Category: Political political

Continue operating as normal?

Not a day goes by that I don’t read a headline, article, or hear about something that really just punches me in the stomach. It’s not an easy time to be somebody in higher education or a library, and my lucky self happens to be both. The systematic dismantling of higher education, as well as K-12, terrifies me in a time where hallucinating large language models are dominating the information landscape. Reading for pleasure is on the decline. There is an outright attack on our LGBTQIA, but especially our trans, friends and colleagues. Will I be able to afford basic items as tariffs trickle back to us, the consumers? Who’s to say, really.  

That’s the national landscape. What we’re facing in Maryland isn’t easy, either – the state has a huge deficit to overcome in the budget, and because of that, the higher education budget has been cut. What makes this even harder is that as federal employees are laid off, many of whom live in Maryland, this leads to less income tax revenue and makes the deficit even worse. As a public university employee, this has been dominating the conversation in the last few weeks. Per usual, those of us in the library are working our butts off to help make up the cut we’re now facing; everything easy is already gone.  

I have found it interesting the ways that different constituencies at my university have reacted to this news. A flat or shrinking budget is nothing new to those of us in libraries, so there is a certain grudging acceptance. That is not to say we’re not advocating for ourselves; that IS to say that we’re telling our higher-ups what exactly it means if we cut this resource or service. A cut here means this, and a cut there means that, and so on. Without getting too deeply into the specifics, that acceptance is not there for other populations at this university, and that worries me. I do not want the library to end up shouldering more of the cuts because we are cooperative.  

Finally, there are heavy personal things that cast a thick shadow over everything I’m doing. They aren’t my story to tell, but it’s incredibly hard to give a shit about the pettiness in academia when such dire things are happening. I am interested in keeping my job and my income in order to deal with said things. It’s also hard to not compare – I’m 12-month faculty, whereas a majority of our teaching faculty are a 10-month contract. That 10-month contract would be a godsend to me and my family right now. Perhaps that’s where the budget divide lies, too.  

What we’re all experiencing is not normal, but it feels like we’re pretending that it is when we go operate as usual. But then again – what other option is there? My dog depends on me for walks, food, and water. I have to take care of myself to even begin addressing everything above.  

I keep coming back to this Dan Savage quote: “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”  

That joy is key in this long haul we’re facing. For me lately, that’s manifested in craft projects, binging the entirety of West Wing, and reading way more than I have in years. It’s the student thank you notes, it’s a snuggle with my dog, and it’s a weekend trip back home in Michigan to meet my new nephew. None of it is normal. But we’ll keep going anyway. 

A Reintroduction and Conference Report

For now, as a reintroduction, a little bit about me as told through a conference update.

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Zoë McLaughlin back to the ACRLog team. Zoë is the South and Southeast Asia librarian at Michigan State University. Besides collection and liaison work, she also catalogs, mainly in South and Southeast Asian languages, and works on physical and digital accessibility in libraries. When she can, she translates from Indonesian and searches for zines and other interesting publications from South and Southeast Asia.

You may remember me as a FYAL blogger from a few years ago. I’m happy to be back on the blog, still in the same job as South and Southeast Asia Librarian, but now with a few more years under my belt, staring down the title of “mid-career librarian.” In my time away, I’ve gotten more involved on the national level and gained a better understanding of how things work in my home library, so hopefully I’m coming back to the blog with new insights, or at least some new ideas.

For now, as a reintroduction, a little bit about me as told through a conference update.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Association for Asian Studies conference. Librarians who cover Asia tend to meet at this conference, as do interest groups for individual countries or regions, to say nothing of the usual conference panels and roundtables. Usually, we go over cooperative projects that we’re working on and institutional updates including new hires and new collection focuses. This year’s conference turned out to be even more interesting than normal because it coincided with moves to dismantle the Department of Education.

As you might imagine, this added an unsettling aura to the conference. There have been, rightly so, several statements already made on the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and how this affects libraries, but Department of Education cuts are also alarming, and not just for the harms they will do to public schools and special education programs. The Department of Education, through programs including the Fulbright, as well as others, provides funding for individuals and programs in the field of international studies. Some of this funding, ultimately, trickles down to libraries in the form of support for collections in the most traditional sense as well as in more innovative ways, such as support for open access projects.

Since I said this would be an introduction, here’s how these cuts affect me: funding from the Department of Education helped to send me to library school. I went to library school knowing I wanted to specialize in Southeast Asian studies, which meant that I needed to learn languages—as many as possible and as fluently as possible while balancing all my other coursework. Languages, as it happens, are also an area of national interest; think Cold War, spies, and the origin of the field of area studies itself. This is (in part) how I funded my education and this is also what we stand to lose. Ultimately, an already underserved area of librarianship (how many catalogers do you know working in Thai?) will be further underserved, meaning our collections and resource description will suffer, to the detriment of library users.

