Likely Passage

Well, I guess this is the end! It’s been a wonderful, inspiring experience. Please see below for my 3-2-1 report.

3-2-1 Virtual Symposium

This is report was inspired by project I am currently working on for the Braille Institute Library. It is written as a general report, to be distributed to library and institute staff, highlighting peer-reviewed research into the cognitive and health benefits of reading and lifelong learning. Though it includes several proposals for library programming, it itself is not a detailed outline of single program or service. Instead, it is meant to be an educational jumping off point, to inspire further research and development. A guide for a larger Library Re-Imagined project.

It’s, admittedly, a dry report. I played around with converting it to a more dynamic visual presentation, but it was an awkward translation, and I felt it worked best as is. The font is actually a font developed by the Braille Institute specifically for low-vision readers, the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font. And text-based documents are easier for screen readers and e-braille readers to translate.

The Cognitive and Health Benefits of Reading and Lifelong Learning – An Inspiration Report

Maybe I shouldn’t be admitting this in a class blog, but I have always been a distracted student. Of course, here, a new father, near 40, in a grad program my priorities and focus are different than my undergrad years. And I’m certainly much more invested in my education now than during the bog-standard small town public education I received in the 90s and early aughts. But I’m not sure I’ve ever fully left behind the seven-year-old me who was kept out of the advanced course for being “too spacey”. Whenever I have to learn something, no matter how interesting it might’ve been ten minutes ago, my mind starts to wander a little bit. There’s always something else I want to know more. Some other angle of approach.

This is hardly a unique trait and I’m sure I could get a clinical term tagged to this kind of distractedness if it ever drifts a little closer towards extreme. I’ve never considered it a problem though because it’s lead to a life of endless curiosity and a desire to keep pushing against my own intellectual boundaries. It’s why I find myself always critiquing, critiquing, critiquing. Maybe an occasionally annoying habit but one that always pushes me to ask “is this right? is there another way to think about this?” and “what’s being left unsaid? what’s being left out of this perspective?” It’s a poking and prodding learning style. One that doesn’t always have a clear goal or purpose, beyond seeing where an idea might lead. And one I hope I have the energy to keep up until the day I die.

Participating in the kind of work that will allow others to nurture and engage with this same kind of curiosity and distractedness is what lead me to library science. Infinite learning, as far as I am concerned, is what life is all about. We are here to witness and absorb. To engage with the culture and society that surrounds. Life is more fun, more colorful, and, most importantly, more interesting when you encounter new things, new ideas.

I love to rail against “useless efficiency” because it strips away all the fun and pleasure of living. We should never have to worry about the bottom line of time and money. We should never have to stress over how useful an education is. The hustle mindset has seemingly infiltrated every industry and hobby. Education for education’s sake and the humanities in general are increasingly being sidelined as distractions from the real work of efficiently making money.

This has significantly diminished the quality of our collective conversations and placed limits on what we, collectively, believe is possible. Politically, we’ve seen how it’s reduced our ability to progress. It’s created a radical environment, allowing authoritarianism and fascism to gain a stronger and stronger foothold. Promoting and supporting the value of lifelong learning won’t solve this issue on its own, obviously, but it will create the context in which we might begin to believe other realities are possible.

I’ve also been thinking about this topic in my daily work at the Braille Institute Library. This is something I am expanding on in more detail in my inspiration report, so I won’t dwell too much on it here, but most of our patrons are elderly and losing their sense of independence. And at least once a day, I hear how much our patrons value our services. The books they get through us are, in their own words, “a lifeline.”  Books! The most basic library service is still fully capable of restoring happiness and a sense of purpose to people who have lost not only their ability to read but also their general sense of independence and, I hope it’s not too presumptuous to assume, a sense that life, even near the end, still has surprises to offer. That there are new things to learn and new experiences to be had. Expanding on this and creating library services that inspire this same feeling of renewal and possibility in every member of the community, no matter their age, background, and history, is what the work is all about.

