hyperlink and build libraries

Anyone remember this ad? I was young when this aired, sure but I’m definitely dating myself here, anyway — THIS is what PSAs USED to be like back when TV still ruled the media landscape for the most part — straight-up bone-chilling.

It frames the idea of how library privacy intersects with freedom of information, freedom of speech quite well. As an aside, the AD Council produced this in 2002 in a wave of nationalistic PSAs about “protecting” freedom and American Exceptionalism in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, which, is of course, incredibly ironic considering that the PATRIOT Act and NSA Domestic Surveillance Program ushered in our current era of warrantless and unprecedented mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, but I digress.

Or, well I guess maybe I don’t digress, it’s actually really, really important to understanding the content in this module.

People are concerned about their data privacy, sure… and yeah we absolutely need legislation to create some kind of baseline… and yes, sure we could all take better personal steps, libraries can make sure the relationships with ISPs and vendors and library computer settings are ideal.

All of these things are great, and they are, I think, also largely ineffectual. I would liken it to trying to put out a wildfire with a garden hose, or, a spray bottle, or a pipette. Even with terms and conditions, disclosures and cookies preferences pop-ups, etc., etc., the fundamental issue is that this current market, the actual set of relations between individuals and corporations and other organizations providing services in the digital space is predicated on the exchange, or rather, the extraction of some kind of data/information about you. The whole system has been gradually built around this, and in most cases, we’re freely volunteering it just through our desire to participate and exist on social media platforms and the broader web. What we search for, the videos we watch, how long you hovered on that tiktok before swiping up, it all makes up this “digital information, quintillions of bytes of data generated every day.” We don’t know how exactly any of it’s being used, and we don’t understand what we’re agreeing to when we sign up. I’m not going to sit and read a terms and conditions document written in legal boilerplate that I don’t understand, and neither are you. I’m not saying any of this is okay, I’m not one of those “privacy is a myth get over it” people, but it is where we’re at.

I’ll point out that even our most robust government regulatory agencies (which are being hollowed out by the second Trump-go-round) usually are only capable of enforcement to the tune of a few million here and there, which means generally very little to corporations with astronomical market-capitalizations. With the exception of the truly landmark, nationwide class-action lawsuits against, say, big-tobacco or opioid manufacturers, the consequences never seem bad enough for executives to not do a little cost-benefit analysis when they consider how much money they can generate for the shareholders when bending or breaking the law a little.

Aren’t we also past credulity at this point, post-shock, the news a perpetual stream of scandal and wrongdoing? Returning to the political climate that produced our AD Council library secret police surveillance nightmare, the revelations of NSA spying and the PATRIOT Act stirred us then, sure, but was this rolled-back? No. Big-tech has always been cozy with Federal law enforcement and the Intelligence Community, so who’s to say they wouldn’t just exigent circumstances their way past any US version of a GDPR??

My solution? A radical, personal re-ordering of one’s own participation in this system. We should know by now that the state will likely be ineffectual if not negligent in ensuring our protection from corporations, and we ought to take personal responsibility for our own willing participation in an environment that actually treats us like a resource to be extracted. Did big-tech and everyone else involved conceal what was being done with our data, trick us like big tobacco, big oil, big forever chemical? Yes. After the revelations started to come out did we stop what we were doing? Some of us probably did. I didn’t. We probably should.

While I do think that personal responsibility has a lot to do with it, I also think institutions like libraries, especially one’s working with the service style and model we discuss in this course, can be leaders and build community-oriented infrastructure to this effect. After all, one will still need to use the internet. In “Ethics, Encryption, and Evolving Concepts of Personal Privacy in the “Black Box Library” David Irvin discusses many possibilities for libraries to lead.

Irvin’s article engages with the issue of privacy as a key aspect of intellectual freedom. As library services become increasingly networked and integrated with the internet, data collection and data security has made library patrons’ privacy and by extension, their intellectual freedom, deeply insecure. Irvin surveys how in researching an intellectual curiosity we might have, it travels from its only place of true privacy (our interior thoughts) through different information systems (a library catalog, an internet search, etc.), leaving trace details as data that are tied to us and generally not frequently expunged from records.

He highlights that as data collection has become more ubiquitous, our consent has been gradually ceded to the point where it is taken as granted. This leaves us highly vulnerable to surveillance, tracking, and exploitation from a myriad of forces, whether private corporations, government agencies, or criminal actors. Aside from those dangerous consequences, the mere fact of being cognizant of being surveilled leads to an internalized self-censorship and compliance in advance.

