At almost 85 years old, the Library Bill of Rights is seeing another round of attacks.

The American Library Association (ALA)—founded in 1876 to professionalize and improve library services across the country—first published the statement in 1939 in response to the news of Nazi book burning and the suppression of information overseas. It asserted that library resources should be provided for the “interest, information, and enlightenment of all people,” and that libraries themselves should challenge censorship and “partisan disapproval” at every turn.

American librarians championed this code during the buildup and entry into World War II. But after the war, librarians went from fighting to defend these principles abroad to fighting to defend these same principles on the home front as they worked to stop book bans and book burnings in their very own libraries during the Cold War.

Now, as librarians and other educators find themselves once more tasked to fight for the public’s right to intellectual freedom, this period of history reminds us that they’ve long been on the front lines of the conflict between censorship and free speech in the U.S., a legacy that dates back to when the first public libraries were established.

The nation’s earliest libraries had high hopes for enlightenment that often fell woefully short. They were subscription-based, meaning that only those who could afford them were allowed to join. Similarly, college libraries, like the one at Harvard, were just for students and faculty. Only as immigration and the population soared in the 19th century did government-funded libraries that served working-class Americans begin to open. Though these libraries frequently held foreign newspapers and books so that patrons could check the news in their home countries, their librarians also pushed assimilation efforts to Americanize new immigrants.

The U.S. government participated in its own acts of censorship during this time. The Comstock Act of 1873, meant to curb the nascent movement of women’s reproductive healthcare, affected both the publishing industry and libraries. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded by Anthony Comstock and his supporters, was particularly hard on libraries, forcing New York public libraries to withdraw classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover from their collections. All the while, Black patrons often found themselves without library access, especially in the Jim Crow South.

In the 20th century, censorship continued with German, Italian, and even Irish works and newspapers banned and locked down at the urging of both the government and concerned citizens. At the same time, amid the growing threat of fascism abroad, U.S. libraries at this time emerged as a great symbol of democracy. In addition to the passage of the Library Bill of Rights, during the lead-up to World War II, librarians publicly championed free speech in other ways—soliciting book donations, buying war bonds, and even participating in an on-the-ground effort to save materials from war-torn Europe.

Then came the postwar whiplash as public libraries got pulled into Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s coercive campaign to fight anything he deemed “communist” and “anti-American.” As part of his Cold War witch hunt, McCarthy opened up an investigation into Voice of America, the U.S. foreign-language broadcasting company, alleging it had capitulated to communism. He attacked the VOA’s overseas libraries, which were meant to represent American ideals and information abroad, and called for a list of authors that he had condemned as communists to be stripped from the shelves. Any librarians who refused faced inquiries into their own personal lives and histories.

In response, librarians convened a meeting with publishers in May of 1953 to discuss how they could defend libraries and authors against censorship and censure. Among those present: the Librarian of Congress, Luther Evans, who had just been named the head of UNESCO; Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution; Cass Canfield, chairman of Harper Brothers Publishing; and Bernard Berelson, a representative of the Ford Foundation.

During the meeting, this influential group ideated the Freedom to Read statement. Building from the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read statement was meant to send a clear message: that librarians remained defenders of democracy, and that they would not back down in the face of controversy and censorship. The meeting bolstered librarians’ coalition of support and affirmed their united front against McCarthy and his acolytes, who’d already begun attacking local schools and public libraries in the continental U.S. for housing “dangerous” and/or “inappropriate” material.

Among the Americans who took up McCarthy’s cause was a San Antonio housewife named Myrtle G. Hance. A member of the Minute Women of the U.S.A., whose stated mission was to remove “supporters and sympathizers” of communism from schools, Hance took it upon herself that same year—1953—to comb through the San Antonio Public Library’s shelves, where she “uncovered” 500 books containing communist materials. In response, San Antonio mayor Jack White (whose wife was also a Minute Woman), demanded that those books be branded with a large red sticker, so that readers would know they were “dangerous.” Another city official went further—calling for the books Hance singled out to be burned.

It was the chief librarian of San Antonio who prevented this from happening. Julia Grothaus, who’d served in her position for two decades, argued that Americans could not understand, let alone fight, a thing if they did not know anything about it first. Local writers, journalists, and civic organizations rallied behind Grothaus’ position, as did the Public Library Board of Trustees, who would not rubberstamp the mayor’s call for her resignation. Despite Mayor White’s attempts at retaliation, Grothaus and her allies did not yield; the books in San Antonio would not be labeled and would not be burned.

What happened in San Antonio happened in other communities across the country, as organizations like the Minute Women stoked the public’s fears of communism. Librarians resisted in various ways to varying degrees of success. Then, on June 14, 1953, they received major support from President Eisenhower, who offered a highly publicized message bolstering free speech during his Dartmouth College commencement speech. Addressing the new graduates, the president told them, “Don’t join the book-burners… Don’t be afraid to go to your library and read every book.”

The press interpreted the president’s words to be a direct rebuff of McCarthy. The following day, McCarthy’s actions against the VOA’s overseas libraries made the front page of the New York Times when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles confirmed that 11 books abroad had been taken and destroyed. The ALA moved quickly to capitalize on the president’s support and the public’s attention. Shortly thereafter, the Freedom to Read Statement they’d come up with that May was signed off on by the ALA and the American Book Publishers Council and officially published. Still in effect today, it states that “the freedom to read is essential to our democracy.”

Seventy years later, the conflict over censorship and free speech continues to play out in libraries. 2023 is on trend to set the record for the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries. That means it would break last year’s peak, in which there were 1,269 demands to censor over 2,500 library books. In the summer of 2022, lawmakers in Florida also passed HB 1467, which requires books to be approved by a media specialist trained by Florida’s Department of Education. Educators and librarians found in violation of the law could be charged with a third-degree felony. Other states, like Missouri and Utah, have since published similar laws that punish librarians for “explicit” content.