In its ideal, pure form, the value of storytelling and promoting marginalized voices is self-evident. Diverse representation in media, the arts, politics, and social life not only makes the world feel more hospitable and welcoming, but it also makes life more vibrant and interesting. Colorful, instead of black and white. But over the past eight or so years (since, really, President Trump 1.0), I have seen how the concept has been used to control marginalized communities in subtle and not so subtle ways. The chosen representatives of stigmatized and marginalized communities tend to be limited in what they are allowed to represent. In these cases, representation is used as a kind of shield against criticism for the organization or institution in charge of elevating these diverse voices. The underlying structures that maintain the existence of stigmatized and marginalized communities remain, more or less, fully intact.

And in this context, that I have to admit I recoil a bit at the phrase “human book”. Conceptually, I think it’s a great idea: creating space and a service in the library to promote direct interaction between community members. It’s the human-as-object angle that troubles me. Of course, it’s safe to assume this is a me problem, considering the participants are volunteers so it’s not something that troubles the people actually participating in the program as the books. But I do wonder if there’s a way to expand the idea, to move it a little further away from validating and reinforcing the public perception that libraries are, first and foremost, places for books, and therefore anything in the library has to relate, in some way, back to books.

That’s not to say I think programs like the Human Library are cynical operations, exploiting the marginalized voices they elevate, only that my alarm bells go off a bit when I read their FAQ and their description of the vetting and publishing process of these stigmatized human books. The page on the Human Library Reading Library washes most my concerns away, especially the video, which provides the portrait of the spaces as an incredibly fluid, open environment designed explicitly as a space for people to get together and talk. Here, I can see how the objectifying language is somewhat necessary in defining the space. People often need a hook, something to make them feel comfortable approaching and asking complete strangers about details of their lives and experiences.

The ability to provide a free and open platform and distribution channel for people and ideas that are normally neglected and ignored by for-profit media conglomerates is the true value of these programs. This was the basis of my Innovation & Strategy Roadmap. And I wonder how libraries could build up from the “human book” and “human library” into something less formal, less objectifying and structured.

Storytelling is usually framed as an expression of personal identity and experience, meant to highlight and humanize a smaller segment of a larger community. But storytelling also relates to fiction and art, more abstract expressions of an identity or perspective. Could a library become a venue where stigmatized and marginalized communities can produce and publicly display original work? Can these communities be given space to represent themselves and tell stories that are not predominantly grounded in what defines them as stigmatized and marginalized? Can, for example, trans and anti-trans community be brought together around a shared interest or shared concern, something that does not rely on explicitly confronting the tensions between the two groups? What would this hook look like?

In a world where Chick-Fil-A is creating its own original content for its own streaming service, Chil-Fil-A-Play, is it impossible to imagine a federally funded public streaming service, a place where local library systems can upload original, locally produced media? In the current political situation, it might be hard to imagine but it’s certainly not impossible.

In this time of compounding crises, the future is a hazy thing. Inevitable because of time but conceptually shapeless. Change has occurred and will continue to occur, but it’s very difficult at times to believe things are moving forward and improving. And now, with the re-election of Donald Trump, time seems to have stopped altogether. I can only speak for myself, I suppose, but everything feels particularly stagnant these days. The future seems to consist of a variety of grifts and disruptions, changes nobody but a handful of CEOs and entrepreneurs really want. The latest, “artificial intelligence”, is creating more worry and concern about how exactly the technology will be used to destabilized already destabilized institutions than any genuine hope for a brighter, easier future. There is a reason “mental health” earns its own section in the 2024 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report.

So, when I think about new horizons for the library, I think about ways we can restore hope in a better future. Right now, libraries around the country, to varying degrees, are all on the defensive. Book bans are the most obvious and most advertised of the challenges libraries currently face but the concerted effort to erode the public’s trust in public institutions represents the most existential threat. How can you serve a community that believes you shouldn’t exist?

