lis.dom

One of the first things I learned in library school (despite my sometimes disparaging comments about the general state of library education, I did learn some things there) is what I now think of as the IANALIANADIANAA disclaimer. I Am Not A Doctor I Am Not A Lawyer I Am Not An Accountant. If you work in a public library, you know the drill: I can help you print off a list of workers comp attorneys in the area, but I can’t give you any advice about your workers compensation case. I can help you search MedlinePlus, but I can’t give you a diagnosis or advice about your prescriptions. I can show you where the tax forms are, and I can even print more off for you, but I can’t do your taxes.

Those are all easy enough: my legal knowledge is close to nonexistent; my knowledge of medical conditions, despite being the daughter of a doctor, is limited solely to psychiatric disorders; and I have a computer program do my taxes.

But often I get questions at the desk that are looking for other kinds of advice, and these are harder to interpret.

At my first-ever library job, I worked regularly at the children’s desk. I got a lot of questions from adults, though, perhaps because the actual reference desk at that library was a fortress-like monstrosity with staplers and scissors chained to it, or perhaps because I was closest to the copy machine. One evening a young woman came in with a paper she was writing, wondering if I could proofread it.

I was fairly certain that this was outside the bounds of “other duties as described,” and that I was in fact supposed to tell her that I could not do that for her. But it was a quiet night in the library, and it was a short paper, just a page long, and I used to teach freshman composition. I said okay. I did a quick job, fixing just proofreading stuff, since that was what she had asked for, but she clearly needed more help. I asked what school she went to. It was a community college nearby, so while she went to use the computer, I did a little sleuthing. Sure enough, they had what sounded to me like a writing center. I jotted down the information, and before the patron left, I gave it to her, suggesting she stop by or give them a call. She thanked me.

Then I emailed the contact person I found listed on the page for the center, just to let him know I’d sent someone there, and hoping that it was the right place. He wrote back the next day, and I still remember his words. “It breaks my heart that students don’t know about the center.” I told him I’d do my best to spread the word.

Over the years as a librarian I’ve gotten a lot of questions from patrons that hover on the boundary between providing library reference services and providing advice. I’m not, I suppose, supposed to tell people that their resume would look better if they formatted it differently, or that yeah, it does sound as though the situation with their landlord does sound like a case for the tenant-landlord association. And I don’t go right out and tell them these things, or walk around looking for those situations. But I can’t claim never to have answered such a question.

The other night I went to hear a talk by the historian Staughton Lynd. He spoke about the organizing mistakes of SNCC and of SDS‘s ERAP project*, and about the philosophy of accompaniment. He realized, he said, that after he got his law degree and went to work with steelworkers and later prisoners, that he suddenly had skills to offer to a fight that belonged to both of them, not just some amorphous idea of how he wanted to help people and do good. And he talked about something his wife Alice said at the time, when she was doing draft counseling: “The meeting between the draft counselor and the draft counselee is a meeting between two experts.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more perfect definition of library work, and I got to tell Alice Lynd that after the talk.

In her case, she was the one who knew all about draft boards and regulations and the requirements for being a conscientious objector, but the draft counselee was the one who was an expert on his own life, on what it would mean for him if he had to go to war, on what it would mean for his family and his own conscience.

I am an expert on searching databases and using basic computer programs. I am an expert on circulation policies. But the patrons are the experts on their own lives — on their job searches, on their quests for knowledge, on the books that got taken with a non-custodial parent after a divorce, on the experience of having a relative or friend in the prison system whom they’re trying to locate.

I always tell people that I went into librarianship on the theory that at least it would do no harm, and that’s true, but that’s not all of it. I went into librarianship because I have the skills for it, and because, as it turns out, those are useful skills. They’re skills that allow me, even for just the few moments of a reference transaction, to encounter another expert, and to work together with her. I am, daily, humbled by that experience, and I hope I always will be.

*Remind me some day in my copious spare time to contribute to some of these Wikipedia articles.

The other day, a friend called to tell me that she was getting published in an international journal. The first words out of my mouth were, “Be sure you read your copyright agreement.” Yup. Not “Congratulations,” not “That’s great,” not “When can I get a copy?” Nope. I am such a librarian that the first thing I told her to do was to check her copyright.