Librarians and other educators are fighting back against the assault on free speech. Earlier this year, the Florida Education Association (which includes librarians), along with the Florida Freedom to Read Project, filed suit against the Florida legislature to challenge its censorship agenda. And after conservative lawmakers in Arkansas proposed Act 372, which sought to “protect children from indoctrination” by allowing librarians to be brought up on criminal charges if they were found with items “harmful to minors,” the Central Arkansas Library System took the lead in filing a federal lawsuit to question its constitutionality. A judge agreed, and the act has been blocked—for now.

Libraries have always offered more than just books. At their center, they offer a community space with safety to explore identities, histories and cultures. As librarians past and present know, the loss of this intellectual freedom would be catastrophic to American culture and democracy. Which is why, over eight decades since the Freedom to Read Act was first passed, in 2021 the ALA put forward a new statement that condemned acts of censorship and intimidation, and promised to continue to defend patrons’ constitutional rights, and the freedom to speak, publish, and read. It ended with a direct reflection on the Freedom to Read Act, proving that the fight goes on.

The post How Librarians Became American Free Speech Heroes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Best-case scenario: it’s migrated to another major platform, and you already have an account set up there.

Less ideal, it has been folded into a smaller-tier streamer, the kind that offers its content for free, but with so many ads that the show is nearly unwatchable.

Then there’s the bleakest option. The show you’re looking for is gone. You can’t watch it. You can’t buy it (except maybe on used DVD or VHS, if you have a player). For all intents and purposes, it no longer exists.  

“The creative community is in a state of dumbfoundedness,” entertainment journalist Matt Belloni recently told Marketplace. “I think they’re saying, ‘Wait a second, my show can just disappear?’”

Streaming video was supposed to be a story of abundance. Watch what you want, when you want. But the salad days are over. Today, there are more than 200 streaming services, and heightened competition alongside slow growth has led to price hikes and cost-cutting measures, including dropping shows to avoid paying residuals to actors and creators. The comedy Arrested Development, which Netflix is set to remove this month, is the latest to meet this fate. Due to its popularity, another streaming service will likely scoop the show up in its entirety (for now, you can still view the first three seasons on Hulu). But the future of dozens of less visible works of television and film remains unclear.

There’s a lesson here from the fall of the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The fabled library, believed to have been founded around 300 B.C.E. during the reign of Ptolemy I, is said to have contained the largest collection of manuscripts in the ancient world. The library sought to “collect the books in existence in every quarter,” calling on “every king and governor on earth to send ungrudgingly the books (that were within his realm or government),” including “the works of poets and prose writers, orators and sophists, physicians, professors of medicine, historians and so on,” according to one contemporaneous text. The library had reportedly acquired 54,800 scrolls at the time, and the account noted that this was just the start: “There is still a great mass of writings in the world, among the Ethiopians and Indians, the Persians and Elamites and Babylonians, the Assyrians and Chaldaeans among the Romans also and the Phoenicians, the Syrians and the [Romans] in Hellas.”

The library continued to grow in earnest, so much so that another branch was eventually built at the Serapeum, the sanctuary of the god Serapis, to house the overflow.

Then it all collapsed.

What can we learn from its destruction, some 2,000 years ago?

Myth-making often shrouds the answer. Take the famous opening episode of Cosmos, which sees Carl Sagan standing in front of what is left of the Serapeum. “Of that legendary library, all that survives is this dank and forgotten cellar,” he says, painting a bleak picture of the “pathetic, scattered fragments” of knowledge inside the building that survived the collapse. The task of rediscovering all of the writing and research contained in the library took millennia, says Sagan, bemoaning the dark age that followed.

But the library’s fall was not as sudden or complete as is generally understood.

Richard Ovenden, director of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, writes in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge that the Library of Alexandria did weather fires, plural—“major incidents in which many books were lost”—during its existence. But these weren’t what felled the library.

Instead, contemporary scholars believe that its demise was actually slow and drawn out.

“A lack of oversight, leadership, and investment spread over centuries seems to have been the ultimate cause of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria,” Ovenden writes, arguing that the end of the great library can be seen as “a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritization and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge.”

When the library did collapse, there had already been a dispersion of its knowledge across the ancient world. For instance, the creation of central repositories of knowledge, “while perhaps new to Greek tradition” with the creation of the Library of Alexandria, “was age-old in the Near East,” according to the 2019 study “Libraries before Alexandria: Ancient Near Eastern Traditions.” And it was thanks to these centers of learning that after the fall of Alexandria, scholars continued the work of collecting, translating, and sharing texts.

“Historians today are clear that there was no ‘dark age’ following the destruction of the Library of Alexandria,” Ovenden writes. “Knowledge continued to be gathered and learning flourished across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East in continuation of the work undertaken at Alexandria and other centers.”

In The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities, historian Violet Moller turns Euclid’s Elements, Ptolemy’s The Almagest, and Galen’s 3-million-word treatise on medicine into case studies of how key texts were not just preserved after the fall of the Library of Alexandria, but questioned and improved upon—“filtered through the minds of generations of scribes and translators, transformed and extended by brilliant scholars in the Arabic world, who in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance were gradually written out of history.”

But for the works that did ultimately vanish, the Christian Church’s campaign to suppress knowledge was aided by a major culprit: changing technology. Papyrus scrolls, upon which the library’s texts were recorded on, were infamously fragile and flammable. While the rise of parchment in the 3rd century C.E. led to a more secure record, it was also the likely cause of the disappearance of notable works, like the writings of the Greek poet Sappho. Contrary to the narrative that they were successfully destroyed by the Church, Ovenden writes that they were “probably lost when the demand was insufficiently great for them to be copied onto parchment.”