To answer this question, libraries need to move beyond their faith in the value of neutrality. While extremely valuable and important in a collection development policy, maintaining neutrality as an overall ethos in the current political climate will only leave libraries vulnerable to political attack. If the endgame is to dismantle an institution entirely and shunting the various services the institution provided to a handful of private, for-profit industries, endlessly conceding to their demands will only and always lead to ruin. Obviously, in the short term, libraries must do what they need to do to survive, so concessions will necessarily need to be made. But looking ahead, long term, towards new horizons, libraries must form ideological and political alliances with like-minded organizations, institutions, and community members.

This means collaborating with local labor and tenant unions. Organizations who work with immigrant communities and who aid the undocumented. Local LGBTQ+ centers. Progressive political candidates, on the local and national level. Local school systems, community colleges, and universities. In other words, it means taking a political stance and forming political alliances who can not only help design and promote pro-library policies, but also unite a community around shared economic, social, and political concerns.

For this project I initially planned on creating a innovation strategy and roadmap proposing a library television station for the Los Angeles Public Library, based on the station run by the Memphis Public Library. This quickly moved into a pure fantasy zone, as I found myself getting lost looking up the various ways legal avenues for creating publicly funded television station. And I began thinking ways the idea could be scaled down to its kernel and fit into the boundaries of the library I currently work for, the Braille Institute Library.

We might not have any ways of broadcasting live material, but we do have the infrastructure for distributing audio recordings. There is an in-house, professional recording booth, where audio books can be produced locally, small sound booths for less formal kinds of recording, and several ways of getting audio material into our patrons’ hands. This gave me the idea for an audio magazine, something that could be published quarterly. Like a television station, it would be a platform for the community to express itself.

The Innovation Strategy & Roadmap can be viewed here: Perceptions

The two articles on past IFLA Library of the Year award winners (Helsinki Central Library Oodi in 2019, and Deichman Bjørvika in 2021) made me curious about this year’s winner: the Beijing Library. Described as “75,000 square meters multifunctional community hub” featuring the “he world’s largest climatized reading space”, the library is presented as an ideal melding of the field’s universal, foundational values and innovated, future-oriented design. It’s a gorgeous, truly awe-inspiring library.

[Source: https://www.snohetta.com/projects/beijing-city-library]

Looking at the full list of this year’s four finalists (Four impressive libraries nominated for the IFLA/Baker & Taylor Public Library of the Year Award 2024) and other past winners (IFLA/Baker & Taylor Public Library of the Year Award), I am filled with hope about the future of libraries. At times, it feels like we are fighting against the tide, with budget cuts and trends towards privatization. But these beautiful monuments to the field, from all around the world, prove not only the ability of libraries to change with the times but also the resilience of the field’s founding ideals.

Despite the geographical spread of the awardees, the descriptions of the library spaces and services all follow a similar theme. This no doubt reflects the focus of the award and IFLA’s raison d’etre, but it also genuinely represents global continuity. Despite the vastly different cultural and political contexts both the Missoula Public Library in Missoula, Montana  (IFLA/Systematic Public Library of the Year Award 2022 Winner announced) and the Beijing Library are described as vibrant, multifunctional spaces providing a range of resources, rooted in but spreading well beyond traditional library services. Both buildings reflect and respond to the natural landscapes in which they were built. Sustainability, for both of these libraries as well as every other library honored, is a key concept. As examples, they all represent the ideal hyperlinked library: future-oriented and resilient institutions participating in a global project devoted to the betterment of all humankind.

These are beacons. Guiding lights. The award is only available to newly built or significantly renovated and altered library spaces.  For examples of smaller scale innovations, programs and services that might feel more in reach of your local library system, there is the American Library Association Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects (ALA Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects). This honors services like the Seoul National University Library’s LikeSNU project, awarded in 2023 (2023 International Innovators), which uses process a vast array of library related data, linking checkout data with collection information to create, among other things, knowledge maps outlining local research trends within specific disciplines and personalized dashboards that provide users with detailed usage data and recommendations.

[Screenshots of LikeSNU’s Knowledge Universe. Source: https://likesnu.snu.ac.kr/usr/userMain.do;jsessionid=8329676E5693B2F86C899F2709747841?lang=en]

And La Bulle (French for The Bubble), awarded in 2022 (2022 International Innovators). Located in Annemasse, France, this is a new consciously constructed “cultural third space”. It is a community focused center, part library, part gathering space, run collaboratively by three groups, including local citizens, elected representatives, and professionals.

