#library rant

As someone with a bachelor's degree in English and as someone who's working on a Master's in Library Science, this is something I'm quite used to. And this exact belief is what makes me so upset about a lot of recent legislation in regards to librarianship. Take Arkansas's Act 372 from last year as an example. Act 372 makes it illegal for librarians to "knowingly" distribute "obscene material" to minors. But it does not define obscene material, and leaves things very open for people to challenge, say, frequently challenged material dealing with race and sexuality. But crucially, this act also overrode most libraries' current policies on book challenges. So previously and in general, most libraries would receive a challenge on a book, and that challenge would be taken to a committee including library personnel, usually a children's staff member specifically. Those people would read the book and determine if it should be banned, or honestly more commonly, relocated to the adult section. (Most librarians and adjacent personnel really want books to be available no matter what, and are pretty anti-censorship overall, so this is the more common answer.)

But under Act 372, if that process outlined above results in the book being kept where it is, the person challenging it can then go to the "governing body of the city or county" and appeal. The act states that the city or county's decision is "final."

So basically, what this means is that if a committee of librarians, aka people who have gotten that Master's Degree in Library Science, have taken the time and effort to learn the best practices of the field and become experts in it, some of whom also have doctorates or other specialized degrees in the field, if that committee of trained and certified librarians decides a book should stay on the shelf, but then a committee of people who work for the city the library is in and are in no way trained or knowledgeable about the best practices of librarianship, can then get this book removed from the shelves. And that decision will be final.

This act was added to the Arkansas constitution, but it hasn't actually taken effect, because a bunch of libraries got together to file an injunction. These libraries are going to court in December of this year (2024) to revisit this law and challenge Sections 1 (to ask them to define obscene material) and 5 (to ask them to reconsider having the city or county as the final say.) All there really is to do is support your local libraries.

And this isn't just an Arkansas problem. There's a similar bill in Alabama, California, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oklahoma again, Oklahoma one more time, and many more tracked by the American Library Association. I don't really have much of a call to action about it to end this post, because I don't really want to spread fear or make people think that if only they did something, this would all stop. All you really can do is support your libraries and call your local legislators if you're someone who's able to.

The point of this post isn't to make people afraid or mad at the state of the world or anything, it's just to complain, really, about the idea that there is literally already a system in place for people to challenge books and a fair committee of trained people ready to handle that. It's frustrating that people don't understand this is already a skilled trade that people spend time and money developing and creating a career in. And it's one thing when it's just a couple of people on the street telling you that you should just be a librarian with an English degree, but it's another entirely when it's legislation. And that's not even to mention that most of this legislation is also attacking diversity in books. But that's a whole other rant.

Books and libraries always go first in a war -

it starts with bans, censorship - or straight up destruction.

You take away a library, you take away free information

You take away free information, you limit and control knowledge

You take away knowledge...Well...

Not to mention many libraries are more than just books, they are community spaces that offer free services to the public...

I cannot understand the audacity the mayor has to demand we be open now on Saturdays (which I want to be) and ask why we aren’t better serving our community by being more accessible after he 1) didn’t originally want to re-open, 2) doesn’t want people inside the library, 3) doesn’t want people on the computers because he thinks they look at p*rn, & 4) has told me several times the past few months that he doesn’t even like the city being open. 

And its not like he approached me and said hey maybe we should rethink our plan right now and be open more hours. It was literally “why aren’t you open more, don’t you want to be accessible??” and then said I should serve coffee after getting angry the original librarian served coffee??? after he told me we aren't a café or a store (when I said we can give out masks).

One of my coworkers warned me that our boss would be talking to me, as apparently yesterday when I wasn’t in, she told him that a faculty member had been concerned that my poetry display didn’t adequately represent “the classics”

There are a few weird things about that, most immediate being that I literally had not put up the display yet, therefore it would have been impossible for a faculty member to have seen the display, evaluated it, and complained to my boss.

So she took it into her own hands and had sent an email to a different coworker and told her to pull a list of “classics” and put them on display. Said coworker pulled them but waited for me because I have final say on book display stuff unless I get hard overruled by our boss.

So we decide to do multiple displays and work in these books she wants to see (despite my strong suspicion that this was just my boss’s own initiative and there was no faculty member).

A few hours later the librarian in charge of acquisitions & collection development came in and he got updated on the book display drama. But he had extra information— apparently the previous day, our boss had been walking around with one of her friends who works at the college (not a professor) and had looked in the boxes of books that had come in. The collection development librarian explained that a lot of them were poetry books that I had ordered.

I had put in the order a while back both for the display and just to revitalize our poetry collection with more contemporary work. Apparently (by the collection development librarian’s account of things which is all I have to go on) my boss’s friend looked through them and made a comment that he didn’t “recognize” the poets and implied essentially that he was uncomfortable that all the new poets were lgbtq and/or poc and/or disabled. 

And that’s what prompted my boss panicking about my display enough to get three of my coworkers involved and override my display selections. (Also, it’s worth noting, the books I pulled also included very well known poets like Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, Matsuo Bashō, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, etc. It’s not as if I didn’t have a well rounded display with poets from different eras and levels of literary prestige.) 

Staffing the reference desk at a big academic institution is first of all, Interesting and Enlightening. People ask all sorts of weird things that you wouldn't expect (the other week someone used our virtual reference chat to ask for a good coffee place nearby) and you get to see a diverse cross-section of university life.

One of the big things I've learned, though, is that 'radical empathy' (as one of our mentors phrased it) is by far the best approach to dealing with people.

Like, as a person it is totally okay to feel like a patron is being rude or lazy or silly or whatever, but as someone trying to help people it costs you (usually) nothing not to pre-judge them or their situation. Apparently it also works really well on trolls too, just ignoring whatever part of their question that's supposed to be shocking or annoying and answering it like you are a Super Helpful But Also Oblivious Librarian.

Obviously there's a huge emotional labor component to doing reference work (similar to other customer service jobs) and you have to make sure to take care of yourself first and foremost - but I've also found it to be super freeing to just take things on face value?

Someone wants to know where the color printers are even though there's a sign 3 feet away that says where they are? They probably didn't see it and our resources should be better labeled (very very true).

Someone is having trouble printing and threw their blank pages across the ref desk and then stomped away? They're probably having a very stressful time right now and might have a class to get to, it sucks that our technology isn't always great and it *is* super frustrating when you're trying to print in a hurry.