In a historical quirk, it was the competition between the library of Alexandria and the library of Pergamon, off the shore of Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, which may have sped up the age of parchment. Classicist Lionel Casson, who recounts the rivalry between the early libraries in his book Libraries in the Ancient World, notes the animosity that existed between Alexandria’s Ptolemy V and Eumenes II, whose reign is said to have overseen the construction of the library of Pergamon. Anecdotally, the story goes, it was when “Ptolemy stopped the export of papyrus … [that] the Pergamenes invented parchment.” Pointing to the long tradition in the Near East of writing on leather, Casson dismisses the idea that Pergamenes “invented parchment.” However, he suggests that “what they might have done was to improve the manufacture of leather skins for writing and increasingly adopt their use, moves that could well have been triggered by the desire to reduce Pergamum’s dependence on imports of Egyptian papyrus paper.”

Today, as we begin to mourn the end of the golden era of streaming, the Library of Alexandria offers a cautionary tale of how poor leadership, sustained neglect, and changing technology can cause an information collapse. But the library’s fall is not just a reminder of how an ambitious project to connect a world’s collections can falter. It also offers us hope that a collapse of information is never as sudden or as complete as it might seem at first.

As the embattled Arrested Development reminds us, there’s always money in the banana stand.

The post Here’s Ancient Solace for ‘Arrested Development’ Fans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the Zócalo/WeHo Reads event “Do Libraries Have a Future?” on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the West Hollywood Library, three librarians were challenged by Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez to shake off stereotypes and misconceptions about their professions—and predict what’s next for their places of work.

Rodriguez opened the conversation by asking the librarians to share their childhood library memories “before I go anti-library on these people,” a comment that elicited shock from the full-house crowd at the West Hollywood City Council Chambers.

The library is “one of the first places you go as a child where you have a certain degree of responsibility,” said Miguel Figueroa, director of the Center for the Future of Libraries at the American Library Association. He recalled his first laminated library card as “this tangible expression of growth and opportunity and responsibility. It’s a pre-driver’s license of sorts.”

Then the grilling began. Rodriguez recounted a few of the things people complain about in the library, including a large homeless presence and a confusing mission where a library can sometimes seem like a community center.

Susan Hildreth, former director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and professor of practice at University of Washington Information School, said that dealing with such a broad customer base is a challenge. But librarians want to help everyone, and have rules to keep patrons safe.

Susan Parker, deputy librarian at UCLA, cautioned that assumptions are in direct conflict with libraries’ missions. “Libraries are a place where we’re trying not to be judgmental on those levels,” she said. At UCLA, when a budget crisis caused the rollback of library hours that had been open 24/7, many librarians were surprised to learn about the crucial role they played in the lives of the community, including providing a nighttime support system for homeless students. “Libraries traditionally are about helping people in a private way,” she said. “As a child it was important to me to look up information that was maybe kept from me at home. For young people who are gay or trans—it’s a safe space for them to find out for themselves.”

Are libraries, asked Rodriguez, diluting their purpose by taking on the responsibility of social ills that other segments of society should have to deal with?

Figueroa pointed out that a lot of social services have been stripped away, and libraries are “one of the few civic assets still open to a lot of different people.” At the San Francisco Public Library, where Hildreth used to work, there’s now a social worker on staff. The best libraries become part of the solution, in part by teaming up with other organizations. Plus, Hildreth said, their mission is to share information, including civic information.

One of the classic purposes of libraries, said Rodriguez, is that they “exist to enlighten and nurture the electorate.” He asked the panelists: “Is that still true?”

“One of the challenges we’re now facing is there are multiple spaces where people are segmenting themselves,” said Figueroa. “The public library hopefully remains one of those civic spaces where you encounter people from different perspectives, where you have a level playing field.” By contrast, private spaces—even if, like Starbucks, they mimic the library in providing work and communal areas—ask for something in return.

Libraries are also finding new ways to convene people, like “maker spaces,” where children and families can be creative together and community events. The librarians on the panel agreed that flexibility is the key to fulfilling these many roles, whether it’s helping people switch between traditional books, eReaders, and audio books or transforming multipurpose spaces from one day to the next. It’s not an “either-or” situation but a “both-and” one, they said.

The demise of libraries is “a trope that’s very easy to put in a tweet,” said Parker. “If you are fortunate enough to be able to buy the book you want to read today on Amazon, have a laptop, subscribe to Internet in your home, maybe libraries are not obvious to you.” But they are a crucial resource to people who don’t have all those things. In fact, Hildreth said, more than 20 percent of the population doesn’t have private Internet access.

Before turning to the audience for questions, Rodriguez asked about the old “bun in the back of the head” librarian stereotype. “Is the public’s perception of librarians accurate?”

No, said Hildreth. “The perception that we’re very quiet, we’re unassuming, we just want to shelve the books” is totally inaccurate. “We are people who are engaged in our communities,” she said. “Most of the librarians I know, know their communities, know where they need to be—and they are seen as key players in their communities.”

The audience question-and-answer session featured a few fellow librarians and a number of library lovers asking about the future of the library—including the future of fines.

“We know library fines and fees are serving as a barrier for a number of users, particularly youth,” said Hildreth. At the same time, many parents and caregivers say that fines help develop a sense of responsibility. “Do we want to take that away from our young people?” Lots of libraries are considering changing their fine system or even eradicating them entirely.

We need to have an open dialogue about both fines and how libraries are funded, the panelists agreed. It’s a conversation.

Another audience member asked how libraries could address disparities in their communities. The best-funded libraries are usually in the neighborhoods that rely on libraries the least. Can libraries with more resources help those with fewer?

It’s complicated, said Figueroa, by the fact that libraries are locally funded. But national projects that encourage information sharing and program sharing have the potential to move toward a solution.

“We find ways to collaborate,” said Parker, adding that libraries are well-versed in moving collections around. But when it comes to other ways of working together, “there’s a lot of work to be done and it’s hard work.”

