Likely Passage

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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.

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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.