Category: Politics of Librarianship

A public existence

Posted on by Alissa

I know angry blogging doesn’t get people very far these days, but I am so sick of all this.

I am so sick of libraries not prioritising queer safety. I should know better than to expect anything decent from IFLA, but their latest statement defending their choice to hold the 2024 World Library and Information Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates—a country with a shockingly poor human rights record, and where homosexuality is illegal—is a masterful exercise in defensive bullshit. Among several shocking statements is this jaw-dropper: ‘The Governing Board was equally aware that every time we hold a congress, regardless of our host, there are some countries or communities that are excluded.’ (Is IFLA suggesting the queers take one for the team this year so IFLA can take Emirati oil money? Seriously?!) The IFLA president-elect, Vicki McDonald, who put her name to this statement, is also the CEO of the State Library of Queensland. Australian librarianship is complicit in queer erasure.

I also noticed that the ALIA president, Jane Cowell, runs a public library service where drag queen storytime was recently ‘moved online’ at one of its branches. I don’t know whether that was the branch manager’s decision, or Jane’s, or the council’s, but for Jane to subsequently write a column for the latest issue of InCite (volume 44, issue 2, page 5, paywalled) talking about the difficulties faced by libraries in the face of such ‘community backlash’ and fail to mention that her own library service caved into said backlash is a stunning display of hypocrisy. Replacing in-person storytimes with online events has the same effect as cancellation: that is, of removing queer activities from visible public space. It is exactly what the fascists want. Australian librarianship is complicit in queer erasure.

We are not an ethical profession when we behave this way.

What would a culturally safe library look like for queer people? Aside from the absolute bare minimum of no neo-Nazis protesting outside (which, in the absence of a police force prepared to protect the queer public and not far-right protesters, would have to be achieved by private security or some other deterrent force). It would look like simply having a safe and gender-neutral place to pee. Queer lives and themes represented in book displays, both for Pride and for other things, fully included as part of modern society. Staff wearing pronoun badges and rainbow lanyards (optional, but appreciated). Drag queen storytime held in-person, not erased and moved online. Targeted collection development by queer authors. Own-voices tags in the catalogue. Homosaurus vocabulary in the catalogue. Not being asked one’s gender upon signing up for a library card, or at the very least having a free-text field. Seeing oneself not only reflected, but welcomed, in a library’s physical and digital space.

I can’t believe I have to say these things out loud, but sadly I have learned that hard-fought-for human rights—and the acquiescence of the broader public to queer existence—cannot be taken for granted. Queer people deserve to exist in public venues. Queer people deserve to be safe in public venues. And while IFLA WLIC is a private event, it also has grand aspirations of being a conference where people from all corners of the Earth can meet and learn from each other. ‘Change happens through dialogue & certainly cannot happen if we are not present,’ reads the IFLA statement. Yes, it certainly cannot happen if a whole class of attendees cannot safely be present in the country at all.

Already there is a lot of anger and resistance to IFLA’s decision: strong statements already from the Association of French Librarians (ABF), the Swedish Union of Librarians (DIK), the Brazilian Federation of Associations of Librarians, Information Scientists and Institutions (FEBAB) and the Finnish Library Association. It is deeply heartening to see such institutional support and solidarity with queer library workers and communities. Not everyone is capitulating to oppressive regimes abroad.

People in Australia are fighting back against neo-Nazi attempts to cancel drag queen storytime: Rainbow Community Angels are showing up in force to counter-protest, the socialist magazine Redflag penned an excellent article titled ‘Councils that cancel LGBT events are helping the fascists win. It has to stop’, unionists from the Australian Services Union Vic/Tas branch are organising for public library workers to be safe at work and hold safe queer community events. Drag queen storytimes have been successfully held, albeit with a lot of noise, in Newcastle NSW and at Maylands Library in Perth WA. Not everyone is capitulating to fascists at home.

ALIA’s recent statement supporting library staff was nice, I guess, but predictably tepid and frustratingly vague. I wish ALIA would put out a much stronger statement affirming the rights of queer people to exist safely in libraries and the value of representing queer lives in library spaces and collections, and by the way, maybe Dubai isn’t a great choice for a global library conference. I suspect I’ll keep wishing.

FLASHback: Reimagining the Australian Extension to LCSH

Posted on by Alissa

Australian library catalogues speak American English. This has pissed me off for as long as I can remember (long before I started working in libraries). I want to do something about it.

Pink and grey Polaroid camera

Thing is, Australian librarians have wanted to do—and have done—something about this for decades. The venerable John Metcalfe thundered about the increasing use of American language, by way of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, in Australian libraries in the late 1960s (‘I have a rooted objection to consulting foreign language catalogues; my language is Australian English’)1. Successive groups of cataloguers and other interested librarians edited and produced two editions of the List of Australian Subject Headings, intended to supplement LCSH, in the 1980s (First Edition of the List of Australian Subject Headings, or FLASH) and early 1990s (Second Edition, or SLASH). Sadly, the ANBD Standards Committee resolved to move away from most of this work in 1998 with the impending move to Kinetica2; Ross Harvey lamented the decline of Australian subject access the following year3.

These days it’s fair to say the Americanisation of our public and academic library catalogues is not a priority for library managers. School libraries, of course, largely use the in-house SCIS thesaurus, designed by Australians for Australians, and certain special libraries such as AIATSIS, ACER and the federal Parliamentary Library maintain their own thesauri. But the publics and academics, where the vast majority of cataloguing is outsourced, cling to LCSH as their primary subject controlled vocabulary. I suspect it’s more out of apathy than loyalty.