The post If You Think Libraries Are Redundant, Read This appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s not so very far away. The next time you see a tiny baby, bear in mind that she or he has a very good chance of living to see the 22nd century. What will the world of libraries look like then? Nobody can know—but perhaps we can talk about what libraries should be in that imaginable future.

For instance, how many libraries will there be? I can think of two good answers, both of which I hope are correct—and one very bad answer, which I hope is entirely incorrect.

The first correct answer is simple. There will be a library: one library, globally comprehensive and globally accessible.

That vision means we think of libraries as collections, which is one thing they are. The old model depended on physical collections of material widely and strategically distributed in locations where communities or institutions could create, sustain, and support them. If consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica was a good thing, then every library worth its salt had to buy a set periodically and figure out what to do with the old edition it replaced.

Now the EB and many other resources are available online. Yet libraries continue to “purchase” (it’s more like a rental at this point) such things, one at a time, at prices they feel are too high and publishers think are too low. The sheer inefficiency of such duplication is preposterous. We continue that way as much out of habit as out of necessity. The necessity that persists is that we cannot think of another way of funding the creation and dissemination of complex information resources except by distributing the cost widely among institutions and users.

That has to change. Once an encyclopedia or a book or a journal or a database is in digital form, there is no good reason why it should not be made as universally and freely available as possible, and no good reason why it should not be centrally held and maintained. Right now, major university libraries harbor knowledge riches galore, astonishing things, really—and we cannot share them. Most people who live on the planet today are unable to have access to sources of knowledge that, from a technical point of view, could be reached on their smartphones today—literally today, within the next hour of the moment you read this, if the provider made the choice to allow the access.

If that has to change, it will change. We will see the consolidation of collections and a consolidation of the technical infrastructure of presenting those collections. (Oh, there will be redundancy and backups, just as there is now for things like Google searches, hosted on many servers in many locations, transparently sharing the load. Such distribution speeds service and improves the resilience in case of disaster or emergency.) And we will see the emergence of business models for paying for what we now think of as “publishing” that allow completely free and open access to the contents of this global library.

The second correct answer to my original question is a little more complicated: There will be 3 million libraries.

Precise arithmetic is beside the point, but I got that number by taking the American Library Association’s estimate that there are now 119,000 libraries in the United States and extrapolating. There is some reason to hope that the growth of human population will top out gently at about 9 billion in the next decades, and so at the per capita rate we now enjoy in the U.S., that works out to 3 million libraries—one for every 3,000 people, which sounds good to me.

But these libraries will have changed. Their physical collections will all be what we now call “special collections”: unique materials they possess uniquely because of where they are and what their history might be. At Arizona State, where I am the university librarian, we have the public papers of Sen. Barry Goldwater. There will never be more than one copy of those papers, but they will retain historical value and we will cherish them. At some point we may also digitize them, but if we do, there will be no good reason not to deposit the digitized version in the global central library and make it universally accessible.

Readers will still make their way to the 3 million libraries to see whatever unique collections they have, but readers will also find in those places much of what they now go there to find: intelligent people engaged in the work of knowledge and the work of community. Librarians will be there as coaches, mentors, guides, facilitators, and other members of the public will be there as knowledge-seekers, knowledge-sharers, entrepreneurs of the spirit, and entrepreneurs of the world of business. Libraries are the ideal “third place” for a free society and will never lose that powerful attraction.

How confident am I that my first two answers are correct? I surprise myself when I say “mostly.” (I thought I was more cynical than that.) The good news is that if I am correct, then a lot of really good things will have happened to humankind. A single global collection universally accessible will mean that the human family has made great strides to overcome factionalism, division, sectarianism, and political pathology. If the library I envision is accessible to everyone who lives in what we now call North Korea, we’ll know the world is a better place.

I did say I had a third bad answer to offer, the one I hope is wrong. That answer would be a deeply pessimistic one: zero.

There are a lot of ways that pessimism could come true. Disastrous interplay of nuclear weapons, asteroids, and a collapsing climate—the loss of libraries would be one lesser symptom of ruination in a dystopian future. We could also lose libraries to hubris and shortsightedness. “We don’t need libraries any more; it’s all digital”—we’ve all heard some version of that peremptory dismissal, entirely worthy to be heard on the stage of a debate among presidential candidates.

But we do need libraries. In a world of superabundant information, they curate and collect and discriminate and care for the good stuff—the stuff really smart people have worked to create and preserve, the stuff you can rely on when you want to understand the world deeply and accurately, the stuff too complicated to come into existence by crowdsourcing, too unpopular to be foisted on us by corporations or politicians. Librarians—smart, professional, dispassionate about everything but the truth—are the Jedi knights of our culture’s future and deserve to be respected for that.

And libraries as places will be no less valuable than they are today. For however optimistic I may seem to be, it still seems prudent to realize that good people and smart people and idealistic people will still not be the only people on the planet. They will value then as they do now the opportunity to pursue knowledge and share insight in the company of others.

If we let ourselves be taken in by techno-optimism and carelessness and if we then let libraries fade away, we will be in a poorer place. There are many historical explanations offered for the disappearance of the great ancient library of Alexandria, but my personal judgment is that it did not fall victim to Julius Caesar or Christian monks or Islamic warriors. Libraries are more likely to disappear because the responsible leaders of a community deprive them of support, take them for granted, treat them dismissively.

But I can still be optimistic. The ancient library of Alexandria vanished somewhere in the first centuries of the common era, but it has in fact come back. With all the political, religious, and social challenges facing Egypt today, a gleaming new building on Alexandria’s harbor now completes its second decade as a place to meet, and a place to talk, and—most important of all—a place to read. We’ll always need a place to read.