So this was all hanging over my head and the heads of all the other conference attendees, including administrators dealing with what to do about the news, non-citizens on all sorts of visas, and students trying to figure out their futures. It was a lot. It’s still a lot.

It was also rather comforting to be around other people who care about Asian studies and have the side conversations that happen at conferences, though they were markedly different this year. There are still many serious questions and unknowns, but it was helpful to meet colleagues new and old and to be reminded that there is more than just the most recent crisis to think about and that some of our ongoing projects, like cooperation between institutions and collaborations with partners overseas, have just as much relevance and meaning now, even as we face these challenges.

Further reading:

A Department of Education Office Changed My Life. Now It’s Been Cut by Lydia Kiesling, Time

Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Library Agency by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times

Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Violet Fox to the ACRLog team. Violet is a Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library. She is the creator of the Cataloging Lab, a wiki designed to encourage collaboration in library metadata. Violet is passionate about critical cataloging, zine librarianship, and promoting the mental health of library workers. 

On February 18, the Library of Congress (LC) sent an email announcement through its regular channels about a special list of revisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This list contained 45 proposed revisions to LCSH relating to Trump’s Executive Order 14172 “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” These revisions would change the LCSH for Gulf of Mexico to America, Gulf of, and would change the LCSH for Mount Denali back to McKinley, Mount (Alaska).

Geographic names in LCSH generally follow the form of name decided on by the US Board on Geographic Names, a body under the Secretary of the Interior. (This relationship is laid out in the LC Subject Heading Manual instruction sheet H 690 Formulating Geographic Headings.) The Board on Geographic Names takes its cues from the State Department, taking into account which countries the US has recognized.

It was not surprising that LC would follow the example of the US Board of Geographic Names, as that’s standard operating procedure. What wasn’t standard was the speed at which this revision was pushed through. Although the special list was backdated to February 13th, no one was notified of these revision proposals until the morning of February 18th, and the deadline for submitting comments was the same day, February 18th. This meant that catalogers had less than 24 hours to respond to these proposals, and our international colleagues in earlier time zones had no opportunity to respond to these proposals. The regular procedure for revisions to LCSH includes a three week comment period, which provides the chance to point out errors or potential conflicts. The proposed changes to the Gulf of Mexico and Mount McKinley headings were fully implemented in the authority file in mid-March.

Those of us who regularly propose revisions to subject headings know that the turnaround time for those proposals is usually a few months, and can take six months or longer for more complex revisions. For those of us who remember the more than five years of LC dragging its heels in making revisions to the Illegal aliens LCSH, the speed at which this change occurred was astonishing. 

We don’t know if LC was quietly given instructions to revise these headings by Congress members, or if LC leadership independently decided they wanted to show fealty to the Trump administration and avoid political pushback. Either way, the decision to not just implement these terms but to fast track the changes negates the principle that LCSH should represent the most commonly used terminology to ensure the discoverability of resources. By making these changes, LC has pushed the responsibility of reflecting common usage onto every single library using LCSH, which now must make the decision of what headings to use in their catalog (that is, if they have the capacity to locally revise headings in their catalogs—not all libraries have the technological or staffing capacity to do so).

Without any formal directives announced, I believe we can reasonably label LC’s actions as anticipatory obedience, the concept developed by historian Timothy Snyder describing actions aligning with perceived expectations before explicit directives are given. We can imagine why LC might have made that decision. In a February New York Times opinion piece, The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump, M. Gessen describes some of the arguments for compliance with authoritarian requests, including the idea that one must pick one’s battles, or that not complying is not worth risking people’s jobs. 

Still, the fact remains that these domineering name changes are now reflected not only in many US catalogs, but in library catalogs across the world. Power has been taught that even if they’re not looking very closely, the Library of Congress will change its vocabularies to reflect the capricious whims of the president, no matter how euphemistic or jingoistic. 

In the 1930s, future Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish wrote about the rise of anti-communism: “The real struggle of our time was not between communism and fascism but the much more fundamental struggle between democratic institutions on the one side and all forms of dictatorship, whatever the dictator’s label, on the other.” Does our current Librarian of Congress have as much strength of conviction?

The main building of the Library of Congress, a neoclassical building, as seen from several floors up on the building next door.
The Library of Congress Jefferson building, as seen from the Madison building.
Photo credit: Violet Fox

Some Thoughts on Showing Up for Students and Overcoming Discouragement

I returned to library instruction this week bearing mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was excited to return to teaching after a pause between December and February that was replaced by other work priorities. I missed building connections in instruction sessions and individual consultations with first-year students and course instructors and navigating the library’s many materials and resources as a new employee. On the other hand, I returned with a great weight on my soul. The same December-February period has seen a series of assaults on information access that are too many to describe in just one post but include the scrubbing of data and resources from federal department and agency websites without notice and the downstream effect that government funding cuts will have on potentially impactful research. I mention this example not to revisit everything that has happened in Washington over the past several weeks but to say that I carried what was happening nationally in my mind and body.

