Longtime readers of this oft neglected blog know I strongly believe in making sure your values are present in your work, whatever that may be.
Last week as I was watching the the Twitter/X-odous to Bluesky (Hi- I’m on Blueksy!), I was reminded of so many people I stopped following and forgot about when I quit Twitter. It was nice to see familiar names! But then I was also reminded of how ill prepared most of us were for the fascist takeover – especially in libraries.
And that then brought up one of my long standing grievances with the library profession: Too many library workers, especially librarians, espouse progressive ideals but you would never really know through their work. We rail against capitalism on social media, and then dutifully follow through with our approval plans to license content. We decry settler colonialism and structural racism of our institutions, and then accept the latest changes to library services in the face of austerity.
Many folks are drawn to working in libraries because due to an implicit democratic and progressive ethos that is foundational to the concept of a liberal library. But we’re human and we fall short of those ideals. In our recent contract negotiations, UC-AFT librarians affirmed our right to Academic Freedom as academic workers. And while Academic Freedom has limits due to pressures like funding, it should empower us to feel secure in bringing our values to our work. Given what’s on the horizon with the next Trump administration, I think it’s even more imperative for us to imbue our values in our work as a means to preserve the fundamental mission of libraries and to staunch the closing on the commons we felt through the first Trump administration and then Covid.
In her recent Truthout column Emily Drabinski outlined why library workers need to organize in the face of the likely cuts under the new Trump administration. I would take it one step further – we must go beyond organizing our workplaces (though we need to start there), and bring it to our campuses, our professional orgs, our communities. Organizing is hard and requires us to talk to people we don’t always agree with, but we need to collectively move forward. I think one step is normalizing bringing our values and ethics into our work. We can’t save libraries from what lies ahead if we don’t recognize how our organizations and work fit into larger systems, and then act to make sure we a contribute to the world we want.
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