The post The Future of Libraries Has Three Different Paths appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s why the NLM’s two-year-old Global Health Events collection archives born-digital material—webpages, blog posts, social media streams—published during outbreaks and other health crises. The archive includes items like blog posts from doctors in the field, tweets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and situation reports from international organizations. In the Global Health Events collection, you can read a cached post on the Doctors Without Borders blog, written by Liberian clinic staffer Amie Subah in February 2015, in which she describes the social stigma she faced after surviving Ebola; tweets posted to the hashtag #NepalEarthquake in May 2015; and the March of Dimes’ advice to parents concerned about Zika in February 2016.

The library’s paper collections are typically centered on people or organizations, and offer incidental perspective on any epidemics or outbreaks those people or organizations might have experienced in their lifetimes. (Christie Moffatt, the archivist in the library’s Digital Manuscripts Program who serves as the point person for the Global Health Events collecting project, cites the papers of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s as an example.) In making new collections of born-digital material, Moffatt and her fellow archivists can make the decision to center their collecting around an event or a theme instead. So the Global Health Events collection contains material on Ebola and Zika, as well as the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.

The web is huge, and there’s a lot of information out there. How do archivists decide when to start collecting links, and which links to save? The NLM team started collecting records for Ebola months after the initial epidemic began. The group learned from that experience and decided to start accumulating digital material whenever the World Health Organization declares a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The library’s Disaster Information Management Research Center, which maintains pages with links to official information from international organizations and major authorized social media feeds, provides a starting point for the archivists to find official information. The archivists use these links to push outward and begin collecting items like blog posts written by practitioners working in the field—the digital equivalent of the paper journal that a 19th-century doctor might have kept during an outbreak. Using the Internet Archive’s service Archive-It, the team captures a link, and decides how often the software should return to re-crawl the page and save new versions. The result is a collection that’s been fairly selectively curated by humans, with a vision for what’s worth saving.

Captured official material, like pages of the WHO’s website, gives one perspective on the way information about an outbreak spreads, letting us see how organizations have chosen to word their warnings and advice to people visiting their websites or social media feeds looking for information. But what about rumors, innuendo, false information—the fog that social media is so good at spreading during a breaking news event? I told Moffatt that, to me, that stuff was almost more interesting than the official record. She agreed, saying, “This is all just part of the story.” While being careful to make sure that browsers know that the information in a given saved link is not necessarily correct, the team makes a point of saving links that show how muddled up facts can get when traveling online.

Moffatt pointed me to a couple of links the NLM team has saved that offer a peek at that kind of shaky information. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration published a warning it had issued to an entrepreneur peddling a cure for Ebola; the NLM captured that warning, which contained details about Natural Solutions Foundation’s pitch to consumers. (“Nano Silver is the world’s only hope against Ebola and the other antibiotics/antiviral resistant pathogens.”) To illustrate public perception of the way Ebola news was spreading, the team grabbed an Oct. 7, 2014, New Yorker Borowitz Report column (“Man Infected With Ebola Misinformation Through Casual Contact With Cable News”). And the team saved a February 2016 Huffington Post debunking of a claim that Monsanto is responsible for Zika.

By setting Archive-It to periodically crawl hashtags like #Ebola and #EbolaResponse, the archivists hope to capture some of the picture of the way information spreads over time. In the future, researchers might use those saved tweets to carry out projects like the one described in this 2014 paper. A team of researchers at Virginia Tech used tweets sent during the Ebola crisis to map the spread of disinformation, tracking rumors like “Ebola vaccine only works on white people” and “The new iPhone 6 is infecting people with Ebola.” In the decades to come, people interested in the way Zika news worked its way through social networks might tap the NLM’s archived tweets to do so.

One of the most interesting tasks the team faces is imagining what uses future researchers might make of this information, and adjusting what they collect accordingly. To some degree, this mission is impossible. “We see so many examples now of collections of digital materials that have uses you never imagined,” Moffatt told me, referring to a project that looks at old ship’s logs to study changing weather patterns. “We try to collect as broadly as possible and as many perspectives as possible.” Who knows what future historians of medicine and public health may need?

The post What Will We Archive in the Future? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Eckert Papers were initially sold at a private auction in 2009. The sellers were apparently descendants of Eckert’s, and the auction sale was a surprise, because the papers were thought to have been destroyed after the Civil War. In 2012, a documents dealer in New Haven, Connecticut, offered the collection to the Huntington.

On its arrival at the Huntington, we decided that the collection could benefit from a collaborative effort to digitize and transcribe the telegraphs, and in turn the materials could offer valuable teaching tools for the classroom. To that end, the Huntington, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, North Carolina State University, and Zooniverse (a non-profit devoted to citizen science) applied for a grant from the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission to make the telegraphs more usable and discoverable. We also hoped to model collaboration among libraries, museums, social studies education departments, and private software companies.

Telegram from President Lincoln to General Weitzel, Apr. 12, 1865. From ledger United States Military Telegraph, War Department, Jan. 21, 1864-Dec. 7, 1865. Thomas T. Eckert Papers.

This joint effort has let us engage new and younger audiences by enlisting their service as “citizen archivists” to help digitize the telegrams. The crowd-sourcing component run by Zooniverse has allowed us to recruit about 2,000 interested individuals to transcribe the telegrams with greater efficiency and accuracy than could be done by staff at participating museums. The project is also designed to build digital literacy, critical thinking skills, and research proficiency, with activities that can be used for many years by classroom teachers and museum educators.

Beyond the historical value these documents carry, their most surprising revelation may be the striking resemblance they bear to today’s tweets, emails, and text messages. Most telegrams were written for brevity, and tapped out in Morse Code: shorthand communiques, queries, and commands. A great number of the telegrams were coded and proved impossible to crack. They offered the Union almost-instant intelligence about the war and its sweeping, rotating, and seemingly erratic movements and strategies.

