live in a less divided, more civil world where people know how to recognize and counter “alternative facts,” support your library!

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We’re fine without fines

I had an interesting conversation today with a student worker who wanted to know if we charge for replacement ID cards. I said no, and that even if there was a policy in the past, I was not in favor of charging students extra for things, especially since most students have little money. I pointed out that it’s possible a lost ID is at campus safety, so it might be good to ask the student to check there before having a new one made, but otherwise, just make the replacement. The student worker said they hadn’t heard a librarian say anything like that before.

We also don’t charge fines at my library, although if a book is never returned we do bill for replacement. one of our staff has been calling patrons with bills, and she said today that they don’t always believe there will be no charge if they return a long overdue item and some have even said they don’t return it out of fear of a big fine.

When I worked at a public library, “fine free” was becoming popular. In 2017, NY Public Library System president Anthony Marx wrote about some forays into fine amnesty and fine free borrowing for kids and noted that in response to those who worried about what fine free tells people about responsibility, “what is truly the greater moral hazard? Having fines or not having fines? In my view, teaching kids that the library is not an option for the poorest among them is absolutely unacceptable.” Indeed. It has always really frosted me when kids can’t use the library because of fines.

Because it turns out, library fees and fines are regressive. And now the Chicago Public Library has become the largest American library system to go fine free. Library Commissioner Andrea Telli had a similar response to the question of whether eliminating fines erodes accountability: “Libraries don’t necessarily want to be in the morality business, and we don’t want to make the assumption that if a book is late or someone can’t pay for a fine, that they’re delinquent or bad in some way; they may just be in a place in their life where they can’t pay the fine.”

Exactly. It turns out the value of returned items is often higher than that of fines collected, and that fines don’t deter people from returning items late — they just prevent people from feeling the library is for them. Which is not in line with the values of librarianship, or of human decency generally.

If the administrations that provide our funding want fines to be part of our budgets (which is not even necessarily the case — in Chicago, fines never went to the library), we need to help them learn about equity and inclusion, and stand with our colleagues who point out that we’re fine without fines, but excluding our patrons because they can’t pay is not fine.

 

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Information pollution

I’ve been trying to be more active on Twitter, in part because a lot of open education people and librarians share experiences and thoughts there. This morning I saw a thread that a librarian I follow had retweeted, originally posted by @Viveka, that got me thinking about something that came across my desk from the ALA’s Center for the Future of Libraries in their newsletter Read for Later a couple of weeks ago. The Twitter thread was about a bot tweet that was making its way around Twitter, trying to drum up outrage about the way Disney has cast the forthcoming live action Little Mermaid movie. I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to grant this message any more attention but the gist is that it’s written to divide people and drum up racial strife while saying on the surface that it’s not about race. Which sounds like something a human might actually do — claim not to be racist but then make a point that attempts to divide people over race. But Viveka notes in the thread, “we know it’s a bot because it behaves unlike any human” and then goes on to explain the tells that make this so.

If you are not as observant as Viveka or just accept the content at face value without interrogating this tweet too carefully — and let’s face it, that’s mostly how the majority of tweets are read, quickly and without much thought — you might miss it. Viveka points out, “It has the right hashtags, the petition link works, call to action is clear.” Which might make it seem real enough that in the seconds it takes to skim it, most people would either ignore it, engage with it, or feel moved enough to click the petition.  But it’s been posted “about every ten minutes, as a reply to other tweets mentioning the movie or the actess” (@Viveka).

A bot can do that, a human can’t. Which is why I went back and re-read the New York Times article by Cade Metz & Scott Blumenthal that appeared in Read for Later, “How AI Could Be Weaponized to Spread Disinformation.” Metz and Blumenthal write about two AI companies that are making fake news generators that are getting better and better at mimicking human writing openly available — so that researchers know what we’re up against, as more and more content like the thread above proliferates. Why does it matter what people think about the casting of a Disney film? It doesn’t, but the humans behind this bot creation probably have an interest in dividing Americans over cultural issues. Perhaps so we will vote emotionally, or so we’ll be busy arguing while our government cages children, or tries to start a war somewhere, or . . . you get the idea. And AI makes it more likely that we’ll have trouble identifying what’s bot generated and what’s not.

So why is this a library issue? Libraries of all sorts encourage information literacy, or in the case of school and academic libraries, teach it. Information literacy is a set of skills and habits of mind that allow people to seek, evaluate, and use information effectively and responsibly. Will we be able to keep doing this work if, as Metz and Blumenthal quote OpenAI researcher Alec Radford, “The level of information pollution that could happen with systems like this a few years from now could just get bizarre.”

I’m not sure. Yes, we can keep teaching people to examine and consider information carefully but we have to be careful not to go so far as to convince them to trust nothing, as danah boyd cautions in her article “Did Media Literacy Backfire?” which I re-read every few months to remind myself how hard this work is. Will the media be susceptible to information pollution in the same way social media is? Is it already, in the “balance bias” of its coverage of major issues like climate change?

There are no easy answers. I believe information literacy is a help, but knowing how to do something doesn’t mean someone will do it. Ultimately the fight against information pollution is a matter of will — we have to spend more than a few seconds scanning something online before deciding whether it’s valid or not. I’d like to think libraries have a role in encouraging that, but in the end, it’s probably up to each of us to be smart information consumers.

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Open beyond the campus

I just got back from the Northeast OER summit (conference #3 in 2 months — my brain is stuffed with ideas). It you’re unfamiliar with it, the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation describes Open Education as “the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” Anyone who knows my past as an unschooling parent knows this makes my heart sing. OERs are open educational resources, which means all the stuff we create and share to make open education happen — in the higher ed world, OER often refers to textbooks and other course materials. It also refers to Open Pedagogy — the idea that students can be co-creators of knowledge.