[The Bulle Game Library. Source: https://www.annemasse.fr/au-quotidien/culture/la-bulle-accueil/la-bulle-ludotheque]

Then there’s North Gaza’s Edward Said Public Library, founded in 2017 by poet, essayist Mosab Abu Toha (Mosab Abu Toha | The Poetry Foundation). In a 2022 article for Lit Hub (Founding the First English-Language Library in Gaza), Abu Toha recounts the genesis of the library, amidst the horror of the Israeli blockade and campaigns of terror. Born from personal love of the English language, facilitated by the lowly and revolutionary capabilities of the xerox machine, the library expanded from one to two branches in 2019, adding a computer lab to its collection of books. In its simplicity, this represents, more than anything I’ve touched on above, the true resilience of the Library as a borderless, future-oriented institution. To build a library for a community under the thumb of the harshest, most violent kinds of oppression, to build a community space for a community Israeli and American military powers wish to erase requires real vision, real strength, and real hope for the future.

[Photos by Mosab Abu Toha. Source: https://lithub.com/founding-the-first-english-language-library-in-gaza/ ]

This, of course, is now clouded under deep despair. A year into Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians, many, if not all of the libraries in Gaza have been significantly damaged or completely destroyed (Israel has damaged or destroyed at least 13 libraries in Gaza). Per a report released by Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024) the Edward Said Public Library is among the list of destroyed. Thankfully, Abu Toha, his wife, and their three children were able to escape. In December 2023, he published the harrowing details of this escape in the New Yorker (Mosab Abu Toha’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza). A more recent article, from October 2024, The Gaza We Leave Behind, details the depth of Palestinian loss.

Not sure if this strays too far from the hyperlinked model, but it’s been weighing on my mind a lot recently. And I’m ending with this because Mosab Abu Toha’s hope and persistence, as representative of the Palestinian hope and resistance, inspire me than the towering, award winning libraries discussed at the top. The strength and hope required to not only build a library in besieged Gaza but to rebuild and rebuild again after they’ve been destroyed represents the best of humanity.

danah boyd’s[1] What World Are We Building is mostly about the ways man-made tools reflect man-made biases. Big Data is her primary concern, looking at the ways our digital worlds remain rooted in the physical, or maybe it’d be more accurate to say the ways the digital landscape reflects our social, psychological landscape. As a lead-in, she highlights work she did traveling around the U.S., interviewing teenagers about their understanding of and relationship with technology.

A common theme in these interviews was teens’ percpetion of the class and race differences between users of the two, at the time, most prominent social media sites, Myspace and Facebook. The former was considered “ghetto”, “lower class”, and less sophisticated than the latter, which was for more “mature”, more “cultured” users. The language used by the teens in the direct quotes provided largely relate to class, primarily hinting at lower economic status and stunted education levels. For one of the two white teens quoted, a young woman, it’s clear, at least in boyd’s retelling, this is coded language to avoid appearing racist. The teen eventually relents and explicitly states black people use one, white people use the other. But the other white teen quoted, a young man, doesn’t seem to express any kind of racial aspect to this division. It’s purely a socio-economic divide[2]. When considered against the young woman’s use of hip-hop, the young man’s use of jazz as a marker of sophistication suggests race is secondary to class. So, I found it odd that though she recognized the ways “our country’s struggle with class and race got entwined with technology” and the language she quotes reflects the ways class and race are themselves entwined, boyd more or less drops the issue of class completely from the rest of the article. Race takes center stage.

I don’t think this is necessarily wrong. Racism is a major issue, distinct from class. One that requires special attention and focus to root out inequality, inequity, and injustice. And her later points about the ways we need to be conscious of the ways our own biases undermine the social value of our technologies and institutions are all correct. But the way class is dropped so quickly and easily in the setup of this particular article, to hone in on one aspect of a very large problem, opened my eyes to something I hadn’t really noticed. In a lot of the literature I’ve encountered in my library related studies, the authors are often much more comfortable discussing race over class. I recognized the same move again in Christian Lauersen’s 2018 keynote speech at the UX in Libraries conference.