I spent my formative years, as most people do, blissfully unaware of the intricacies of intellectual property. In fact, I’m fairly sure I didn’t run across that term until I was in graduate school (my second graduate school). Oh, I’d looked at the copyright statements in books from time to time, to see when they were written, and I’d realized that sometimes the copyright date didn’t really tell you that, because it was the date the copyright was renewed, or it was a copyright for that edition or something. I’d seen the battered paper sign taped up by the copy machines at the public library that gave dire warnings in small print about photocopying copyrighted material. I knew that when my favorite used record store put up a cutout of Garth Brooks saying you shouldn’t buy used CDs, it was making fun of the movement started by Brooks and other artists to clamp down on the sale of used CDs because they supposedly cut into their profits. But on the whole, copyright wasn’t something I ever thought about. The phrase “public domain” had not yet entered my consciousness.

How I got from those days copy ignorance to my current state of copyawareness is an interesting, and, I hope, instructive story.

This blog has had a Creative Commons license on it since it started back in 2005, which is around the same time I learned of the existence of Creative Commons, and since all the hip librarian bloggers were doing it, it seemed like the Thing to Do. And it resonated with me–I liked the idea that I could specify how people used my work, though it wasn’t something I had ever thought about before.

About a year later, I got asked to contribute something to a special issue of Counterpoise being edited by the Homelessness, Hunger, and Poverty Task Force. Graduate school, multiple jobs, and life being what they are, I ended up deciding to give them not something new, as I’d hoped, but rather a column I had written back when I wrote for the Daily Iowan that I thought would be appropriate. I had been in library school for long enough at that point that I had a dim idea I ought to ask the paper about reprinting it. I did, and they said, “oh, yes, you can do that; there’s a form to fill out and the publication that wants to reprint it will need to pay a $10 fee.” Um.

So I asked for the form, and I filled it out to the best of my knowledge, and I sent the company a check and thought, “well, I guess I got paid $16.50 for this, so I still made a profit on it.”

Several years later, when I was fully employed as a librarian, the Iowa thesis and dissertation open access policy came out. Basically, it required everyone submitting a masters thesis or doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa to submit it electronically and make it part of an institutional repository that would be fully searchable and available online. Iowa’s was not the first such policy, but it was among the more controversial, largely because it aroused the ire and wrath of the writers.

Before I became a librarian, I was a dog-walker, and before that, I got an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which is the unfamous cousin of the much more widely known Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was a heavy library user. I loved books! I loved bound periodicals! I even loved that I could find newspaper articles via LexisNexis, via dialup, from my home. I loved libraries! But I did not know diddley-squat about them, or about copyright, and neither did most of my writer friends. And so when that mandate came out, my old graduate program listserv, which I still subscribe to, which is mostly a sleepy little thing with occasional posts about residencies or calls for submissions or announcements about readings, went crazy.

Graduates who had written essays using the real names and identities of people went apeshit at the idea that those essays might get digitized and the people might find them whilst Googling themselves. People who’d had things published fretted about the consequences of having those things, often in earlier draft form, digitized. People who hoped to have things published worried they’d never be able to because no one would publish stuff that was already out there on the web. To some extent, these concerns are legitimate (although to the “I used real names” people I wanted to say, “and you were not concerned about the people who could walk into the library and take your thesis off the shelf and read it? Or find it in a library catalog and request it?”–neither of these is, of course, comparable to late-night ego-surfing, but it would be enough to give me pause when mentioning people in a piece of writing), because most mainstream publishers are still freaked out about electronic text and believe that no one will ever pay for things any more if they can get them for free somewhere else. And their concerns were, eventually, listened to — the current policy allows MFA students to choose open access electronic deposit only if they want to, and there is strong language about how paper theses will never be scanned.

Recently, an old friend asked if she could get a copy of an essay of mine that she wanted to teach as a part of one of her classes. Library geek that I am, I immediately went off to see if the journal it was published in was indexed anywhere and if full-text from it was available. Somewhat to my surprise, it was, but not until a few years after my essay was published. So I fetched my copy of the journal from home and scanned a copy and then, good librarian that I am, went to check out the copyright situation.