The Civil War’s great, fiery, hour-by-hour drama was played out in hundreds of these dispatches, and things needed doing quickly. Some of the telegrams are riveting in their terseness. “Chattanooga Dec. 6 ’63,” one began. “Despatch just read from Gen. Foster indicates beyond doubt that Longstreet is retreating towards Virginia I have directed him to be well followed US Grant 4:30 PM.” Those 32 words were issued by Ulysses S. Grant, who was just weeks from becoming the Commander of the Union Army.

People of all ranks sent messages through the telegraph offices. Soft-spoken Abraham Lincoln was an articulate and eloquent spokesman for his causes, even as brevity was one of his hallmarks: The Gettysburg Address was only 272 words long, after all. The White House was close to the telegraph quarters—making the medium perfectly suited as a communications device for our 16th president. “I HAVE SEEN YOUR DISPATCH EXPRESSING YOUR UNWILLINGNESS TO BREAK YOUR HOLD WHERE YOU ARE. NEITHER AM I WILLING / HOLD ON WITH A BULLDOG GRIP, AND CHEW AND CHOKE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE,” Lincoln wrote—dare we say texted?—to Grant, by then the Commanding Officer of the Union Army, just months prior to the 1864 presidential election.

Thomas T. Eckert, seated left, with six telegraph assistants near Petersburg, Virginia, 1864. From James E. Taylor Collection: Scrapbook Two.

Sometimes telegraph operators helped soldiers and officers transmit personal messages. “A. Lincoln Telegraph lines have been down all day,” one transmission from December of 1862 began. “In a day or two our dead are all buried & the wounded are being well cared for the whole Army is in good condition but our loss will much exceed the figures I first named to you will probably reach ten thousand.” The author, “A.E. Burnside,” then noted that he’d sent a couple of dispatches to his wife earlier in the day, “which I hope you will allow to go through as they are very important to me personally.” This writer, of course, was Ambrose E. Burnside, Lincoln’s commander of the Army of the Potomac. Just three days earlier, Burnside had led the Union army into the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg, after considerable prodding from Lincoln. Things were tense, and the note is from a man whose reputation and whose troops have been badly diminished at the hands of the President.

Much like modern emails, the telegrams, stripped of almost all formality, were sometimes emotional but right to the point. In the middle of an October 4, 1863 report to General Halleck, William T. Sherman mentioned, “My eldest boy Willie, my California boy, nine years old, died here yesterday of fever and dysentery contracted at Vicksburg. His loss to me is more than words can express but I would not let it direct my mind from the duty I owe the Country.” Sherman then returned to his troops on the move, stoically carrying on with his patriotic duty to the Union cause.

These are the kind of contexts, and subtexts, that appear regularly in the telegrams. The war wasn’t fought on paper or via telegraph lines. It was waged in combat, with blood and indecision and in sorrow—and occasionally, with joy—but almost always with resolute strength. But like modern day iPhone jockeys, the senders and recipients of these 19th-century tweets, and the operators who kept it all working, understood the immediacy of the telegram and the value of instant communication: The things it could do to advance the cause of the war, direct strategic maneuvers, and, sometimes, ease pain.

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So rather than dwelling on that topic, which has become a favorite pastime of armchair futurists, let’s focus on the people affected by libraries instead of the collections contained within them. Whether individuals prefer paperbacks or reading on a mobile device is trivial compared to the fact that American society is becoming highly unequal. The trend suggests a Dickensian future—albeit one filled with smartphones. The real question is: How will the mission of public libraries evolve in a world filled with such gross inequality?

The gap between the rich and poor is reaching historic highs in the United States, with the rich getting richer while wages stall or fall for lower-income Americans, threatening to hollow out the middle class. The last time the U.S. experienced this level of inequality was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—around the same time that public libraries first started catching on because of the efforts of Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who donated $60 million to fund more than 1,500 across the country.

Yet the library patrons of the future might be more sympathetic to the cries of Carnegie’s most vehement critics, striking steelworkers who wanted higher wages and demanded to know: “What good is a book to a man who works 12 hours a day, six days a week?” And those grueling 19th century hours might even be preferable to the impermanent shift work of the gig economy (think Uber) or to the troubling trend of jobs being eliminated altogether by technology (think driverless Uber). What happens to all those people without stable employment? Will public libraries become their government-subsidized third space? Will public libraries be to temp workers what Home Depot parking lots are to day laborers? Probably. Increasingly, people will flock to libraries to access resources they can’t easily afford, but which they need to find work: a decent internet connection, computers with licensed software, and private meeting spaces for video interviews and conference calls. Maybe they’ll just want a place where they can socialize with others in similar situations, an outlet to stimulate their imaginations, or a place to escape and access entertaining content. After all, today’s libraries not only nurture the mind, but the soul.

To meet the needs of this vulnerable population, public libraries will need more staff equipped with strong technical, pedagogical, and community organizing skills. What if adult patrons could identify the types of projects they wished to work on and libraries in turn provided them with the resources to allow it to happen? Could libraries help users gain valuable experience that prospective employers would appreciate—in computer programming, cross cultural communications, and virtual collaboration?

If that sounds far-fetched, consider that this is precisely what many public libraries already do … for teenagers. Instead of looking to build bookless libraries or yet more maker spaces filled with dusty, unused 3D printers, library leaders should seek the advice of teen services gurus for inspiration. For example, in 2015 the San Antonio Public Library inaugurated its highly successful Teen Library, a new 6,000-square foot space that is designed much more to inspire and aid its users than house books and other materials, with plenty of room for teens to hang out in groups and explore high-dollar technology they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access.

At the same time, because so many of the underemployed will be seeking refuge in public libraries in between gigs, government may start deploying more of its other services through these facilities since it’s more efficient to centralize activities into as few administrative units as possible. In Aarhus, Denmark, for example, the public libraries double as “citizens’ services centers” where locals can register a change of address or apply for a pension. The same will be true here in the U.S. One day you might dispute your speeding tickets and apply for gun permits at your local public library.

