Weed it and weep

I first learned about library weeding back when I was a custodian at the Eugene Public Library in Oregon back in the late 1990s. In advance of a move to a new building, the librarians removed huge numbers of books from the collection and threw them into trash barrels in the library garage. I discovered these barrels full of books -- including a large number of second-wave feminist classics -- one night when I came on shift.

The librarians assured me that this was a normal part of public library collection management, that the books were being removed because they circulated rarely or not at all. Public libraries needed to provide what was in demand among their patrons. The job of saving books belonged to academic libraries. While I was quite convinced that the librarians believed the story that they were telling me, it seemed to me that the practice of weeding had an unintentionally Orwellian result. Old and unpopular materials were removed from public view and sent "down the memory hole." I wrote about it at the time. Thanks to the miracle of the Wayback Machine, you can read that old essay now, if you'd like.

While it's true that the aggressive weeding of public library collections is a widely accepted practice among librarians, there are professional standards that govern it. The decision to remove an item from a library collection theoretically takes account of several criteria, including how often it circulates, its lasting importance, its physical condition, and its age. One widely used set of guidelines for weeding is published by the Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission, and is known as the CREW Manual. Whatever the shortcomings of this document, it makes clear that weeding is a practice that requires thoughtfulness, planning, and thought. In other words, librarians don't generally go through their collections and toss out every book that is more than 10 years old without considering other factors.

But according to information sent to me by one of my professors, exactly such a bizarre and extreme weeding program may have taken place recently at the Urban Free Public Library in Illinois. The story broke about a week ago in the local online news magazine Smile Politely. According to columnist Tracy Nectoux,

I was contacted about something extremely disturbing that had recently happened at Urbana Free Library (UFL). A weeding process had taken place that had discarded thousands of nonfiction books in a hasty, arbitrary way — a way that utilizes only one of the UFL’s stated selection criteria.*

Both UFL staff and the public (who were alarmed at the rapidly emptying shelves) spoke out, but the weeding continued until a library board meeting (and Mayor Laurel Prussing) was called. JP Goguen, a university library employee, was at the meeting, recorded it, and sent the recording to me (the board normally does not record meetings). The conversation at this meeting is alarming. Urbana Free Library's director, Deb Lissak, made a unilateral decision to weed books in the print collection by date alone. It seems that the Adult Services staff’s expertise and knowledge of the collection was neither consulted nor welcomed. In fact, Anne Phillips, Director of Adult Services, was not even in the country when the project began and was unaware that it was happening at all.

The library planned to mark all of its book with RFID tags. In order to speed up this time-consuming process, library director Lissak may have ordered the removal of any book in the collection that had been published before 2003. There are conflicting reports about this. An update to Tracy Netoux's orginal post has a link to this response on the Urbana Free Libary's Web site. Another update provided a link to an interview of Lissak by a local radio station, in which Lissak said the controversy came about because of miscommunication between the library staff and herself.

Others dispute Lissak's version of events. An overflow crowd of enraged citizens attended Monday night's City Council meeting, as reported by the East Illinois News-Gazette and Smile Politely. There is even a Twitter feed devoted to the controversy. Most tweeters seem outraged by the situation, but some support Lissak's position.

This summer I'm working on finalizing the prospectus for my library studies master's thesis. It's going to be about weeding. I think this is an important area of public policy that ought to be discussed more thoroughly with the public. This controversy shows exactly why public discussion of library weeding is so important.

Feminist Library in danger of closing

While doing some advance research for an upcoming project in a library school class, I happened to do a Web search on "feminist library." This is how I discovered The Feminist Library in London, which

is a large archive collection of Women’s Liberation Movement literature, particularly second-wave materials dating from the late 1960s to the 1990s. We support research, activist and community projects in this field.

That's the good news. The bad news is, due to local government cutbacks and a privatization effort, it's in danger of closing.

Activist efforts are underway to save the library. You can read about these on the Save the Women's Library blog and on the library's Facebook page.

Do no evil?

Okay, I really need to quit writing blog posts and get seriously to work on my term paper about open access journal publishing for my library management class. But I think this post from Jaqui Cheng on Ars Technica is worthy of note. Google is negotiating with the FCC over the amount of the fine it will face for "unintentionally" bypassing privacy protections on the Safari Web browser. Reader comments on this post make much of Google's continuous violations of its own motto, "Don't be evil."

This caught my attention because it was so closely related to the subject of my most recent post. Although I didn't mention it, David Sirota used Google to illustrate his concerns that folks who store material on the cloud could lose important rights to their work.