The digital divide and homelessness are two topics where class is discussed more directly. But in these areas the focus is usually on how a library’s services and programming can fill gaps. Class is presented as a condition, not an identity[3]. It is rarely, if ever, considered in discussions about diversifying the workforce or reaching members of the community who do not or only rarely use the library’s services.

To be clear, when I talk about class status, I’m not just talking about the lower class. Look again at the teens in boyd’s piece, they not only express a preference for why they use Facebook, they articulate the reasons they don’t use Myspace. Take a glance at the general rhetoric surrounding social services in this country and the bizarre aversion to “handouts” on both sides of the political aisle[4] and you can see how this might affect a libraries relationship to the communities they’re hoping to serve. I’m not sure if there is research to directly support this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a little bit of the young woman’s “the people who use Myspace are a little bit ghetto” buried beneath some non-library users’ perception that the library is not for them[5].

Now, I’m not saying we need more upper-class representation in the library in response to this. Especially because this perception cross class boundaries. Many people feel uncomfortable admitting they have a low income and need public assistance. But this does open up new points of departure when planning outreach, based around the question: How can the library promote a general shift in the public’s perception of social services?

And looking behind the scenes at the organizational structure of the library, it will be very difficult to realize the dream of the Hyperlinked Organization if we fail to properly acknowledge the way class affects staff members’ perception of their role within their library. Their sense of agency, power, and freedom to contribute and criticize equally. Diversifying the workforce based on race, gender, and sexual orientation will only get you so far. If a staff member is living paycheck to paycheck and always playing financial catchup, they’ll be less likely to do anything that could be perceived as rocking the boat. And if the gap between the salaries of the upper and lower staff is wide enough to start collecting commas it doesn’t matter if the managers are using inclusive language or not, everybody will be well aware of their place in the hierarchy.

[1] On her website, boyd explains her decision to eschew capitalizing her own name in what’s in a name?

[2] Though, you can possibly glimpse some sexism buried in his view of what qualifies as cultured and uncultured in his dismissal of “bubblegum pop”.  

[3] All this brought to mind a quote from Stuart Hall, “Race is…the modality in which class is ‘lived’, the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’.” From Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance.

[4] Conservatives lambast liberals, accusing them of wanting everything for free. And liberals do all they can to assure the greater public their proposed services are in no way  “communist” or “socialist”, that these handouts are not really free. There is a cost, even if it’s not financial. Despite the fact that everybody likes free stuff.

[5] This also cuts the other way, of course. As a cultural and educational institution, many believe the library is only useful for book worms, amateur eggheads, and academics. This problem has been well addressed in the literature though, which frequently highlight the many “practical” services libraries provide.

I seem to have an unfortunate allergy to anything that hints at tech boosterism, so I found myself groaning here we go again when I encountered the first line in Shannon Mattern’s Library as Infrastructure —”Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs”. Thankfully, this quickly proved to be a clever bait-and-switch. Mattern’s piece ended up being one of the most inspiring, useful texts I’ve encountered in this program.

When I left my previous career in healthcare, I waffled between pursuing a career in social work or a career in libraries. Libraries won because I realized they offered the possibility of directly impacting people’s lives in a much looser, more dynamic way. Social work is important work, but it’s more rigid, bureaucratic. In libraries, or maybe I should say the future of libraries, I recognized endless potential.

Technology obviously plays a role in these possibilities but only if it functions as a counterweight to the tech industry and tech industry’s ethos. The tech industries’ innovations and disruptions should be approached with a critical eye^[1], highlighted primarily as negative examples of what happens when genuine innovation is routed away from the public good towards private interests. When concepts like community, access, and intellectual freedom are co-opted and corrupted for profit. Libraries have a much longer history of upholding these values and we need to stop pre-emptively ceding ground to Silicon Valley.