Today the Australian extension to LCSH sits on a forgotten corner of the Trove website, quietly gathering dust, the content copy-pasted from the former Libraries Australia website. It has looked like this for at least a decade. Development policy? What development policy?! From experience, the only parts of the extension still in common use are the compound ethnic descriptors (Vietnamese Australians, Italian Australians, etc) and the ability to subdivide geographically directly by state (eg Ducks—Victoria—Geelong, rather than Ducks—Australia—Victoria—Geelong). These local terms are coded as LCSH (ie, 650 #0) even though they’re not.

I couldn’t understand why this crucial aspect of Australian bibliographic culture was (is) being completely ignored. I thought a lot last year about what a solution could look like. I was deeply torn between doing free work for the Americans—that is, pushing for an Australian SACO funnel, which would make contributing to LCSH easier and more accessible for Australian libraries4—and building local vocabulary infrastructure here at home to enable libraries to describe resources for Australian users in Australian English. Neither option is perfect, and each would require a fair bit of work and maintenance.

What swayed me towards the latter was remembering that an Australian SACO funnel wouldn’t actually solve the core issue as I see it: LCSH will always use American spellings and American words as preferred subject headings. It might include alternate spellings or words as ‘use for’ or non-preferred terms, but ultimately it will always call things ‘Railroads’ and ‘Airplanes’ and ‘Automobiles’ and ‘Turnpikes’. It will always be compiled for the primary benefit of the US Library of Congress. The status of LCSH as the de facto standard subject vocabulary for Anglophone libraries worldwide is a secondary consideration.

So I thought—what if we brought the FLASH back? What could a revived Australian extension to LCSH look like? I wanted to know where we got up to in the 1990s, how many uniquely Australian terms might be used today, whether it would be worth re-compiling these into a new supplementary vocabulary, and how to encode, host, maintain and govern such a vocabulary for maximum benefit and impact.

One week, fifty-one dollars and 177 scanned pages later, I had a PDF copy of the unpublished second edition of the List of Australian Subject Headings (SLASH) from 1993, thanks to the State Library of New South Wales (the only holding library) and a tip from ALIA. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the early nineties, a time I am too young to remember, with thesaurus terms reflecting Australian society, culture, politics, and bibliographic anxiety about particular Americanisms.

Analysing this document will be quite a task. I am fortunate to have institutional access to NVivo, a ‘qualitative data analysis computer software package’ (thanks Wikipedia) that researchers use for things like literature reviews and analysing interviews. I am not an academic, but I suppose I am now a researcher.

I’m currently tagging (what NVivo adorably calls ‘coding’) thesaurus entries by theme, where there is some overlap:

  • First Nations people and culture
  • Australian plants and animals
  • Australian English re-spellings of LCSH terms
  • Uniquely Australian terms and concepts not found in LCSH
  • Outdated or offensive terms
  • Interesting terms for further discussion (this category won’t be included in the final analysis)

First Nations terms would these days be drawn from the AIATSIS thesauri and AUSTLANG. Many terms for Australian nature and culture (such as ‘Mateship’) have since made their way into LCSH proper, and many offensive terms have recently been, or will shortly be, addressed by LC. I want to know what’s left over: how many terms, in which thematic areas, whether it’s worth exploring further. It’s entirely possible that after I’ve narrowed down the list to Australian concepts not yet in LCSH, and Australian spellings that will never be in LCSH, it might not be worth doing anything. I don’t know yet, and I’ve decided I’d like to find out.

So far I’ve only finished coding the As, but it’s a fascinating exercise. Some choices made in SLASH are still ahead of where LCSH is today, such as the reclamation of ‘Indians’ to refer to people from India5 (the SLASH term for Native Americans has, uh, not aged well). Other choices reflect divergences between Australian and American English that I suspect have since narrowed, such as preferring ‘Flats’ over ‘Apartments’.

Over the next few weeks or so I’ll hopefully code the rest of the SLASH headings and assemble a corpus of data to guide my next moves. I’d love to hear from anyone who likes the idea of a revived Australian extension to LCSH, even if they might not be so sure how their library could practically implement it. Catalogue and vocabulary maintenance is a lot easier now than it used to be (depending on your ILS—some exclusions apply!!) and I’m reasonably confident that we could make something cool happen. We’ll see what the data says…

  1. Metcalfe, J. (1969). Notes of a contribution by Mr. J. Metcalfe on LC Subject Cataloguing as Central Cataloguing Used in Australian Libraries. Seminar on the Use of Library of Congress Cataloguing in Australian Libraries, Adelaide. Cited in McKinlay, J. (1982). Australia, LCSH and FLASH. Library Resources & Technical Services, 26(2), 100–109. ↩
  2. Trainor, J. (1998). The future direction for Australian subject access. 45th Meeting of the ANBD Standards Committee. Retrieved January 12, 2023. ↩
  3. Harvey, R. (1999). Hens or chooks? Internationalisation of a distinctive Australian bibliographic organisation practice. Cataloguing Australia, 25(1/4), 244–260. ↩
  4. You don’t have to be a member of SACO to propose new or changed LCSH, but I understand that it helps—the form for non-SACO members is missing some crucial detail, such as the correct email address to send it to, and proposers are often not notified about the progress of their submissions. ↩
  5. For more on this heading, see Biswas, P. (2018). Rooted in the Past: Use of “East Indians” in Library of Congress Subject Headings. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 56(1), 1–18. ↩

Beyond ‘Ditch Dewey’ in the academic library

Posted on by Alissa

An old 90s television displaying a blue screen, set in front of a red brick wall

‘Why don’t we just ditch Dewey?’