As The Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

As Sirota notes, Google has an innocent explanation for this--they insist they're merely getting your permission to allow you to share your stored material with others. But keep in mind that Google, like Facebook and other "free" online services, makes its profits from mining and selling our personal information. Maybe it's time to reconsider whether this kind of "free" is a good deal.

Partly cloudy?

Over at Truthdig, David Sirota has this interesting essay about cloud computing and how you might surrender rights to your own work by storing material on the cloud.

The apprentice librarian shows off to her technology class

This was one of my contributions to a discussion of our favorite information technology hardware:

I couldn’t resist posting a picture of a computer hardware project I did back in 1996 that I was terrifically proud of. This is a working computer on the outside of a trash can. After painting the trash can a beautiful sparkly shade of motherboard green, I mounted the motherboard, adaptor boards, hard drive and floppy drive, and power supply on the outside of the can. The monitor, keyboard, and printer were free-standing, but were plugged into the motherboard.

This system was a PC-XT clone with a 8088 processor operating at 4.77 megahertz. It had 640k of random access memory, and most likely a Seagate ST225 20 megabyte hard drive, along with a 360 KB floppy drive that used 5 ¼ inch disks. There was also a 2400 b.p.s. “internal” modem. All or most of this hardware was about 10 years old and quite obsolete when I got my hands on it. However, back in Eugene, Oregon, where I put this contraption together as an entry in the Mayor’s Art Show, a system with this configuration could be connected to the Internet via Eugene Freenet. This system was fully operational, and at one time or another I powered it up and used it to check my e-mail. At the time I took the picture, some friends were keeping it at their house for me, and they took advantage of the fact that it was also a fully operational trash can.

Sadly, I had to recycle this hardware before I left Oregon for Oklahoma. But the picture still serves as a reminder that one day in the near future, your bright, shiny, new cutting-edge piece of IT hardware will be trash.

Working computer on the outside of a trash can

The apprentice librarian struggles with her management class

Some parts of library school are going to be a struggle for me. My required class in "management of knowledge organizations" (or something like that) is a good example. The self-introduction I wrote for this online class explains why:

Hello, everyone. I’m hoping we have a great semester together, and I’m looking forward to what I know will be an interesting class. I think it will be a tough class for me (I’ll explain why in a little bit), but I know it will be interesting.

About me: I was born in Philadelphia, and have lived in Idaho, Oregon, and for the past 10 years, Oklahoma. I got my bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of Idaho in 1979. People often want to know what a person can do with a philosophy degree. I’ve done lots of things. I’ve fought forest fires, worked in a bookstore, and been a busperson in a public market. For eleven years I was a custodian for the City of Eugene in Oregon. (About half of that time I worked at the Eugene Public Library.) Since moving to Oklahoma City, I’ve worked as a stock clerk at PetSmart and as a production worker and custormer service associate at FedEx Office. Most recently, I’m a public computer specialist at the Midwest City Public Library.

You will notice that I’ve never been a manager, but I think I’ve learned a few practical lessons about management in the course of working these and other jobs. Management, planning. organization, and leadership are activities that are done by ordinary people all the time, every day. The success of any organization depends not only on the hard work of its ordinary workers, but also on their intelligence and their own ability to plan and organize their work. If ordinary workers did nothing beyond what their managers directly tell them to do, everything would fall apart. In other words, every worker is a knowledge worker.

When I worked for PetSmart and for FedEx, I experienced a great deal of mismanagement perpetrated by people on upper corporate levels who seemed to have read a lot of management textbooks, but who had no clue about the conditions that ordinary workers actually faced. Either that, or corporate management was deliberately manipulative, dishonest, and oppressive. The goal seemed to be to suck every last drop of blood out of the workers, while paying us as little as possible. “Customer service” wasn’t about helping people, it was about sucking up to customers to manipulate them into spending money they couldn’t afford for things they didn’t need.

I apologize for ranting, but I wanted to explain why I approach the subject matter of this course with a great deal of caution. I have worked for large and small businesses, and I have worked for several levels of government. Over the past twenty years or so, it has become a fad to say that we should run government more like a business. This is the approach that seems to be taken by the authors of the textbooks for this class. My experience tells me this is a very bad idea, and even in its most humane and enlightened forms, it’s downright undemocratic. I think there is something obscene about reducing citizens to “customers” and “marketing” our services to them. That is not what libraries are all about. Libraries are about recognizing that ordinary people possess extraordinary capabilities, including the capability of being fully informed citizens who are the ultimate bosses of every public enterprise. That is why I want to be a librarian.