What Irvin proposes is for libraries to become sites of extraordinary privacy. He lays out plans for libraries to train staff in the strictest possible information security standards, encrypting and anonymizing library search and circulation records, and routing all internet traffic through Tor browsers. He further suggests that libraries collectively bargain for these conditions by withholding contracts from vendors until they assure encryption and elimination of user data from external systems. By increasing data security and protection to extraordinary levels, libraries could set new societal standards for intellectual freedom and reposition libraries as being indispensable institutions, truly safeguarding knowledge and curiosity.

This American Libraries Magazine  article is definitely in this ball-park, I was very happy to see VPNs and ToR mentioned!!! To wrap up this rant, we shouldn’t reasonably expect the government or corporate tech to do the right thing any time soon (or ever!) and accordingly, individuals making good choices, coming together in community at a place like a hyperlinked yet black-box library, just might be able to start shifting something, from the ground up.

here’s that article in apa reference if anyone needs:

Irvin, D. (2021). Ethics, encryption, and evolving concepts of personal privacy in the “black box library”. Serials Librarian, 81(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2021.1875960Links to an external site. 

There’s so much to take in w/r/t the different communities in the hyperlinked libraries sphere. So many obstacles between library systems and the people in most need, so many more between library systems and the people they haven’t even been able to reach yet.

This module was particularly revealing in just how much libraries are basically filling in the gaps of our increasingly porous social safety net. Increasing wealth inequality, the continued rise of corporate influence over public policy, and now, with the second Trump administration, an outright concerted campaign to disassemble the vast funding and services apparatus of the Federal government upon which an already fragile social system relies.

It’s all very unfair and makes me not feel so sunny about the future. I even get angry and protective about the idea of libraries in the first place (or rather, what my particular idea of libraries looks like in the first place). Aren’t they supposed to be for books? Libraries are serving as schools, public health centers, internet service providers, shelters for the unhoused — isn’t this all distracting from people who want to go there to read a good book??

The thing is, this is probably the gut-reaction of a lot of well-meaning folks, folks who probably consider them progressives. Even if you do feel this way, are having this emotional reaction, if you take a breath, and stop for a second, none of it is much of a speculative leap.

If the library is there to provide free and open access to just books, information bearing entities so that people might satisfy a need, for personal enjoyment, for education, for everyday life — doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s a lot more that comes along with it?

Information isn’t just in physical books anymore after all, in fact, quite a bit of it is not, it’s online, so doesn’t it stand to reason that the library should provide access to the internet?

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you don’t have internet at home, or don’t know how to use it, the library might be the place to provide it, or to help you learn how to use it?

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you need information to learn, to educate yourself, the library could take that a step further and actually connect you with resources to improve a resume, or even earn a GED?

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you need information pertaining to your health, which is so often gate kept by a lack of insurance, or an abundance of judgment from healthcare systems, and that the library might have access to that, they could help you access and understand it?

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you are unhoused, and the shelters are full, or just don’t exist, and you have nowhere else to go, the library is actually the one of the only places indoors and climate controlled where everyone is allowed to just be?

The library is in many ways and many places, the last vestige of the true commons, and if government and society fails, or is limited in so all these ways and so many others, who else is going to provide? Everything we fail to provide to one another is gradually taken over by capital, which will charge us for the privilege of something that was once, or should be, free.

It should also not go unmentioned that public libraries are governmental entities, shouldn’t they then provide as much support as they can?

Above all the reasons I’ve talked out above there’s one fundamental explanation for these non-book services: as information has become more accessible on the internet, and the nature of people’s media consumption habits have shifted, it is true that less people are using the library; but the people who still do, who still need it, really, really, really need it. While the library is still for anyone and everyone, it’s those that are in the most need of our help that should be the priority in shaping the future of libraries and their services. 

It wasn’t until “Module 4: Participatory Service & Transparency” that I think really started to understand what this course is really all about. This is not to say that I was going into this course with no idea what to expect, of course, nor am I suggesting the introduction, foundational reading, and model modules didn’t do a good job! Something about participatory service & transparency just made it all click for me, in how I’m now able to explain or describe this course holistically in more or less one thesis statement: any and all barriers that get in the way of using the library should be done away with, expediently.

Do your users need to access library spaces and services when the library is not open because of their hectic life schedule? Economic or budgetary pressures forcing limited staff hours? Find a way to let them in! (Bibliotheca, 2021). Letting people into the library unsupervised inevitably sets off a wave of “but what about’s????” all motivated by some paranoid notion that the commons will be tragically ransacked and destroyed.  Whither this expectation? Why not radical trust? “People are genuinely, usually good (hopefully)” (Stephens, 2019). Why not assume that people will just be happy they have another way to use their library? If you don’t trust your users, your users certainly aren’t going to trust you (Schmidt, 2013).

Of course (usually) the library is still standing in the morning — indeed we’re talking about a service model that is already free and open to the public as it is, watchful eyes of librarians, or no.