Well, why don’t we just. After all, it’s a fair question, provocatively asked by a client services librarian at a session of our week-long end-of-year zoom gathering. My heart sank. Of course somebody asked this. A fellow colleague cheekily posted in the zoom chat ‘Your time to shine, Alissa!’ I can’t recall ever meeting him properly, but I guess he knew who I really was? I could see the University Librarian about to respond, as the Q&A portion of the hour was intended for the library executive, when suddenly I found myself interrupting, unmuted, to over a hundred people:

‘Uh, could I just say something here?’

With approximately zero seconds notice I ad-libbed five or so minutes of explanation around this idea, having entirely forgotten to put my camera on. My hands were shaking by the end of it. Surprise public speaking is really not my thing.

Here’s a much fuller version of what I think I said, with some added points that I only thought of after a strong peppermint tea and some chillout time with my fern collection. I know my comments were recorded for an internal audience but I’m deliberately not going back and listening to them! While I’m not a classification expert, I have spent many years agitating for more critical attitudes to this work, and I am the metadata team leader here, after all. If anyone was going to give a (decent) answer to this question, it was gonna be me.

Smart move, loser. Now you’re gonna have to say something!

Shut up, brain.

These days, ditching Dewey is no longer an outrageous, unthinkable suggestion. Only 19% of American academic libraries were found to be using DDC in 2018, with that number steadily dropping. The biggest problem now is what to replace it with. If there existed a better classification system for generalist academic libraries like ours, chances are someone would be using it already. I could spend my entire career devising something better and still never be finished – and it’s not like OCLC are resourcing this work for DDC anymore. The only other system in wide use in Australia is Library of Congress Classification (LCC), which isn’t exactly a better option. It encodes the biases, perspectives and priorities of the United States government, just like LCSH does, and why would we want that in our library? The nexus of classificatory power is located far, far away from us, when it needs to be right here. LCC has a tendency to historicise Indigenous peoples—that is, place everything about them in the history section, as if they have ceased to exist entirely—and encodes archaic and offensive perspectives on topics as diverse as Arabic literature and the geography of Cold War-era Eastern Europe.

Genrefication isn’t really an option for academic libraries. Our collections are designed for serious research and study, not recreational reading or other types of lifelong learning; whimsical genres are largely inappropriate for an academic setting. Besides, even public library genrefication projects, such as the one at the flagship branch a stone’s throw from my office, are often built on Dewey’s foundations; the books are shelved in distinct genres, yet continue to use a DDC number as a shelfmark, meaning the substrate logic remains the same but is made impenetrable to a casual browser. It makes the browsing experience more frustrating, because you no longer have the granularity of Dewey to guide you, only a broad category. Academic library users are typically quite focused in their browsing. We couldn’t just say ‘here’s the economics section’ and leave them to it—we need the kind of granularity only a formal classification system can provide.

Our print collections have been largely unavailable for browsing for the best part of two years. We’ve been doing distance education for decades and have a large and growing cohort of exclusively online students. It’s not like a lot of people are actively browsing our physical collections right now. Also, reclassifying an entire print collection fills me with dread! My team of 1.6 FTE are nowhere near resourced enough for such a enormous undertaking – physically retrieving, reclassifying, restickering and reshelving every single print book in our branches would take months and involve huge amounts of work. We just don’t have that kind of capacity.

Besides, is large-scale reclassification truly the best use of my team’s limited time and considerable talents? I feel like there are more immediate and more focused things my team and I can do to improve the cultural safety of our metadata. We could be adding AUSTLANG codes and AIATSIS subject headings to our First Nations materials, overlaying records from Libraries Australia that already feature this data. We could work to contextualise offensive and culturally unsafe depictions of First Nations topics, adding content warnings where necessary. We could work with our Indigenous knowledges institute and our colleagues in the Archives to apply Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels for materials we collectively hold, ensuring their provenance, protocols and permissions are clearly documented.

I had a conversation with one of our liaison librarians and her boss a few weeks ago about her campus library shelving First Nations Dreaming stories in 398.2, the myths and fairy tales section. The juxtaposition of core cultural and religious texts with lightweight children’s stories is manifestly inappropriate; the former’s continued placement here, in spite of clear DDC instructions to the contrary since 2003, is a damning indictment of the cultural incompetence of library cataloguers.1 My liaison librarian colleague mentioned this situation in the zoom chat—I suspect it was a surprise to many of our colleagues, including the University Librarian. I responded after I had finished speaking with ‘Absolutely – I look forward to fixing this next year’. I was going to do it anyway but it’s nice to have senior management buy-in for these things 🙂

The Dewey Decimal Classification was designed by a particular man, at a particular time, in a particular place, with a particular collection and for a particular audience. His notoriously questionable values and those of the classification system that bears his name are, by and large, not those we share today. But who is ‘we’? Who gets to put books where? Whose values are encoded and embodied in the placement of books on shelves? What values would our institution like us to project in our physical and digital spaces? What about the multitude of value systems that our students and researchers bring to those spaces? How do we represent such multitudes in a linear shelf arrangement? Should we even try?

Don’t get me wrong, colleagues: I am all in favour of doing classification differently. But please don’t underestimate the difficulty and the sheer amount of work involved. It’s not as simple as just ‘ditching Dewey’.

At this point I ran out of courage and trailed off. The University Librarian, who I get the impression chooses their words carefully, said nothing for a few agonising seconds before inviting a question from another audience member. I had noticed them listening intently as I spoke. I hoped they didn’t mind me interrupting.