So, I think I’m going to struggle a lot with this course, but as you can see I am very interested in it. I appreciate all the hard work and good planning that Dr. Kim has put into this class, and I look forward to our discussions and projects.

OWS library destroyed, site created

Last night we were offered the vain hope that the materials that made up Occupy Wall Street's public library had been preserved by the police. It turns out that the police actually destroyed most of the library. Thanks to Kevin Hicks for posting the link to this article in American Libraries about the destruction and re-birth of the OWS library. Christian Zabriskie writes:

Library staff were assured that they would be able to recover their materials from a city sanitation depot. Indeed, the firestorm of public hue and cry that followed the clearing of the park, the destruction of the library was the only aspect of the action to which the city directly responded. However, when library staff attempted to collect the library’s property on the morning of November 16, they found the laptops smashed, much of the collection missing, and many of the books that were recovered damaged beyond recovery. The damage to the library’s archives of zines, writings, art, and original works is devastating and irreparable.

Protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti Park less than 24 hours after they were cleared out, following a variety of legal decisions. The library was immediately restarted with a half a dozen paperbacks. Within two hours the collection was up to over 100 volumes and the library was fully functioning—cataloging, lending, and providing reference services. “The library is still open” was repeated like a mantra. “This is why I became a librarian, this is why I went to library school,” Library Working Group member Zachary Loeb said of the rebuilding. He was also quick to point out that, while he had helped to build and maintain the collection knowing full well that the park would probably be cleared eventually, the manner in which it was done hit him hard.

Tents and tarps are strictly forbidden in Zuccotti Park now. During the reoccupation on the evening of November 15, it started to rain so library staff put a clear plastic trash bag over the collection. Within minutes a detail of about 10 police descended and demanded that the covering be removed because they deemed the garbage bag to be a tarp. There were a few tense minutes as staff tried to convince them otherwise, but ultimately it was removed—leaving the collection open to the elements. As the police withdrew, scores of people chanted “BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS.” There was still concern that the park might be cleared again that night, and one officer made it clear that “unclaimed property will be removed and disposed of” in reference to the collection. Library staff quickly set up umbrellas over the bulk of the books and began sending librarians home with bags of books to keep the collection safe in remote locations.

Nonetheless, the library remains open.

Zabriskie's article contains a link to Occupy Educated, a site created by the OWS Practical Change Working Group as an emergency response to the library's destruction. According to the creators of the Occupy Educated site:

If you are curious about why Occupy Wall Street has turned into Occupy Everywhere, if you want a basic understanding of the problems in the system that make this stand necessary, these are the books to start with, in no particular order.

Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber
End of Growth – Richard Heinberg
In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
Griftopia – Matt Taibbi

I don't know if this is the same five books I would pick. I do know that I think I picked a good time to start library school.

Occupying my library studies school work

This weekend I stayed away from political and social activities and completed three assignments for my Libraries and Popular Culture class. It's a great class, and I'm learning a lot, and it's definitely worth the work. One of my assignments was to write a review of a documentary dealing with popular culture. I picked the movie Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Mass Media.

I watched the movie and wrote the review, I was struck by exactly how applicable Chomsky's ideas were to the current Occupy movement. So I'm posting my review here in the hopes that it will contribute to discussions of ideas and strategy in our quest to rein in the corporatocracy our nation has become. (If you would like to watch the film, you can do so here. If you can't devote three hours in one sitting to this, you could check out the film from the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.)

My review follows below:

Introduction

            On November 4 I watched the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. I’ve read some of Chomsky’s political analyses, and I’ve wanted to watch this movie for years. Recently I checked it out from the public library because it seemed very relevant to our class discussions on corporate hegemony in creating mass culture. Manufacturing Consent also seemed an appropriate choice for our class documentary project.

Summary

            This 168-minute film is partly an analysis of Chomsky’s political ideas, partly a biography of Chomsky, and partly an examination of some of his opponents and detractors. Chomsky, a self-described anarcho-syndicalist, says that coercion in human society should take place only for clearly justified reasons. He argues that concentrated private control of economic resources allows the owners of these resources unjustified control over society. In a totalitarian society, elites retain power by using obvious overwhelming force. In a democracy, such as the United States, elites maintain power by “manufacturing consent.”