The conflicted state I felt is one that many academic librarians across the country are very likely feeling. In these uncertain times, how we can best show up for our students and guide them toward becoming critical and responsible information users is a question that is more important and complex than ever. As a Black librarian, these questions are amplified by my concern for other students of color at my institution and my professional aim of creating a library space that is safe and inclusive—both now threatened by the undermining of DEI efforts on the federal level and increasingly in higher education nationwide.

As challenging as it will be with the brevity of one-shot instruction, consultations, and reference interactions, here are some ways I want to show up for my students this year:

  1. Listen with intention and empathy: Having the patience to pay attention to what students are saying and the struggles they might face that are difficult to communicate.
  2. Reinforce that I am a resource for different kinds of information: Remind students during classes, consultations, and more extended reference interactions that I can help them find things they need that are not just research-related.
  3. Employ principles of trauma-informed teaching: Constantly be aware of stressful events and issues on campus and beyond that are potentially impacting my students and create a learning environment of safety, trust, autonomy, and support where appropriate and possible.
  4. Model vulnerability and authenticity: Be honest with students about my struggles with research and library use and emphasize that I am growing like them.
  5. Meet students where they are: Remember that, to borrow the focus of Dr. Carol Kuhlthau’s seminal research, the information search process will be different for each student and necessitates me working with them at the place they are at rather than pushing them to the “right” way of finding information first.

Whether I can meet even one of these goals remains as unclear as the direction of this administration. But even beyond the stress and nerves of teaching, two feelings I will likely struggle with this year are discouragement and disillusionment triggered by the state of the country and the fracturing of truth and fact due to mis and disinformation primarily online but also increasingly from unregulated artificial intelligence. In moments like these, it is vital to remind myself of the purpose of my role as a librarian–to support students in finding the information they need and equipping them with research skills they can use in college and life.

A few years ago, amid a challenging season of loss, a close artist friend of my partner and I named Soyoung Kim gifted us a watercolor sketch that we keep in our office. The sketch depicts a sailboat bobbing over blue waves with the following words on the bottom center: Advice for Discouraged Sailors 1. Stop 2. Steady Your Boat 3. Study Your Compass 4. Seek The Wind.

Image Credit: Soyoung Kim, 2023. See more of Soyoung’s work here!

As we journey into the deeper, busier waters of this semester and the uncertainty of this year, as we meet discouragements, disappointments, and failures, may we remember to pause, refocus, return to what inspired us to work in academic libraries, and pay attention what this work is calling us to do in these times.

A strange, but rewarding, side quest

January has been a very long month. Many times, I’ve felt particularly useless in the era we’re living in, and that came to a head on January 20th. I posted a video on TikTok asking if folks wanted to learn how to find information, and when I woke up the next morning, I had 500 followers, 10k views, and a resounding number of yeses. Right now, I’m sitting at about 1400 followers and 32k views. I want to reiterate – I didn’t have ANY of that before Monday 1/20.  

I didn’t set out to be a content creator, and to be honest, having that many people view what I do makes me deeply uncomfortable. I want to retreat into my turtle shell and delete the account all together. But that’s just my first impulse; I think about it longer, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a good uncomfortable. I am appalled by what is happening in the United States right now, and while I can’t change it by myself, posting videos about information literacy is something that’s in my sphere of influence. To be frank, it’s been a great way to redirect my rage and energy about it all.  

I also think that this is making me a better librarian. Planning out and writing the scripts for the videos forces me to slow down and consider what a very general audience might know or not know. I either cut down on jargon or explain it, go slower, and put some big concepts into bite-sized videos. It’s content I could definitely reuse to flip some of my instruction, but it’s also good practice for those 50 minute one shots where it feels like there’s just too much to cover in very little time.  

It’s clear to me from the response to my initial wonderings that people want to learn this. Given the information landscape we live in, with AI nonsense proliferating search engine results, uncertainty in who and what to trust, and government websites going down with the rise of the new administration, it’s needed. That is unequivocally a space that academic librarians can contribute to, and I’ve found a lot of renewed purpose in this side quest.  

I don’t know how long the algorithm will be on my side, or how long I’ll keep making videos. Honestly, I don’t really feel capable of planning that far in advance right now – we still don’t even really know if TikTok will be a viable platform in a few months. The app still isn’t currently available in the app stores. I do know that over 1,000 people have favorited my tip about adding “LibGuide” to a Google search and at least one person has gotten a library card because of my video explaining the process. To me, that’s well worth it.  

If you have any suggestions for videos I should make next, I’d love to hear them. My handle is @interstellar_ed if you’re curious. And remember: January will be over very soon, and we will keep going.