Two days later, in another session of our week-long end-of-year zoom gathering, the conversation turned to the ethics of AI, and how systems reflect the biases and perspectives of the people who build them. The UL remarked that the discussion really went to the heart of critical librarianship—recognising that the library profession also has a long history of perpetuating all sorts of biases and harms in our work. And I just about fell off my chair.

Was this real? Did I really work in a library where the University Librarian not only uses the phrase ‘critical librarianship’ in front of the entire staff but makes a point of actively living those values? Did I really hear the directors echo those comments and agree that perhaps it’s time to reconsider our classifiation practices? Did I really hear the UL namecheck me twice in the closing session, for both my colleague’s presentation on our project to fix our batch file loading processes and also for my impromptu Dewey comments? Did I really say all that in front of everybody?!

Truly I feel like I’m working in paradise. It’s one thing to blurt out my Big Metadata Feels in response to a question that wasn’t even directed at me, but it’s quite another for my senior management to embrace these ideals, making a point of publicly supporting the work I do and the things I am so passionate about. Hearing ‘critical librarianship’ out loud at work has just about made my year. Every day I am so grateful to be here. I can’t wait to make good on this promise.

  1. I did not say this part out loud. ↩

Libraries are for everyone! Except if you’re autistic

Posted on by Alissa

a succulent viewed from the top down

You know how someone can make a throwaway comment that hits you right in the soul and you can’t let it go? That’s been my week. It’s been really horrible for my brain, trying desperately to process this thing and make sense of all these feelings. I’m not great at this at the best of times. It’s exhausting.

I attended a large and important meeting this week. Lots of very senior people were there: heads of NSLA libraries, university librarians, people on assorted committees, people whose opinions are considered particularly valuable. A handful of people reading this blog would have attended this meeting. I’m still not completely sure why I was invited. I think it’s because I’m a notorious pain in the arse, but I was also a bit chuffed to have been selected because of who I am, not because of what job I do. I was initially quite anxious about attending a meeting full of senior managers (one of them being my own). Turns out that was the least of my worries.

While in a breakout session, the topic of conversation turned to hiring processes. Two public library directors complained loudly about how they kept getting applications from, and I quote, ‘process driven’ ‘introverts’ with ‘no communication skills’ and that they wouldn’t want to hire someone ‘if they can’t even make eye contact’ with others. I am an introvert. I am process driven (insofar as I want to make bad processes better). Communicating with people face-to-face is hard and takes a lot of energy. And I can’t always manage to look people in the eye.

These public library directors may as well have been waving a sign saying ‘Neurodiverse applicants are not welcome here’. It felt like an absolute, crushing rejection of everything I am, everything I have achieved, everything I have worked so hard for. They said out loud that they didn’t want people like me. That there is no place for me in their libraries. That I don’t belong here.

The kicker? I used to work for one of these public library directors. But they didn’t know I was autistic, and at the time, neither did I.

Last year a hospital psychiatrist came into my room in the mental health unit to have a chat. She asked some weird questions about my living arrangements and how I felt about people in general (‘baffling’). She didn’t say where she was going with these questions, but I had a vague idea. Her senior colleague continued this line of conversation the next day (rather more kindly, it must be said). After a while she said to me, ‘Have you considered the possibility that you might be mildly autistic?’

I said yeah, actually, I had, but I hadn’t done anything about it ’cause I figured it wouldn’t make a difference one way or the other. I’d kept filling in those online quizzes and ticking almost every box, but at perhaps half the strength, as if someone watered me down with a dose of the normals. I assumed it was mild enough that it didn’t impact me too much, and decided the pervasive stigma around autism outweighed any potential benefits of a formal diagnosis. Besides, it’s not like there’s a cure.

I was really thrown by the fact that the suggestion of mild autism came from the psychiatrists themselves. They knew next to nothing about my history. I hadn’t put the thought in their heads at all. But the more I thought about maybe being autistic, the more about me it explained. Having this knowledge changed my life. And I found myself wishing someone had told me this about myself twenty years ago.

I looked into getting a formal diagnosis. Accredited specialists have long waiting lists and charge over a thousand dollars for the privilege. The tests are pretty hard going. But as one of my psychologists explained to me, the diagnostic process for autism spectrum disorder is heavily weighted towards symptoms and behaviours displayed by white boys. Adults, women, people of colour and those with milder traits find it considerably harder to get diagnosed, because the tests aren’t designed to pick up on different manifestations of autism. Only in the last couple of years has this imbalance been recognised at all. Better testing is surely years away.

The other deeply problematic part of all this is one of the few real ‘treatments’ available: Applied Behaviour Analysis, or ABA.1 Essentially it teaches people how to ‘mask’, or hide, the symptoms of their autism. Supposedly this is so they can ‘fit in’ and ‘function’ in normal society, but it comes at immense cost to the autistic person, and makes little effort to understand the root cause of their behaviours. Keeping this mask on all day every day can be overwhelmingly difficult and require huge amounts of brain energy. A child might successfully mask all day at school and then have an exhausted meltdown at home, often unable to understand or verbalise why everything is so hard. ABA tells the autistic person that they are the problem. That they must contort themselves into the box society has made for them. That they have to do all the work to make others less uncomfortable with autism. That there’s no possibility of creating environments that are autism-friendly, where they don’t need to mask.

The creator of ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, expressly aimed to make autistic children ‘normal’. Contemporary scholars and activists have likened it to gay conversion therapy.2 I’ve had enough of society telling me not to be queer. I won’t tolerate it telling me not to be autistic, either.