As another barrier to using the library, late fines, have been eliminated, there haven’t been mass reports of pillaged collections, and some 25% of libraries reported increased circulation (Gerber, 2022). While people should understand and respect that library materials are everyone’s to use and enjoy, the idea of disciplinary, punitive fines is no way to build that respect. Anyone who still has misgivings about this should let this sit with them: “families who don’t want to borrow books because of the fines…show that it is an equity issue—perhaps those who could benefit from the library the most are the same people who fear they will have to pay fines” (Gerber, 2022).

K.G. Schneider’s non-manifesto-manifesto “The User is Not Broken” still resonates some 20 years later. Libraries would do well to consider one of her aphorisms in particular: “Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it” (Schneider, 2006). That was certainly true then…in 2006…now we have seemingly nothing but least resistance information seeking! AI LLM summaries at the top of search results are as far as many people go.

If this is the competition, libraries need to be innovating; opening doors, windows, tearing down walls! AI searching the whole internet and coming up with iffy answers from some less-than-reputable blogs? Why not an LLM trained on just the library collection itself? (O’Brien, 2025). If the library is our treasured, ivory tower of protected, sanctified, authoritative knowledge, what if we made it hyper searchable? What if this LLM could respond to a natural-language-query-search-qua-question and give you a range of information pulled directly from the digitized books in the stacks? Could it even demonstrate a network of relationships between information? Now that’s a hyperlinked library, an ontological rhizome, to turn a phrase (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013).

In “Libraries, AI and Training Collections” Lorcan Dempsey, (2024) former chief strategist of OCLC and Professor of Practice and Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Information School at the University of Washington is cautious and optimistic about “letting” AI into the stacks. He prefers a definition of AI as a “cultural technology” not unlike the library itself, something which “provide ways of communicating information between groups of people” (p. 22). Linking these two cultural technologies might be more difficult than we think, as Dempsey poses:

a community grand challenge…As a community, we are not good at sustaining large scale infrastructure as a community asset…one could imagine some income from licensing a resource like this to the foundational LLM providers, it is unlikely to sustain an operation over time…a discussion about this might be advanced by several key national organizations (p. 24) 

This debate mirrors Ted Fons’ (2016) article “Making Libraries Visible on the Web” from ten years ago, or even Sarah Werner’s (2015) “How to Destroy Special Collections with Social Media” Rare Book School lecture, also from 10 years ago. Back then it was gatekeeping special collections material and library catalogues from being used in search engine results or sharing special collections content via the still fairly new social media. A combination of obstinacy, fear and ignorance drove attitudes then and still drives it now.

Maybe, just maybe, the biggest obstacle, the biggest barrier towards providing library users what they want isn’t physical constraints of time and space or institutional bureaucratic inertia. Maybe it’s a basic resistance, on the individual level, towards change. Maybe if we tear down the walls as they exist in our own mind, the path towards the new model for libraries wouldn’t be so opaque.

Returning to that idea about the path of least resistance for information (Schneider, 2006) we tend to think of information as lack and acquisition. An information need and its fulfillment, its resolution. But really, it’s a state of flow, with fits and starts, for sure, but the library should be the last thing stopping up the current (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).

References

Bibliotheca. (2021, March 2). Customer story: Gwinett County Public Library \ Open plus [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAQxJw2H_tw&t=9s

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press

Dempsey, L. Libraries, AI and training collections. (2024). Against the Grain, 36(3), 22-24.

Fons, T. (2016). Making libraries visible on the web: To ensure that library content is conveniently accessed, libraries must give search engines what they want. (2016). Library Journal, 141(13).

 

Hi everyone!!

My name is kevin glass, or kg, and I am in my second semester of MLIS at the SJSU iSchool. I have an academic background in critical theory/contemporary philosophy, historical research, as well as film and performance studies.

I was drawn to MLIS studies through my intellectual curiosity of how knowledge is produced in our society through documents and information, and how the institutions and systems that legitimize (or don’t legitimize) documents and information play a role in that process.

I see the online and digital space as an increasingly complex zone for the interplay of these ideas. The proliferation of the ability to distribute information and generate documents/digital objects has radically altered the knowledge regimes/cultural hierarchies of power that previously ordered and controlled the flow of information and documents, and the reality consensus that came with it.

Given this “infodemic” we currently inhabit, I am looking for what’s next, what are the new ways in which we’ll reconstitute reality consensus and find mutual agreement on what is legitimate or not. I think the concept of hyperlinked libraries, of accelerated access to a wide-range of materials and perspectives through networked systems is a solution with tremendous potential. Something that has the quality of the constantly connective and branching ways of interacting with information that has taken shape in internet users, but is backed by the ethos of library systems seems the perfect way to rebuild. In other words, can hyperlibraries build hyperliteracy?

Excited to find out!

-kg-