Amy wonders what a library is

Recent events have required me to update my professional philosophy, which eventually attempts to answer the question “What are libraries for?” The text is largely attempted from my side of a conversation between myself and Barbara Sobol about library value presented at the UBCO Leader in Residence Conference.

The Library idealized is a kind of socialist utopia—abundant access to the sum of humanity’s knowledge and culture, regardless of personal demographics or situation. Perhaps it was this tenor of thought that lead Borges to imagine Paradise as “a kind of library,” in a quote that has graced many an office door, email signature, and social media profile of librarians ever since. However, the trap of advancing the library as an unqualified force for good—a utility player, the heart of campus, always ready to lend a hand—is the erosion of identity, the loss of boundaries, and an accompanying loss of core strengths. My job as an Assessment Librarian is to evaluate the library’s impact and demonstrate the library’s value—to ask and to answer whether and how the library is fulfilling its purpose. But to evaluate the library’s mission fulfillment requires a firm sense of its purpose and role, and what I have come to realize is that among the profession, there is no single, cohesive idea of what the library is.

In March 2020, my normally expansive job duties—liaison, instruction, assessment, e-resources, data services, website management—contracted to the point where I was spending the majority of my day-to-day work troubleshooting and fixing access problems with library e-resources. Corresponding with vendors, adjusting settings, tweaking EzProxy—all of that was now taking most of my time; the jump is evident in the stats for our ticketing system. While it’s tempting to believe that these problems were a byproduct of the COVID-19 lockdowns, it is far more likely that these were existing issues suddenly being reported, because access to usual workarounds—coming to campus, trying different computers, getting a print copy—was cut off. Conducting interviews for my web usability study on my last day in the office before the lockdown, a faculty member said as much to me: she would run into problems at home and then just try again from the office where it would usually work. It took a global pandemic to showcase problems that were already there—that we were ignoring, basically. At a university like TRU where Distance support already is, or should be, built into our bones, this demonstrated conflict with our stated value of open access had the makings of a reckoning. We started to make changes that we should have made years ago.

The opportunity that accompanies a reckoning is a new urgency to address the ongoing value conflicts within the librarianship profession. As an example, in those few moments in early 2020 where I had time to reflect, I was thinking about my usability study, where I was faced with the ubiquitous idea of “The Library is Everywhere.” This slogan was maybe once a rallying cry to expand our minds but is now treated as axiomatic: The library is everywhere. Libraries are for everyone. The unfortunate reality is that most of what I was encountering in my daily work-life were service or resource gaps where the library couldn’t reach. Setting aside the level of digital literacy required to access our systems in the first place, Internet access is far from universal, and in terms of our digital resources, libraries are almost completely reliant on the stewardship of external proprietary vendors in a way that I see as antithetical to both the purpose of libraries and the skillsets of library workers.

Additionally, the “library is everywhere” narrative remains fairly resource-centric; our services are necessarily confined by time and staff hours, and also by location. There were many times during the COVID-19 remote delivery period where I would wake up in the morning to have an online research consultation with a student in India, who would then go straight to bed afterwards because it was after midnight their time. Libraries need to pull back from “the library is everywhere” and “libraries are for everyone” because we use these slogans as a mantra, or perhaps a shield—to blind us to the myriad places where we’ve fallen short. And these blind spots have prevented us from answering that question, “What are libraries actually for?”

I don’t believe libraries want to be everywhere; the idea of everywhere is unsustainable, and the concept of the “everywhere library” leads to our professional boundaries dissolving outside of our control. Not only are libraries everywhere, but there is looming pressure to be everything—for library workers to be social workers, and healthcare workers. We’ve expanded past our traditional services to the point where I understand why the public fixates the image of a building full of books: because it’s tangible and easy to grasp. 

Ultimately, any resolution in value conflicts comes down to making choices about priorities. I don’t think that many in the library world like making choices, because it means that not everyone can win. But the only way we can demonstrate care is by making conscious, deliberate choices. In order to define what libraries are, and from that what our values are and how we can make an impact, we are going to have to identify and prioritize our core services, and from that, make decisions about where we will invest resources. Possibly the most important thing we can do is to recognize the choices we are already making, both public-facing and behind the scenes. Allocating resources and devoting time are choices that reflect priorities. Resources and time lead to growth and potential.

The COVID-19 lockdowns and the associated remote delivery years were in many ways a monkey’s paw answer to everyone, including me, who always wished that we could get to a place where no one could honestly say “we’ve always done it this way.” We saw very quick innovations and adaptations in the ways libraries provided service—some type of touchless borrowing/curbside pickup pretty much everywhere; research consultations moved to the remote environment, and instructional techniques adapted for the virtual classroom. But more importantly, we’ve finally seen glimmers of recognition of the need for flexibility and care in the way that employees approach their work. Work-lives can never be fully separate from our home-lives; trauma cannot be compartmentalized, either by library employees or by library users. We still have the opportunity to establish ongoing trauma-informed, care-centered practices and to expand as far as we can in making value choices that center care in library policies and operations.

And so, to progress towards this end, I must provide some kind of answer to that question, “what is the library for?” And my working theory is this: that the ideal library provides care for our communities through a just redistribution of access to knowledge and creativity resources. In order for this vision to be realized, changes are needed. First, we need to divest ourselves of paternalistic notions of care, because learning analytics and surveillance technology have both co-opted care rhetoric almost beyond recognition. But real care isn’t punitive; it’s building trust that flows outward and downward first before we can expect it back from our communities. Second, we need to cultivate an inclusive and accessible understanding of what “community” means, which is especially difficult in academic libraries, which are already exclusive to those who can afford the tuition. And as library workers, we have to recognize ourselves as a part of those communities we serve and assert that we are also entitled to a caring, respectful library environment.

The final, most drastic change needed is that libraries need a real, collective understanding about what a just redistribution of knowledge resources looks like; and I don’t believe this is possible while we remain beholden to proprietary systems. For example, while I imagine that Discovery layers were conceived partially as equalizers in terms of access to resources, the reality is: we have EDS, which is an Ebsco product, so when we’re looking at big deal packages, we end up choosing a lot of other Ebsco offerings in part because—surprise!, they work really well with our Discover layer. Then Information Literacy classes go on to teach a conception of authority that lionizes these proprietary resources in the name of getting students to “use the library.” So, the truly caring library would need to own our own systems, which would require at the very least, a massive redistribution of time and monetary resources into infrastructure. Is this achievable? It’s not impossible, but for librarians it necessitates a collective commitment to a vision of ourselves that’s very different than the current reality. To succeed in my work, I must balance two warring premises: first, that the ideal library—providing care through just access to knowledge resources—is the goal of my work; and second, that I am not meeting this goal and cannot under current conditions and systems. To lose sight of the first is to feel uprooted, burnt out, and to forget why I chose this place and this profession at all. To forget the second is to continue uncritically, perpetuating the systemic injustices that the ideal library would seek to remedy.