Thing is, though, this isn’t the first time someone has said that people like me aren’t welcome in libraries. During a study visit undertaken as part of my library degree, the facilitating lecturer told our group that we needed certain attributes in order to be successful librarians and find work in the sector. I don’t recall precisely what she said, so I won’t put words in her mouth, but I know they were very similar to those listed by the public library managers the other day. I needed to be charismatic, I needed to be an extrovert, I needed to be a people person. I knew innately that I didn’t have any of the attributes she listed. And I almost quit my degree on the spot.

It felt like she was trying to pre-emptively weed out students whom she thought weren’t likely to get hired. But I don’t understand why she felt the need to do this. Evidently the only work she could conceive of as ‘library work’ was front-of-house service delivery. She couldn’t fathom libraries also needing people in back-of-house roles that might better suit introverts, such as collection development, metadata management and systems librarianship. She couldn’t picture her graduates thriving in those sectors. And she couldn’t imagine that libraries would be prepared for pay for these skills.

This lack of imagination is holding our sector hostage. Library managers, especially in public libraries, often can’t conceive of infrastructure work as being ‘customer service’ and therefore choose not to resource it. It’s hard to think about what libraries could accomplish if they resourced this work and cultivated these skillsets, not because I can’t imagine it but because deep down I know it will never happen. We could become community open data stewards, we could make classification less racist and more meaningful to our user communities, we could actually make our catalogues intuitive and simple to use (what a concept!). We could do all kinds of great things.

Libraries can’t possibly become better and more diverse workplaces if managers only hire people who are just like them.3 The sheer breadth and variety of library work means that libraries need all kinds of different skillsets, backgrounds and life experiences. Public librarianship is more than just the desk: while the nature of front-of-house roles can present some challenges for neurodiverse staff, there’s no reason they can’t be supported to excel and thrive in their work.4 Besides, autistic people are great! We’re really good at spotting patterns and aberrations, keeping things organised, methodically solving problems, cutting through bullshit and getting to the point. I reckon every library needs someone like this on staff.

It’s hard for me to not take these kinds of bad opinions personally. It often takes my brain a while (hours, sometimes days) to catch onto the fact that somebody might be speaking in bad faith, or be looking for attention or validation, or have an axe to grind. (Once I realised that most of Twitter fell into those three categories the site became much more tolerable.) When people say things to me or a group I’m in, my first instinct is to believe them. It took a long time, but I ultimately managed to discard the lecturer whose words hurt so much. I hope to shortly evict the public library managers from my brain. I’ve spent a whole week trying to understand why I was so deeply upset by their comments. They don’t deserve any more of my energy.

It was broadly agreed at this large important meeting that libraries have a PR problem; the common impression of librarians and library work doesn’t match the realities of today’s library services. Addressing this problem was beyond the scope of the meeting, but I refuse to believe that any real ‘solution’ involves discouraging quieter types from a career in libraries. They are not the problem. Autistic and neurodivergent people are not the problem. Ableist and unimaginative library management is the problem. It amazes me what senior librarians think is acceptable to say out loud. Do they think we’re not listening?

A guest author writing pseudonymously for the ALSC blog notes:

In the library world, conversations about autism are often predictable. They focus on autistic children or adults as users, and the challenges that they may present. Much less common, it seems, are discussions of the positive contributions that autistic people can make to a library, as library users but also as front-line librarians.5

It’s one thing to proclaim that ‘Libraries are for everyone!’ and create sensory storytimes and other programs for neurodiverse children, but it’s quite another to actively dissuade neurodiverse people from working in the sector. As a child, the library was a safe, comfortable, familiar space where I could indulge my interests and be myself. As an adult, and a library worker, I use my skills and talents behind the scenes to help maintain these spaces online. Being potentially autistic doesn’t always feel like a ‘superpower’, but it enables me to do the work that I do, and maybe even to be good at it.

And I definitely have a place here.

  1. DeVita-Raeburn, E. (2016). ‘The controversy over autism’s most common therapy’. Spectrum. ↩
  2. Gibson, M. and Douglas, P. (2018). ‘Disturbing Behaviours: Ole Ivar Lovaas and the Queer History of Autism Science’. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 4(2), pp. 1-28. ↩
  3. Lawrence, E. (2013). ‘Loud Hands in the Library: Neurodiversity in LIS Theory & Practice’. Progressive Librarian, 41, pp. 98-109. ↩
  4. Anderson, A. (2018). ‘Employment and neurodiverse librarians’. Invited guest forum for Informed Librarian Online, hosted by ODU Digital Commons. ↩
  5. Justin Spectrum (2017). ‘Perspectives of an Autistic Children’s Librarian’. ALSC Blog: Association of Library Services to Children, a division of the American Library Association. ↩

Divided we stand

Posted on by Alissa

pile of notebooks on a desk, the topmost reading 'don't just stand there'

They say that ‘staying apart keeps us together’, but everyone I know is slowly disintegrating. I was slightly ahead of that curve, but the futures of many appear just as bleak. Most of my social circle lives in Melbourne, back in lockdown and under increasing strain. People are stressed, exhausted, weary, afraid for their health and their livelihoods. To think I almost moved there earlier this year. To think I’m now grateful I was forced to stay put.

It’s been a hard slog, though. After I got out of the psych ward in early April I spent 3 1/2 months at my mum’s place, learning how to be well again. We watched almost every episode of Great American Railroad Journeys. Mum watched a lot of Essendon football matches (especially the old ones where they won). I watched a lot of flowers bloom. Moving back into my own place a couple of weeks ago was almost an anti-anticlimax. It wasn’t the cute little flat in St Kilda I’d had my eye on, but it was still here, and for the moment, so was I.