            Chomsky says that the elites who own and control mass media believe that ordinary people must be diverted and controlled for their own good. This is not done by direct censorship. Major newspapers and major television stations control the political agenda through such strategies as selecting topics, framing issues, filtering information, and setting the boundaries of acceptable debate. 

As an example of this process, Chomsky compares US media coverage of genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s with coverage of atrocities committed by US-backed Indonesian forces against the people of East Timor in the same time period. He argues that abuses committed by US enemies were exaggerated while abuses committed by US allies were ignored.

Additional Sources

            Making a balanced selection of additional sources related to this movie was challenging because Chomsky’s opponents often use such extreme language in attacking him that they undermine the credibility of their own case. My own sympathy with Chomsky’s views undoubtedly made it more difficult for me to be neutral. Nevertheless, I hope this resource list would be useful to library patrons who had a variety of responses to the film.

1. The IMDB Web page on Manufacturing Consent (Internet Movie Database n.d.) contains reviews from both viewers and critics. While most of these reviews are positive, there are cogent dissenting points of view, as well as links to message boards for further discussion. There is also a link that allows a viewer to watch the movie for free.
2. Z Magazine was one of the sources of information that Chomsky suggested in the film. This website by the publishers of the magazine (Z Communications n.d.) contains links to much news and analysis from a libertarian socialist point of view, as well as a link to an online version of the magazine. Viewers who found the movie convincing would particularly like this site, and Chomsky himself has a blog here.
3. This page (Wvong 2001) by Canadian computer programmer Russil Wvong offers a critical assessment of Chomsky’s work. While agreeing with Chomsky in part, Wvong also presents evidence that Chomsky advances his claims in intellectually dishonest ways. Wvong also argues that Chomsky is willing to accept human rights abuses when perpetrated by regimes he supports.
4. The book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Herman and Chomsky 1988) offer a clearer and more comprehensive explanation of Chomsky’s “propaganda model” than the movie does.

Discussion Topic

            Noam Chomsky, a linguist by training, is most emphatically not part of the culture-and-civilization tradition. His work on universal grammar—which he believes is hard-wired into the human brain—has convinced him that ordinary people are creative geniuses. He doesn’t believe that ordinary people are dupes, but simply that they lack resources to gain complete information.

            In the 1992 movie, Chomsky advanced a specific model for how corporate elites create and maintain what Antonio Gramsci calls “hegemony” over popular culture. Chomsky argued that most news media outlets are owned by giant corporations that share the interests of the rest of the ruling elite. This allows them to control the terms of popular debate and crowd out dissenting ideas.

            Do you think Chomsky’s argument was accurate in 1992? This movie was released before widespread public use of the Internet. How has the existence of the Internet affected the accuracy of Chomsky’s position? Does greater availability of the means to publish mean that corporate control is much less of a problem than it was?

References

Achbar, Mark and Peter Wintonick (directors). 1992. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Necessary Illusions/National Film Board of Canada. Zeitgeist Films, 2002, DVD. Includes Chomsky’s 2002 reflections on the film, extended excerpts of 1969 Firing     Line debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., and a 1971 discussion with Michel Foucault.

Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of  the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

Internet Movie Database. n.d. “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.”             http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104810/. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Wvong, Russil. 2001. “Noam Chomsky: A Critical Review.” http://www.russilwvong.com/future/chomsky.html.  Accessed November 5, 2011.

Z Communications. n.d. “Z Net: A Community of People Committed to Social Change.”           http://www.zcommunications.org/znet. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Pornography, abuse, and free speech

This started out as a post for my online library school class, but it got way too long. So I'm going to use it for a blog post:

Principles are always difficult to follow in real life, because principles are abstractions, and real life is messy and complicated. It’s not possible to draw up a principle that will account for all situations. That being said, my ethical approach to free speech has to do with the distinction between ideas and actions. Ideas that are “offensive” should be protected. Actions that harm actual people should not be protected, even if those actions are connected to the creation of ideas. (This standard certainly isn’t original with me, but I can’t remember the Supreme Court case that established it.) I’m going to limit my discussion to the subject of pornography and sexual abuse.

When Wendy Kaminer argues that simulations of child sexual abuse should be permitted, darn it, I’m gagging as I say this, but I think she’s right. (Now, I have to tell you that I have no idea how realistic these simulations are. If there’s any question, I think the burden of proof should fall on the defendant to prove that no actual children were harmed in the making of the film.)  If I’m reading Kaminer correctly, when she defends portrayals of cruelty to animals, she doesn’t differentiate between simulations and the use of real animals. In that case, I disagree with her. Animal abuse that would be illegal if you did it in your back yard shouldn’t be protected just because you made a movie out of it.