In 2024, thinking like a startup no longer qualifies as thinking outside of the box. The logged on, hustle mindset is very much the status quo. Everything bends towards following the tech industry’s lead^[2]. Life is becoming fully gigified^[3] and digitally optimized. And adopting the perspective and language of the tech industry, if not the actual tech itself, only leaves us chasing their tail.

They way Mattern raises the specter of tech, with the Dewey-as-Jobs opening and her description of the value and limits of David Weinberger’s “buzzy” Library as Platform, only to ultimately reject its terminology in favor of the weightier, more tactile infrastructure is incredibly smart and refreshing. It acknowledges the landscape modern libraries are forced to contend with, and the importance of adapting to the current reality, without compromising what makes libraries so vital and resilient: their physicality, their presence in the community.

As infrastructure, the library can be woven, inextricably, into the fabric of the communities they serve. They become a utility, as basic and vital as the plumbing, roads, and fiber optic cables. Remove the library, and the basic social, political, and cultural structures of a community will weaken and collapse. The best modern libraries combine the freedom of a public park, the educational opportunities found in the public school system, and the nuts-and-bolts support provided by services like the employment development department. They are, as Mattern wonderfully describes them, “mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub”. They do not and should not mirror in a physical reality the internet.

Which is why, in my opinion, it is vital we—the library workers, students, academics, patrons—begin defending libraries on their own terms. We need to take pride in and present the library as what they are and always have been: sturdy institutions, less vulnerable to shifting trends than it might appear^[4], with deep roots in the communities they serve, and a strong history of innovation.

As infrastructure, we can begin to imagine things like San Mateo County Libraries’ Library Outpost scattered throughout the city. Remote toy and sports equipment libraries at the entrances of the major parks and playgrounds. Smaller drop off and pick up boxes near the entrances of cooperating businesses and all publicly owned property. All blending seamlessly into public life.

We can imagine publicly funded complexes that combine traditional library services with social work, homeless outreach, food pantries, and temporary shelter, something like the Gardner Street Women’s Bridge Housing Center if it had remained a library. Arts complexes with gallery and performance spaces. Spaces where artists-in-residence or patrons of the various maker/creative spaces can display and perform their work.

We can imagine shuttle services, similar to West Hollywood’s free transportation services (Cityline Fixed Routes, WeHo PickUp, Cityline Dial-A-Ride Flex), free for all library card holders that move between a system’s various branches. Making the unique programming and services spread throughout the whole system available to the entire community while simultaneously functioning as a parallel public transportation system, connecting community members to all of the non-library resources and businesses nearby.

We can imagine federally funded open-source ILS software and e-lending apps, made available for free to all publicly funded libraries and local librarian developers. Programs that can be tweaked and tailored to meet each community’s needs.

We can imagine, in other words, a future of well-funded libraries^[5]. Systems that employ a wide range of well-paid librarians and staff. People who live in the communities they serve. Who bring a unique and wide range of skills, including but also extending well beyond those that fall into traditional librarianship. People invested in libraries’ foundational beliefs and libraries’ future.

[1] I think it’s best to remain on guard against the negative effects of adopting too wholeheartedly even the most promising tech interventions. Programs like the Open+ system are great, they represent the incredible resilience of libraries and librarians in the face of shrinking budgets, and the libraries and librarians who take the risk and adopt them deserve genuine praise, but the anxiety expressed by staff of the Gwinnett County Public Library system, that it would be used to replace jobs, is well founded. As wonderful as they are, these solutions do replace jobs. Ideally, the off-hours usage numbers will be understood by the bean counters as proof of the library’s popularity and value to community, and the program’s success will lead to more funding. But now that the library has shown it can operate longer hours with fewer staff, will they get the budget to hire more librarians or will the county, who have a history of slashing the library’s budget, start asking if other programs could be automated in the same way? This is something that should concern all librarians, especially students pursuing a degree, hoping for stable future employment.

[2] Around the corner from my house, there used to be a billboard for an ordinary accident lawyer branded as the iAccident Lawyer.