Each person’s anxieties manifest in different ways. Until recently mine included a lot of shouting on Twitter. I need to stop doing this because it only makes the noise worse. I also have a lot less energy these days to scream into the void. I’d prefer to spend my time on more constructive pursuits.

Regular readers of this blog will recall my long-term criticism of the Australian Library and Information Association, including my unflattering appraisal of their response to the pandemic back in April. I considered not renewing my personal membership this year, and not just because for a while I couldn’t afford to pay it (though I did at one stage donate some of my renewal money to the GRLC casuals’ fund). Discontent with ALIA in Australia’s library community has simmered for some time. Library workers whose views I respect, such as Bonnie and Danielle, have chosen to leave. Others openly question the association’s choices in event management. Planning a large in-person conference for next February seems particularly foolhardy.

Despite all this I ultimately chose to renew my ALIA membership, albeit three months late. I did so for one primary reason. It wasn’t because I’m an ACORD office-bearer (and therefore obliged to hold personal membership for as long as I’m on that committee). It wasn’t because I felt my seat at the broader ALIA table was really getting me anywhere. It was because I was genuinely excited by this year’s elections to the Association’s Board of Directors. After years of waiting and wishing (and whining), I felt like we finally had some solid progressive leadership. I wanted to put my money where my mouth is and support those new Directors to start making necessary strategic change. This won’t happen overnight. It might not be anytime soon considering how much else everyone has on their plates right now. But there are some good foundations in place, and for the first time in my five years of membership I was optimistic about ALIA’s potential. I wanted to support that.

I was concerned, however, that my renewal would be interpreted as an endorsement of the status quo. I want to be very clear that it is not. My membership is an act of faith, not an act of trust.

It has also finally dawned on me that ALIA will never truly be the kind of organisation I think it should be. CEO Sue McKerracher made clear back in January (in InCite’s critlib-themed issue, no less, submissions for which were curiously never advertised) what she sees as ALIA’s core function: ‘taking the facts about libraries and shaping them to fit the interests of government’ (p. 7). Lobbying, in other words. Advocacy. Public relations. Media management. I know ALIA does quite a few other things, but lobbying appears to be its primary focus. It’s why the Association moved to Canberra in the first place. Certainly there are good reasons for librarianship to establish—and fund—such a body. I just resent funding it personally, is all. I don’t feel particularly advocated for.

ALIA put out a pamphlet-type thing recently listing some of the ways it had responded to the pandemic. Curiously, none of those ways included advocating for casualised library workers who lost all their shifts, or academic library workers facing forced pay cuts and mass redundancies, or LIS students graduating into a non-existent job market. They did encourage libraries to hire authors to do talks, which I would find more admirable had they also encouraged those libraries to not lay off their staff.

There’s a bit of a gap here. ALIA advocates for libraries as institutions, while our trade unions advocate for library workers within their workplaces. There’s no organisation that advocates for library workers as a whole, as professionals1, as workers with valuable skills, as people who deserve stable employment, as individuals who have so much to offer. So many of us are screaming ourselves hoarse, but it feels no organisation is listening. Globally, many library workers have had enough of their professional associations, and are investing in real change. Lindsey Cronk’s exhortations to #FixALA and Callan Bignoli’s #LibRev[olution] conference and subsequent organising point to a groundswell of support for radical change in the library sector. What kind of united future could we create for ourselves? How might we go about building a different kind of power?

Picture this: a national library workers’ association. A separate entity to ALIA, uniting library workers across all sectors, at all stages of their careers. One big library union, perhaps. I’m intrigued by the Danish model: in 1968 the librarians of Denmark collectively revolted against their library association and formed the Danish Union of Librarians, ‘to secure wage and working conditions and to cultivate their profession’. The union has both an industrial and a professional role, supporting librarians at work and in their careers. Meanwhile, the Danish Library Association takes the lead on lobbying and public outreach efforts. Interestingly, their org structure includes politicians as well as professionals, and one seat is reserved for a library student. It was the inclusion of the former that so riled the latter.

Australia’s industrial relations are very different, with library workers divided into unions based on their sector: schools, healthcare settings, levels of government, higher education and so on. There can be real advantages in organising with fellow workers in one’s sector, irrespective of role. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some library workers can struggle to find appropriate union representation, including special librarians, employees of vendors, and those working outside a formal library environment.

Such a national library workers’ association could resemble the Danish model, and become a formal trade union, ensuring that all library workers could have someone in their corner. Or it could be a different kind of organisation, taking after the Casualised, Unemployed, and Precarious University Workers (CUPUW, formerly the National Higher Education Casuals Network), a cross-sectoral alliance of non-permanent university workers fighting for recognition of their worth as people and workers in the face of structural collapse. We could all start imagining what this new association might look like. Would people join under their own steam? Would we want ‘delegates’ from different library sectors or states, or specific representatives for students, casuals and the unemployed? How could we best set ourselves up for success and longevity?

