Hello and welcome back to UNBOUND! I went on a short hiatus because I was working on the (now finished!) Library Test Kitchen video, which was mentioned in my previous blog post. Plus, I went on winter break for a few weeks.
This week of transition, and especially today, are historically significant for many reasons. I will not go into those reasons as that is not the purpose of this blog. However, no matter how, or if, you voted in the 2016 election, no one can deny that there are bound to be some quite drastic and sweeping changes with the new Trump administration. Among these impending changes are issues that hit close to home for many members of the library and information science community, such as education, privacy, and access to information. One of these changes has already happened; any mention of “global warming” or “climate change” has been removed from the White House website. Again, regardless of personal thoughts on this issue, it is exactly that, an issue. What I mean is that climate change (or the lack thereof) is an issue with multiple arguments, theories, and proposed solutions. To remove this information from the public domain is scary and in direct violation of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Core Values of Librarianship which include social responsibility, intellectual freedom, and access.
Of course, it is true that Trump and his administration are not librarians so they do not act with the values and mission of librarianship in mind. Nor is Trump, by any means, the first politician to hide information. However, it serves as an excellent beginning to a necessary, long and complicated conversation about the mission, goals, and actions of librarianship in 2017 and beyond. The current ALA mission reads:
The mission of the American Library Association is to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.
If censorship of important global issues is deemed acceptable on the President’s front-facing, public website, how long will it be before other controversial materials disappear from federally funded institutions, websites or collections? My point being that no matter what, every person should have the right to access information so that they can make decisions and form opinions, about things like climate change, on their own.
I have compiled a list of links to things that are happening in the library world that address some of the aforementioned issues:
- San Francisco’s Public Library’s Quest to Put Diversity on the Shelves
- Carla Hayden Thinks Libraries Are a Key To Freedom
- Library (and Library-relevant Events) and the Inauguration
- Freedom of Library Speech
- No More ‘Beall’s List’
- The Next Few Years #sharegoodstuff
- UCLA Information Studies students call for access to essential data
- On Libraries – The American Conservative (this is an older piece but highly relevant)
- The Biblioracle: Hero librarians create fake reader to save books
- Video – San Francisco City Librarian Luis Herrera and Members of SF Writing Community Respond to Trump Presidency at SFPL Event