            This article about banning sexual offenders from the library has similar gray areas. It’s not clear how, in Attleboro, Mass., a Class II or Class III sexual offender is determined. But I think it’s defensible to ban people from the library who’ve been convicted of sexual or physical assault. The library needs to be a place where patrons can be physically safe. If I have a reasonable fear that my physical safety is endangered when I enter the library, my freedom to access information has been compromised. The nature of libraries is to have lots of secluded nooks and crannies (think rows of book stacks) that could be dangerous. Banning people who have committed assaults seems like less of a civil liberties encroachment than installing surveillance cameras.

            Back in the 1980s when Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin proposed a model anti-pornography law, I thought they were taking the wrong approach. Pornography, I said, is a form of hate speech, and as such is constitutionally protected. (I was using the particular radical feminist approach that erotica is egalitarian, and pornography is sexist.) In retrospect, I think my condemnation of the model ordinance might have been too simplistic. The law didn’t create any criminal penalties for producing pornography, but allowed people who had been harmed by pornography to sue its creators. It’s similar to laws which allow someone who has been shot by a criminal to sue the gun manufacturer. In theory, the pornography industry could be using consenting adults to create sexually explicit videos for consenting adults, but the reality is much different.

Who's afraid of radical feminism?

Jonathan Dean has an interesting analysis of radical feminism in the context of the case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who faces sexual assault charges in Sweden. Dean questions the idea that Assange couldn't get a fair trial because Sweden's chief prosecutor is allegedly a "malicious radical feminist."

So what is radical feminism? Historically, radical feminism was a specific strand of the feminist movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late 1960s. Distinctive to this strand was its emphasis on the role of male violence against women in the creation and maintenance of gender inequality (as argued by the likes of Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon). And while a minority of radical feminists – most infamously Valerie Solanas – were hostile to men, radical feminism was much more instrumental in generating widespread support for campaigns around issues such as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment.

However, in Britain at least, radical feminism has never been particularly dominant, partly because – in the eyes of many socialist and postcolonial feminists – it has been insufficiently attentive to the intersections between gender inequality and other categories, such as race and class. So Rod Liddle's peddling of the tiresome rightwing idea that radical feminism has destroyed the family, along with Dominic Raab's assault on "feminist bigotry" and the Vatican's efforts to address "distortions" caused by radical feminism, rest on at least two implausible assumptions. First, they reduce feminism to a horrifying caricature that never really existed and second, they make the frankly bizarre suggestion that radical feminism is the dominant ideology of our times. It would seem that not only do these radical feminists commit the outrage of not wearing makeup, but they use the time this frees up to consolidate their world domination. Or an alternative explanation might be that these are the paranoid anxieties of fearful anti-feminists.

Thoughts on WikiLeaks

This started out as something I did for an online class assignment, and with some minor modifications, I thought it was worth re-posting:

As citizens of a democracy, we have responsibility to supervise the government bodies that act in our name. One of the major difficulties with official secrecy is that it transforms the relationship between citizens and government. When the government keeps secrets, I am no longer able to fulfill my responsibility as a citizen. Secrecy might allow government officials to perform necessary tasks -- but it might also allow them to support foreign dictatorships or collude in the murder of civilians. Without transparency, I simply have to trust them to do the right thing. Secrecy allows the government to become my master rather than my servant.

But it seems to me that this is a question of fact as well as of theory. In other words, what are the actual effects of the WikiLeaks disclosure?  Have catastrophes resulted from this release of classified information, or has it enhanced the functioning of democracy? I suspect that some of you will disagree with me, but so far I think the results have been encouraging.

For instance, documents found on Wikileaks may have helped inspire the overthrow of the corrupt and authoritarian government of Tunisia. In a sort of chain reaction, the uprising in Tunisia seems to have inspired pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt. It looks to me as if the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks inspired the Guardian in the UK to collaborate with al Jazeera TV to release the Palestine Papers. (Controversy is good business for journalists. It increases readership.) The Palestine Papers, in turn, have offered important new information about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and inspired new hope for resolution of that conflict. Finally, the WikiLeaks controversy has opened up much needed discussion of the issue of government secrecy, as evidenced by this Time magazine article and also by this thoughtful post.

Julian Assange may not be an admirable person, (and I think that the rape charges against him are worthy of investigation) but on the whole, it seems to me that WikiLeaks has done good work.