Another benefit of such an association: it would enable library workers to speak publicly and collectively on issues that matter to us, rather than waiting for ALIA to do it on our behalf. I feel like a lot of us have spent a lot of time over the years trying to get ALIA to say particular things. Like many others, I was surprised and impressed by ALIA’s recent statement on Black Lives Matter. It was strongly worded, it came from ALIA directly (not its Board), and it was seemingly issued without members having to ask. I hope to see more of this kind of advocacy from ALIA. If only they’d spoken up for marriage equality like this before we begged them to.2

Brendan Bachmann wrote a searing piece on many libraries’ shameful treatment of their casual staff during the pandemic. I will note that MPOW, to its credit, has continued offering shifts to its few casual workers, and has moved heaven and earth to enable the vast majority of us to work from home. But many library workers have been treated far more poorly, and it is precisely the kind of behaviour Brendan discusses that a library workers’ association would stand against. Workers need to feel seen, to feel heard, and to feel like someone’s prepared to stick up for them. I’m realistic about the chances of policy reversal, but even just having that solidarity would make a world of difference.

Brendan is completely right. We are better than this. But we deserve better than this, too.

… It does seem to be a pattern though, doesn’t it? New librarian joins ALIA, chills for a bit, realises how cooked it is, agitates for change, gets nowhere, is crushed, leaves ALIA. Over and over.

So why have I spent so much time and energy over the years being cross at my professional association? Despite outward appearances I’m not naturally a ‘burn it all down’ kind of person. I don’t enjoy being angry all the time (in fact, I’m much worse at being angry now than in the Before Times, and it gladdens me). I’d much rather try to make things better. And generally speaking I prefer to be a member of things rather than not. It takes a lot for me to consider quitting something. I do think that ‘Together we are stronger’, to echo ALIA’s motto, but it’s time for a deeper introspection on who ‘we’ are.

I wrote in late March, a lifetime ago:

I don’t know why I keep looking to ALIA to demonstrate leadership in the Australian library sector. I don’t know why I hope they will stand up for library workers. I don’t know why I think they will change.

It’s deeply frustrating because we, as workers, want so desperately for our professional organisation to advocate for us. But ALIA doesn’t do that, and it’s not going to do that for as long as Institutional Membership is available. The conflict of interest here is insurmountable. So we need a separate association focussing on library workers. I had thought for a while that newCardigan would be ideally placed for such a role, but I would understand if they wanted to remain a radical social group rather than something more formalised. I don’t think the organisation we want really exists yet. I think it should.

I have a long personal history of sinking my time and energy into people and things that didn’t or couldn’t reciprocate. The time for that is over. If the Australian library sector is to have any hope of getting through these tough times, we as library workers need to build our own platform, and find our collective voice. Staying apart won’t always keep us together—it’s time for a national Australian library workers’ association. Let’s make it happen.

  1. Irrespective of how (or even if) such workers have degrees or other professional accreditation. ↩
  2. Man, this was three whole years ago and I’m still bitter about it. ↩

Recognising critical librarianship

Posted on by Alissa

This article first appeared in inCite, the magazine of the Australian Library and Information Association, January/February 2020, volume 41, issue 1/2, page 24.

Are you a critical librarian? You might already be, but maybe didn’t know your actions and philosophies fit within the name. Perhaps you’re the type to advocate for changes to subject headings, or your workplace is actively making library spaces more welcoming for disadvantaged people. Perhaps these are really the same thing.

For some, critical librarianship, or ‘critlib’, means bringing social justice principles to library work, such as a commitment to equality, diversity and solidarity with marginalised people. For others, it means aligning their library practice with critical theory, a ‘framework that is epistemological, self-reflective, and activist in nature’. These are related but distinct approaches to how libraries interact with their communities. It’s one thing to advocate for social justice in the library, but it’s quite another to use the tools of critical theory to explore why and where there is social injustice in the library in the first place.

Critical librarianship involves deep, considered analysis about the structure and theory of library work. It doesn’t mean criticising in a rude or disparaging way. Nor does it mean believing that libraries are necessarily bad. Critical librarianship aims to make the profession better by recognising harmful and oppressive structures, dismantling those structures and building better ones in their stead. We critique because we care.

All areas of library work can incorporate critical perspectives, including reference, information literacy, outreach, IT systems, collection development and cataloguing. Each area strives to recognise who is harmed by prevailing library practices, what message they send, and how they might be reformed.

For example, advocating for changes to subject headings, such as the notorious Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) ‘Illegal aliens’, involves recognising how terms like these reflect social and political mores of the United States Congress, the institution served by the Library of Congress and its subject headings. Australian libraries use these headings mostly out of convenience, but many terms are clearly inappropriate, such as ‘Dreamtime (Australian Aboriginal mythology)’. The equivalent term in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) subject headings is ‘Religion – Dreaming’, which repositions the Dreaming as contemporary spiritual practice and not ancient mythology.

Neither term is neutral, because nothing about librarianship is neutral, but choosing to replace an LCSH term with an AIATSIS one demonstrates a recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to describe their culture their way, and the obligations of libraries to uphold those rights. It sends a message that these are the terms the library prefers, and in so doing makes the library catalogue a more welcoming and inclusive place. It’s about taking social justice principles of diversity and inclusion, applying critical theory to our controlled vocabularies, and ultimately making better choices in the service of our users. This is critical librarianship. It’s also the least we can do.

Bringing social justice to the library is deeply admirable. But critical librarianship should also involve bringing the library to social justice, listening to our communities, and incorporating critical theory into library practice. Perhaps you’re already doing these things. Turns out these practices have a name.

The price of entry

Posted on by Alissa

dead leaves in a forest

Last night, LIS student Megan Chorusch decided she’d had enough, and told the library sector something it needed to hear.

I’ll let you read the thread for yourself. I am furious that our sector is putting people in this position. So many prospective library workers are making huge sacrifices in the pursuit of jobs that simply are not there. Megan’s story is heartbreaking—yet all too common.