If you’ve ever watched a VH-1 Behind the Music documentary, you know that there are several things that happen in the life of any musician. There are drug and/or alcohol problems. There are a succession of drummers. There are breakthrough albums or songs and later disappointments. There are quarrels with bandmates. And there is financial ruin brought about by the fact that the band was so excited that someone wanted to sign them that they didn’t bother to read the contract that says that all their money is going to their agent and their record label. Writers are much the same way, at least in my (limited) experience. You want to publish me? Oh thank you thank you thank you! And then you call all your writer friends, or at least all the one who you think won’t hate you, and you go out and drink toasts, and you get some paperwork from the journal editor and you send it back, and many months later, you get a few copies of this journal with your essay in it, and, well, there is no high like the high of seeing your name in print. I have never had a book published, but I’m guessing it’s a similar thing on a much larger scale. Oh yeah, there was that paperwork I signed about them printing my essay or publishing my book, but I just kind of glanced at it.

Well. Ha. I knew better now. I was a librarian. I had been reading Dorothea Salo religiously since library school. I knew you did not just glance at your publishing agreement. But of course back in 2003, that’s all I did. So this time around I went to go look it up. Literary journals, generally speaking, as I now know, retain the copyright on your piece until it is published, and then it reverts back to you. So sent my friend a PDF of my essay and told her the copyright was mine and she could use it with my blessings. She thanked me, in a slightly baffled fashion, and it was then that I realized that while I’ll always bridge two worlds, I will also always be a librarian.

Other people have written about open access and the humanities, and about why humanists, of all people, should be cheering the California Digital Library on in its boycott of Nature Publishing Group.* My librarian friends are mostly still afraid to talk about these issues when it comes to the creative writing types, though. But I’m not. I am a creative writing type, or at any rate, I was, and I can tell you that this stuff does matter, even for the creative folk.

So you want to complain that open access will destroy the marketability of your work? Okay. Fine. But then don’t complain when books cost money, and when that course packet of essays you want to put together for your class turns out to cost a lot of money, and when the library and the department send you nasty notes about the illegality of making multiple copies of copyrighted work for your classes. Because you know what? All those other writers want their work to be marketable, too, and their publishers all told them that the only way to do that was to clamp down on all these people trying to steal their stuff for free.

Do you want your school to go on subscribing to The Georgia Review and Granta, not to mention the little little magazines — all those obscure journals where you got your start? Then it’s very much in your interest to support things like the CDL’s fight against NPG, because library budgets are not forever expandable. Librarians want to give you access to the things that you want. It’s what we live for. Well, that and watching David beat Goliath. If you’re a writer, there’s a good chance that in addition to buying books, you use, or have used, a library heavily at some point in your life. There’s a good chance that you have generally positive feelings about libraries, albeit mostly as places that contain books. We are that, and we will continue to be that, at least in part. We want to do for your work what librarians have always done: collect it, preserve it, and make it available, in whatever ways are best suited to the time and the place and to patrons’ needs. (Translation: yes, we are looking at digital stuff. Yes, we may some day want your work in digital format, too. Yes, we think this is a good thing. Yes, we understand that you have concerns, and we do take those seriously. And we really don’t think you want to go back to the days of books in closed stacks findable only through searching gigantic tomes. Do you also want your book not to appear on Amazon.com?) But in order to do all of this, we need money, and right now, we are being gouged. California has decided they aren’t going to take it any more. I hope you will support them.

*As Dorothea notes, the CDL vs. NPG thing is only very tangentially an open access issue, and I realize I’m conflating a lot of things here that shouldn’t all necessarily be conflated. But they are related, and they are all often equally scary, and so I am treating them as kind of a big IP monolith for the sake of this particular exercise.

Back in October, I went on vacation, and, somewhat unusually for me, I took a bit of a busman’s holiday while I was there and visited a number of libraries. I saw the zine library at ABC No Rio. I got a tour of the SUNY Maritime library (which is in a fort!), courtesy of a friend who works there. I strolled through the library at Vassar, where I went to college. One of my hosts, Jenna Freedman, showed me around the Barnard library, including its zine collection, and John Blyberg very kindly gave me a grand tour of the Darien library, where I also got to meet a number of other staff members (hi, all!), who are all just as great as Kate says they are.