[3] A good friend of mine, a certified teacher in New Jersey, recently started working as a contractor for a startup based in Chicago that serves poorly staffed schools in the South. To get around a lack of certified teachers in their districts, these Southern schools pay the Chicago company who uses some of that money to pay certified teachers from all around the county who are, at least in my friends case, unable to find steady, stable local work. The teachers run through a ready-to-use curriculum remotely while in the classroom the schools provide non-certified in-person monitors and extra security if the students prove too rowdy. As contractors they of course get none of the benefits and security employees typically receive. And the students miss out on the value of having teachers who are not only physically present in the classroom but also members of the community and familiar with the community’s needs.

[4] Reading through older LIS literature can sometimes feel like visiting a tech graveyard. You’ll find numerous references to failed websites and apps, programs few use or even remember today.

[5] According to the City of Los Angeles Open Budget, Los Angeles County Libraries received $256.50 million in the 2025 budget, not nothing and an increase from 2024 but significantly less the police department’s $1.98 billion. Can we imagine a world where those numbers are reversed, and the positive impact this would have?

Hi! My name is Louis. This is (hopefully) my second to last semester in this program. So, I am getting near the end. I live in Hollywood with my wife, two dogs, and our one month (!) old daughter.

Prior to starting my MLIS journey, I had been working in health care, specifically ophthalmology, as a technician for about ten years. I quit in 2022 to focus entirely on this new phase of my professional life and planned to get a library job after my first semester. That took a little longer than expected, or maybe it’d be better to say it took as long as I should’ve expected, but I’ve been happily employed at the Braille Institute Library as a Reader Advisor since last summer. And like the name suggests, we serve the blind and visually impaired, so there’s been some continuity between my past and present life. Though, through our affiliation with the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, we also serve people living with physical and cognitive disabilities.

For my undergrad, I studied film and media arts, with focus on theory and history more than production. And though I haven’t done much with that degree professionally, I’ve maintained my interest in film and art films. Home, happily, with a new child right now, I’ve been looking longingly at the slate of upcoming repertory screenings in L.A. I’m especially pained to be missing the first wave of an extended series of Frederick Wiseman documentaries (Frederick Wiseman: An American Cinematheque Retrospective). I highly recommend all of his work, but Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) [trailer] is incredible and likely of particular interest to others in this class/program. I believe all of his films are available on Kanopy.

Why this class? Well, tech has, for better or worse, worked its way into every aspect of modern life. And, for better or worse, many industries and institutions are eager to keep up with all emerging trends. So, professionally, it seemed wise to get better acquainted with how this is playing out in the world of libraries. I’m not a total luddite but I am a skeptic when it comes to new tech and the wave of promises that accompany the roll out of every new app, program, or gadget. Reality usually falls well short of the initial advertising. And I’ve seen enough boom/bust cycles to know that when the tech industry becomes interested in an aspect of your industry or institution, things usually get worse. They’ll spout stock lines about accessibility and freedom, about the new possibilities their product offers, but eventually it becomes clear the primary hope is to consolidate and privatize. Big tech is, ultimately, hostile to the idea of public institutions.

Now, that said, I do think, despite the largely corrosive effect it’s had on society and culture, there are plenty of benefits to all this new tech. Information and culture are more accessible than they have ever been before. Communication is easier. So, my hope for this class is to learn ways the library can be used to force technology to live up to its potential. As I see it, wresting and wrangling as much as we can from the walled off worlds of private interests, to make all that is available freely available under one metaphorical roof, is the primary goal of all non-corporate library work.

A note about the title: I always feel obligated to mention where I sourced my titles because they’re almost always borrowed. For this blog, I flipped through one of my collections of Larry Eigner’s work (Larry Eigner | The Poetry Foundation). These have served me well in the past, and in his collection of prose, Country Harbor Quiet Act Around, I found the piece Likely Passage. It had a nice ring and seemed somewhat, if you squint, relevant to what this blog will be about. So, I borrowed it. The piece itself is about a day of record rainfall in, I presume, Eigner’s hometown Swampscott, Massachusetts. The image in the header is cropped from the book’s cover.