But perhaps the greatest test for public libraries in the 21st century will be providing these services while still appealing to the more fortunate members of the new economy. Apart from the quaintness of the experience, why would wealthy people voluntarily visit a public library—one that, if improperly managed and under-resourced, could devolve into a dystopian, Apple Store version of the DMV? If the attraction was access to books and other content—whether digital or physical—then surely emerging technologies will provide more attractive alternatives over time. Without incentive to use these public spaces for themselves, wealthier Americans could oppose using their tax dollars to support libraries, or they could continue to support such funding, but under conditions that would take out much of the pleasure that comes from using this venerable institution.

Public libraries of the 21st century might end up looking a lot like the libraries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It may surprise readers to know that there was a time when public libraries debated whether it was appropriate to lend popular fiction to borrowers—imagine not being able to check out Harry Potter novels from your local neighborhood library! The idea that taxpayers would fund reading for pleasure was scandalous, and certainly not what Andrew Carnegie intended. He wanted libraries to focus solely on providing access to edifying materials that would transform the uneducated masses into a more productive workforce. When Carnegie famously called on his fellow rich folk to give away portions of their wealth to benefit humanity, he clarified that such assistance should only be directed to those who were willing to help themselves—using the upper crust’s narrow definition of self-sufficiency. If financial inequality persists, don’t be surprised if public libraries start further restricting the content patrons can access, treating certain types of reading as more appropriate than others.

No doubt the future still holds a lot of promise for public libraries. In particular, advances in technology and the adoption of Smart City practices—using data to track how well the public sector is doing its job and inform policymakers—should improve service delivery and greatly enhance the convenience, and therefore the perceived value, of public libraries. Growing inequality has the power to tear apart our society. Hopefully, public libraries will remain a common ground—for education, employment, and enjoyment—during a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than ever.

The post How Will Public Libraries Serve an Increasingly Unequal Society? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I get where this perception comes from. Google and Wikipedia can answer a lot of basic questions that we librarians used to tackle. Issues arising from unglamorous arguments over budgets or the government have also made times difficult for libraries, librarians, and other information professionals. But now that we’ve acknowledged those truths, it’s important to mention another: That librarians today influence the cutting edge more than ever before. We use our skills to bring pieces of the future to wherever you are.

Perhaps that’s why ours has become one of the professions that fixed-gear, bike-riding, tattooed hipster types have moved to in droves, as reported in an obnoxious style section article in the New York Times. Maybe that’s why some of our profession’s lingo, words like “metadata” and “curation,” have now found their way into the popular culture and lexicon. Seriously, you can’t throw a stone and not hit someone who is a “curator” of some obscure material or pursuit.

In any case, the idea of the librarian just sitting there in a quiet large building, wearing a cardigan and waiting for you to visit, is the only thing that is caught in the past. Even though we do love a good visit, and always have a cardigan ready for when the building’s climate control inevitably lets us down.

This might even be a golden age for librarians, sometimes now categorized as “information professionals.” Our culture seems to have reached peak curation, where almost every form of content is carefully chosen and presented for consumption, and the tech world is rushing to organize (and monetize) the insane amounts of information available at our fingertips. We librarians are right at the middle of it all, collaborating on all sorts of new projects and applications.

Look no further than Spotify, the streaming music application used by millions every day. It collects and provides access to millions of songs, features a searchable catalog, and curates quality choices that cut through the maddening amount of material that’s available. That sure sounds like the kind of things librarians do every day.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that companies like Spotify and Facebook do in fact have librarians (more than one even!) on staff who collaborate with developers and other bright people to cultivate an experience that has become embedded in your daily internet habits. Of course, they may or may not be called “librarians” in these positions, but the skillset is the same. Cataloging, curation, metadata creation, data management, programming. From the visual presentation of the app, the extensive organization of the information, down to the algorithm that selects songs for your Discover Weekly playlist—our fingerprints are appearing in the core of these new media applications.

Librarians are also innovating via new initiatives within more traditional spheres, pooling our resources and brainpower to build systems and applications that bridge past ideals with current trends and future possibilities. One result of these efforts has been a push to build portals that harness existing digitization efforts to make archives and special collections materials more available to people where they live, via mobile phones and the internet. This offers researchers the information equivalent of one-stop shopping.

Take the creation of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a major leader in this realm. Using metadata records as its engine, this portal brings together millions of items from museums, academic libraries, and public libraries from all over the country in one searchable site. For example, if you were searching for information about the Gold Rush, you could pull whatever materials are available via your local library or university catalog, but DPLA gives you the opportunity to find materials documenting different experiences via libraries in California, Washington, or beyond with one search.

Furthermore, all of the data is open-access, which means any librarian anywhere can grab it and transform it to develop new applications and unique experiences for users. Omnia, for instance, merges all of DPLA’s data with all the entries from another large European library portal, creating a searchable timeline.

Silicon Valley companies have enviable research and development budgets, but they often lack the collaborative spirit and greater-good mentality that drives public-sphere librarians. In the meantime, many libraries, especially in public and academic institutions, have money to keep the lights on and provide key services like reference and outreach, but don’t always have the means to innovate or build new projects. We have to hunt for outside funding opportunities, competing to score grants to push new initiatives. A frustrating number of good ideas can’t find funding and miss their window of opportunity.

Burnout from this battle for dollars is one of the most significant threats to public sector librarianship as it currently stands, dis-incentivizing librarians to dream up creative ways to make knowledge and information available to the wider world. Yet we’re a more resilient bunch than you think. We’ve already survived the transition to the computer age, Google, even e-books—what’s another set of challenges?

It’s officially time to toss those old jokes into the vortex where Borat impressions now reside and allow our perceptions of the librarian to evolve. We’re constantly adding new skills, services, and technologies to our expansive toolkit, even if sometimes we have to implement them in the scrappiest way possible. This gives us the ability to move across various industries and shape them with our influence.