Walt Crawford has talked about not being a fan of the “one big library” concept. I must admit I’ve always had a fondness for it, probably at least in part because of its echoes of the IWW and their “one big union,” but Walt’s point is worth taking: libraries are — and should be — as different as the communities they serve. There are a lot of neat things that I could point out about all these libraries, from the kinds of periodicals they have at SUNY Maritime to the automated book return system at Darien, but what I’ve been thinking about most in the weeks since I returned is how radically different these communities are and how the library not only reflects the community but also shapes it.

As I have noted before, I never once spoke to a librarian when I was in college, and though I spent over an hour wandering around there, I did not talk to any librarians at Vassar on this visit. In part, that’s because I didn’t set anything up ahead of time and didn’t want to bother anyone, but largely it’s because I still have no idea where the librarians in that building are.

I love the Vassar library. It is everything people say libraries shouldn’t be these days. It does not have much in the way of comfortable furniture (though there is more than there was when I was there, but there are still plenty of long wooden tables with hard wooden chairs). There isn’t much in the way of group study space (or if there are such spaces, they are well hidden). It is one of the most confusingly laid-out places I have ever been. It’s made up of a few large rooms and then a series of interconnected small rooms. You’ll be following along with a call number just fine, until suddenly you’ll get to the end of one of these small rooms, and then you have to figure out where the rest of your call number continues. I think the continuity is somewhat better than it was when I was there, but it looked to me as though there were still some big jumps. And, as I’ve mentioned, the librarians are conspicuously hard to find.

But you know what? I love that place. When you walk in the door, you go up a few steps, and you’re standing in a sort of central courtyard. In front of you is one alcove with a gigantic stained glass window depicting the first woman to get a bachelor’s degree. To either side are longer alcoves with long tables running down the middle (long tables with rows of green-shaded lamps that look just the way you think an old, woody library should look) and rows of stacks on either side. There are mysterious staircases and all sorts of nooks and crannies. I have a recurring dream — one of my very favorites — wherein I discover a set of stairs I’ve never seen before, and it turns out to lead to a whole other section of the library that I’ve never been to, and it is even more gorgeous than the rest of the building.

Now, I’ve been to a lot of college libraries, and in many of them, the whole reference and instruction and group study stuff is much more apparent. But I didn’t choose to go to those colleges. I chose this one with the gothic architecture and the weird nooks and crannies and the leaded windows, and I learned to find my way around it, and though I never spoke to a librarian, I ended up being one. There’s a place in this world for the library as beautiful place filled with interesting books. It’s not the hippest, to be sure. But it’s still legitimate.

The Darien library has some architectural similarities (I have a semi-annotated photoset on Flickr). It’s been made to look like a sort of old-fashioned library with new-fashioned accoutrement (the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs, IL has the same kind of feel). But it is also very consciously designed to be a community space, and a particular kind of community. Thus you’ll find many of the things you’d expect in a great new library — new books front and center, lots of information about programming for all ages, a teen room with comfy furniture and Rock Band, and kick-ass technology everywhere. But also caters to — or shapes — the community. There’s a room called SoHo, which, if you are into office equipment and supplies, will just make you drool. Computers, fax machines, scanners, paper cutters, staplers — they’re all there for the use of patrons with small offices or home offices (hence the SoHo name). All that equipment, out there and available, made me think that the library really is a place to make things, and it made me think — how ever incongruously — of the zine library and activist space I visited on the Lower East Side, ABC No Rio.

When we talk about libraries as community centers, it is places like ABC No Rio and various infoshops around the country that immediately come to my mind. Why? Because these are places that are about making things: making zines, making music, making art, even making food for Food Not Bombs. No, I’m not advocating that all libraries immediately open up their kitchens (though that would be cool — but it would also quite probably be a disaster). I would kind of like it if every public library had a sign that said PROPERTY OF THE PEOPLE OF ____, because our libraries are the property of our communities, and communities should be given pride of place.

What I am advocating is that people think about their libraries not only in terms of how they reflect their communities but also in terms of how they shape them. I was shaped by that Vassar library. I was shaped by the group study rooms at the Iowa City Public Library and by their public LP and CD players (you could even combine the two — if you took a stack of CDs to the circulation desk, they’d put them on and pipe them into your group study room for you) and by their wall of flyers and pamphlets from all the sorts political and social community groups that now show up now in their local associations database. And I hope that the people who come to the library here are shaped by it — shaped to consider the world as wide and vast and varied, even in this tiny little town.