I introduced myself at the first Community College System of New Hampshire OER Taskforce meeting as a librarian and OER nut. I embrace this work because it speaks to my values. I make no apologies for seeing a social justice role in librarianship and education . . . let me digress on this for a second.

I know that this makes me susceptible to what Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” but I don’t think libraries, and even more so, formal education, are beyond critique, as those of you who’ve been with Nocturnal Librarian know — I think that like democracy, the idea of libraries as egalitarian places where all are radically welcomed is something we strive for, but I am well aware that as a profession we often do not uphold this, we have definitely got problems with regards to asking librarians to do more work without more compensation, etc. I embrace the values associated with radical welcome and access for all, and the potential of libraries to embody them, while acknowledging we have work to do. I’m at a community college because I value access to education and I believe public education should serve all publics (it doesn’t, especially when it’s under-resourced but that’s another post).

Digressions over. All this is to say, I love OER because it is in line with other things I love — learner directed learning, collaboration, community, equity, justice. So it was an awesome conference, and I was excited to be with other librarians, faculty, instructional designers, learning technology directors, etc. And I got some ideas I think I can transform into action pretty easily, which is always motivating.

One of the things I’ll work on right away is getting other OER interested folks on my campus together informally in a “community of practice” —  we don’t take enough time to do the kind of sharing that happens at a conference. Yesterday I was in a workshop on Creative Commons licenses and copyright and after hearing Meredith Jacob‘s presentation we broke into tables by interest and talked. It was really fruitful, and although we ended up ranging beyond open licensing, copyright and fair use, we learned from each other and built community. I want to recreate this if I can on my campus.

Another really cool thing I heard was a presentation by Grif Peterson of P2PU, which connects people who want to learn something together in learning circles which meet in public places — often, libraries. They describe themselves as “a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education.” Again, those of you who know me can imagine how this delights me! Grif presented on learning circles with Kelly Woodside, a consultant and trainer at the Massachusetts Library System. Kelly’s awesome job involves collaborations between different kinds of libraries and non-library allies like P2PU. I loved hearing what they had to say, and I’m hoping to find intersections among our work — Kelly and I already talked about One Book projects that bring college and public libraries together, like the one I am co-chairing in Manchester with the director of the city library. I see potential intersections between P2PU, higher ed, and public libraries, too — if a small library in NH wants to host a learning circle but is understaffed, facilitating is the kind of real world experience faculty might like to incorporate into courses and students might like to try, so I’m hoping to connect people around this idea.

What interesting connections have you made at a conference that got you motivated? What possibilities do you see for Open Education in your community?

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The undead and the unfree

Grad school started back up so I’ve been busy. But two stories caught my eye this Halloween. One was about a library in the Atlanta area offering a pandemic program with a zombie theme. The library had “a bit of pushback from staff about the zombie-themed marketing.” But the programming coordinator went for it anyway. The program sounded great — a public health information session on preparing for emergencies, learning about vaccines, and understanding pandemics. Perhaps some staff thought it was too frivolous a marketing theme for a serious subject. But since it is a really important topic, shouldn’t the marketing be designed to attract the most people possible?

Meanwhile, I also read yet another story about prisons banning books, and requiring prisoners to use their eReaders instead (at a high cost). Right now my library had an inter-library loan that is overdue at the federal prison in our state. They aren’t easy to lend to — my access services coordinator says this is not the first time they’ve held onto an item long past its due date. But this article gave me pause and made me realize what a valuable service it is to lend to prisons. Reading in jail has been linked to lower rates of recidivism. Books can help inmates learn about the laws that have impacted their lives. And I certainly couldn’t live without books. It seems to me that if people have lost their freedom we don’t need to also refuse them access to information and reading. It also seems silly to ban books rather than just inspect them with greater scrutiny.

Happy Halloween.

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More knowledge for good: research as resistance

I heard about a project recently that I somehow missed — Emily Dreyfuss wrote in Wired about it in June, when the family separation crisis was still in the public eye. A band of what Columbia University librarian Alex Gil is quoted as calling “digital ninjas” from all over came together online, gathered data from public records, and created Torn Apart/Separados, “an interactive web site that visualizes the vast apparatus of immigration enforcement in the US, and broadly maps the shelters where children can be housed.” This must have taken forever, right? It took a week.

That, my friends, is some serious bad-ass librarianship. Torn Apart/Separados Volume 2, which is live now, shows “the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.”

Did I mention how badass these people are? This is all just volunteers using their research skills to shine a light on some serious darkness. Alex Gil also created what he calls a Nimble Tents Toolkit, so that other researches can put together their own “relief mapathon” (Gil was also involved in mapping Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to help aid workers) or “rapid response research.”

I told a class today that I freakin’ love Wikipedia — they stared at me, the crazy librarian with the rainbow chickens and colorful cat on my door raving about the beauty of making all human knowledge available to all humans — but they listened when I said that crowd-sourced knowledge is what will keep the world moving forward. I asked them what was more important, that a source accurately express a well reasoned, well supported opinion, even an unpopular one, or that it be strictly factual and “unbiased.”

By the time we were done, we’d had a very heartening conversation about how their generations (mostly 20s and 30s — yes, those very same Gen Y and Millenials that so many people malign, who in my view are our future and are doing the best they can with what they have to work with) are tearing apart old definitions and building a more equitable, inclusive world. And that taking a stand — being “biased” by naming your values, gathering data, and making a rock solid argument in favor of a better world, a better future — is why they are in college.

I am glad to be part of the same profession as Gil and other badass librarians. And I am glad I could strike a chord today with a few students who are going to feel a little bit better about crowd-sourced knowledge and about taking a stand (properly cited, APA or MLA, your choice).

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