I’m not sure where it’s written in the ancient library tomes just how much flexibility and evolution this profession actually requires. But the nature of our work ensures that, despite claims to the contrary, we’ll never be stuck in the past. For librarians, the future is always right now.

The post How Librarians Are Quietly Shaping Our Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course, as we argue in our Inquiry, Why Libraries Will Shape the Future, the purpose of libraries and librarians—to disseminate information—is more relevant than ever in the internet age. But what of the physical spaces, which Mark Twain called “the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them?” Will these institutions that once helped define communities still exist? And why should they?

In advance of “Do Libraries Have a Future?” a Zócalo Public Square event in partnership with WeHo Reads, we asked eight writers to reflect on the most memorable library they ever visited, what it meant to them, and whether it should exist in 100 years.

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To better understand the Osher Library’s work, I spoke to Ian Fowler, the facility’s director. Fowler told me about the advanced imaging technology that the library uses, including a 60-megapixel camera used to capture especially large maps, and a new 3D camera that allows the library to render globes. “The hardest part,” Fowler told me, “is getting a 100 percent accurate digital representation of the coloring. That involves recalibrating our camera for each shot.” Accordingly, properly digitizing a single map can take half a day or more. So far, it has scanned somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of its flat maps and 10 percent of the atlases in its collection.

Creatio Universe, 1720.

This isn’t a purely technical endeavor—old-fashioned research still plays an important part. Once an item from the library has been scanned, catalogers carefully examine it, working to add as much metadata as possible, from basic facts about provenance and size to subtler details about notes scribbled in the margins or advertising materials on the reverse. Thanks to this work, the library has sometimes uncovered details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, as when a cataloger working on an atlas recently discovered unusual notations such as poems that a past owner of the volume had added.

Digitization also presents scholars with a new way of looking at maps, since, according to Fowler, “you can get a lot more detail than you could even looking through a magnifying glass.” As Matthew Edney, Osher professor in the history of cartography, points out, you can also dwell on an image longer than you could while studying a physical item under controlled conditions. “Rare book rooms kick you out,” he told me, but you can take your time with digital copies.

In some cases, that’s allowed Edney to discover new features of maps that he thought he already knew well. He points in particular to an 18th-century map of New England that was once owned by Hugh Percy, a British army officer who was a key player during the battles of Lexington and Concord. “Staring at it on screen, you realize there are these faint pencil lines, possibly indicating tentative knowledge,” Edney said. As he explains in a recent paper on the topic, such observations helped him better understand how Percy likely used the map—offering a picture of what the map meant at the time, and not just what it shows.

A map of the most inhabited part of New England, 1755–1768.

It’s this quality of digital maps—their ability to help us recognize the practical dimensions of cartographic texts—that may be most important for historians, since a map does much more than provide us with a sense of place. “People always assume that a map is defined by the part of the world it shows,” Edney told me. “It’s actually clear that cultural conventions, social conventions, define the nature of the map far more.” Looking at different maps from a single era can reveal competing ways of acting on and making sense of the world, much as comparing the cartography of different eras can help reveal how those ideologies and attitudes change. Digitization can make it easier to think through such issues, in part because it allows you to set archival items—which may be housed in different libraries located far apart—beside one another.

Paradoxically, however, digitization may also make it more difficult to parse the larger context of a map—or any archival object. “As soon as you turn a primary source into an image, you start to lose something,” Edney suggests. Citing the rare books scholar Michael Suarez, he points out that the first thing to go is the larger bibliographic context that comes with an object: All of those details about where it was printed and who owned it that typically accompany an entry in an archival database. Though such information ultimately accompanies a digital record, it’s easier to neglect it, thanks to the relative simplicity of access. Second (and more difficult to reconstitute on a computer screen) are the physical details of an object—its size, its smell, the grain of the paper. These are the features that can help us situate an object within its vanished lifeworld, showing us what it meant to those who made it, along with the ways it helped them make meaning from the world more generally.

Map of Seville in Spain, 1750–1760.

The Osher library strives to frame its virtual copies of maps as fully as possible. Sometimes that means photographing beyond the edges of the image, revealing how the paper crumbles its edges or the binding of the book in which it appears. But there’s only so much they can do—especially when it comes to scale. “Online, everything looks the same size. That’s one of the things that shocks people sometimes when they come in,” Fowler told me. Though the library indicates how large an item is, researchers are still sometimes shocked when they request an item only to find that “you have to put eight tables together to unroll it.”

When all that context drops out, you’re left with the mere content of the map, which can make it harder to understand in truly historical terms. Jonathan Senchyne, director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and a graduate school colleague of mine), says that this can sand down the historical texture of an object. “There’s always a temptation to think about something that’s been [digitized] in presentist terms,” Senchyne told me. In other words, it’s challenging to break free from our own ways of understanding and moving through space when we only access the past through a digital lens.

Map of the state of Maine. By Moses Greenleaf Esq. 1820.

There’s still a great deal to be found in such images, especially for those who appreciate the aesthetics of cartographic form. Look through some of the featured items on the Osher Library’s website, and you’ll come across an 1820 map of Maine, richly colored by hand; a gorgeously detailed Dutch map of the world from a century before on which shipping routes radiate out of islands like mercantile stars; a hand drawn diagram of a German river’s course; and much more. Without additional information, however, some of the other items in the collection—its 1750 manuscript land survey autographed by George Washington, for example, on which that formidable signature could easily vanish into its relatively humble surroundings—might lose some of what makes them special.

“When digitization started, a lot of people thought that would replace looking at the maps in person,” Fowler said. Today however, he and other cartographic librarians advocate studying them beside the physical ones when we can, drawing on the mutual advantages of print and digital. Those who don’t have the luxury to make their way to Portland, Maine, can still learn a great deal from the library’s collections, however, so long as they think carefully about how to approach them.

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