TILT #30 — People have the right to know what their government is doing, and why.
Remaining vigilant in this moment of rapid change
Writing today from my local public library which has a large Bill of Rights display in the entrance. I feel safe here.
Title and subtitle of this week’s letter are from A Statement to the Archival Community from Concerned Archivists. They have an exceptional Resources page in addition to their well-written statement, which is not a timid document:
Donald Trump has made a long series of statements and proposed policies at odds with our Constitution, our history, our system of law, and our international human rights obligations, and which are a direct affront and threat to justice everywhere.
And then it goes into specifics. Read. Add your name to the 300+ that are already there. Join your colleagues in resisting the normalization of these threats to our professional values and our democracy.
With reports already coming in about concerning changes to WhiteHouse.gov, we need archivists’ skills and vigilance.
I stopped by the library also to kibitz with the library director about the very sudden non-reappointment of Vermont’s State Librarian Marty Reid. It’s customary with new administrations that heads of departments submit their resignations, which are then politely declined. However, this hasn’t been happening at the federal level and it’s not happening here.
Reid was good at her job, as well as a likable person. No real news about this, except that the incoming Governor Phil Scott, usually thought of as “a decent sort of Republican,” appears to be cleaning house. The State Library has been the victim of terrible budget cutting over the past decade and this has been dispiriting. I’ve been working with VLA on crafting responses.
I’ve been looking up sources for this newsletter from Duck Duck Go instead of my usual Googling. I watched this video from the Southern Poverty Law Center about the role of Google and its algorithms in supporting and even amplifying incorrect information, specifically in the case of Dylann Roof. Roof was incorrectly self-educated about “black on white crime” from results he got from Google and formed troubling conclusions. Roof wasn’t sophisticated enough to evaluate the sources he found.
I’ve pulled out some relevant screen shots which are now my answer to “Why do we still need libraries in the age of Google?”
Two notes from California:
- San Francisco Public Library is putting on a full blown We Love Diverse Books program (pdf) in January to try to combat the homogeneity that we get from a lot of US publishing.
- We mourn the passing of Kevin Starr, former State Librarian, and California historian focusing on what he liked to call “social drama of the imagination.” By all accounts a terrific person.
Another “What is going ON here?” occurrence: Beall’s Predatory Journal List (explanation of predatory OA on Wikipedia) disappeared from the internet sometime in the past few days. This raised some eyebrows. Beall had just come out with his new lists for 2016.
I have always been interested in the thoroughness of this resource, but was not deep enough into the culture of it to have a handle on the legitimate criticisms that Beall and his approach had garnered. Many librarians are just as happy to see it gone. I’ve saved some backups of the missing pages in case people want to take a look for themselves.
I don’t know Jeffrey Beall at all. I went to go ask him a question about this, found he’d blocked me on Twitter, and decided to leave him be. Anyone with more info on this, please feel free to pass it along.
There are many fine “Check out these terrible library books!” blogs, but I appreciated the well-roundedness of the Awful Library Books site by Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner. In particular I enjoyed their Will Weed For Food section outlining the talks that they do about how, why and when to weed. Their slogan for this year is “Weed ’Em and Weep: Hoarding is Not Collection Development” and I hope I get a chance to see one of their talks someday.
Personal notes: NCompass Live had me and several others on a webinar about Wikipedia’s #1lib1ref project. It was recorded, you might enjoy it. If you’re a librarian (or not!), please add a citation to Wikipedia and help us make it better.
I’ll be heading down to Florida to give a talk at the Panhandle Library Access Network Small & Rural Libraries Conference next Friday and then heading back north to Toronto for the OLA Superconference and a talk at Toronto Public. As always, if you see me please say hello.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