For many, the prospect of library work is deeply appealing. In theory, library work offers the chance of being able to help people, to connect them with information and knowledge, to not have to sell them stuff, to do something meaningful and honourable with your life. Many see librarianship as more than just a job. This is vocational awe, a cruel deception our industry clings to, painting itself as inherently good and wonderful and therefore beyond reproach. Very quickly this turns into ‘you should do this work because you love it, and not because it pays’. Very quickly the goalposts start shifting, as more and more people seek this kind of work. Entry-level positions suddenly ask for years of experience. Then those positions start paying less. Then they vanish altogether.

What do we tell people who are looking to get into the library industry? We tell them to volunteer. We tell them to work for free. We tell them to try and get casual or part-time employment. We tell them, in short, to devalue and exploit themselves before the sector does it for them. Librarianship, historically a profession deemed suitable for women, has never been a high-paying industry. I don’t know anyone who became a librarian for the money, and I know a lot of librarians.

But what we’re really telling prospective library workers, as I have written before and as plenty have pointed out before me, is that if you can’t afford to volunteer or work casual hours then there is no place for you here. Many LIS students are mature-age, perhaps re-entering the workforce after having children, or perhaps looking for a career change. Many have families, mortgages, caring responsibilities, financial pressures. Many others come from working-class backgrounds, have a disability, are Indigenous, live in regional areas, are marginalised in the job market in so many other ways. They can’t afford to work for free or for so little. And they shouldn’t have to.

This story belongs to so many of us. My twitter feed is full of tales very similar to Megan’s. ‘I’ve recently decided not to go on with my information management studies.’ ‘I am having to go to tafe to do an admin course because I need to work.’ ‘I have three volunteer roles with ALIA, and still no one wants me with no experience.’ Megan’s thread has resonated with many library students and new graduates who don’t see a future for themselves in the industry. And they’re the ones who care enough about libraries to tweet about them! Their despair is palpable. I wish I could do something to help.

I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a permanent full-time job in a library that many people would give their right arm to work for. I don’t have dependants or a mortgage. I didn’t have to volunteer for organisations that were capable of paying me (and I could make a conscious decision not to do this). All I had to do was blog and tweet and write and present and be on committees and have a ~presence~ and perform huge amounts of hope labour in order to get where I am, never mind where I hope to be. It’s a hell of a lot of work. I love what I do, and I am acutely aware of my good fortune, but the hustle feels never-ending.

And yet, curiously, we’re also told that libraries are facing a skills shortage. Librarianship remains on the short-term skilled occupation list for visa purposes. We heard in 2016 of a critical shortage of health librarians in Australia. I often hear anecdotally of libraries struggling to fill a range of qualified librarian positions.

Something is not right here. On one hand we have new graduates at all levels crying out for any kind of library work, and on the other we have employers claiming the job market isn’t supplying them with what they’re looking for. The Department of Employment’s Job Outlook for librarians is rosy, but the Outlook for library assistants and library technicians is grim. Many degree-qualified librarians instead find themselves in library technician or assistant roles (when they can find work at all), consequently crowding out those with TAFE qualifications. Many areas, particularly major cities, will refuse to consider your application unless and until you have that piece of paper… but then they’ll reject you anyway because you’ll have no experience.

ALIA’s education, skills and employment trend reports have consistently claimed that the wave of retiring baby boomers will create spaces for new librarians. I got my foot in the door at MPOW because of just such a retiring baby boomer, but more often than not retirees take their jobs with them. Natural attrition. Efficiency dividends. Doing more with less. It’s all so familiar.

I don’t know who to believe—the Job Outlook, the professional association, the universities, the TAFE institutions. For a profession so attached to ideals of truth, integrity and knowledge, it sure does feel like someone is lying to us.

Like Megan, I don’t know what I want to achieve with this post. I won’t pretend to have the answers, much as I wish I could help those locked out of library work. I’m not a manager. I can’t hire anybody. Very few of us can make permanent, well-paid, entry-level library jobs appear out of thin air. The industry is plagued with structural issues no one person can possibly address.

Yet we cannot expect people to make these kinds of sacrifices for low-paid, entry-level library work. Free labour should not be the price of entry. That is, assuming we can even find an entryway.

Megan writes in closing: ‘Even if I didn’t think [volunteer work] would better my job prospects, I’d still probably do it because I love it there. But the thought of needing to and recognising that I have to prioritise gaining experience before I even graduate. That’s where my frustration lies.’

I hear you, Megan. And I’m sorry it’s come to this.

The stories we tell ourselves

Posted on by Alissa
Sunrise over Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, with the National Library on the right. Photo courtesy Glenn Martin Photography

Around 10.30pm last night I had a brainwave.

I lay in bed despairing at the election results, where a lot of money had swayed a few votes in a few seats in a manner not to my liking, when I suddenly remembered a book I needed to read. I’d had this book since February (courtesy of Hugh, who had read it in one sitting) but knew it would need to be read in a certain mood. Polemics are better heard, not seen, so I began to read the foreword aloud to myself.

‘Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to take away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.’

Rebecca Solnit wrote Hope in the Dark fifteen years ago, in part a response to the invasion of Iraq and the despair felt by millions who watched it unfold. The foreword to the third edition was written in 2015 and, to be honest, it shows. Yet it reminded me that one electoral result is not failure, that change is incremental, that we do not know the future for certain, and within that uncertainty there is space for hope.

Hope. Not optimism.

This is not a political blog, much as I have become a political person, and much as my employment brings with it certain restrictions on my political speech. But politics and librarianship go hand in hand. We fiercely defend the freedom to read, the freedom to collect, the freedom to describe, and the freedom of library users to go about their business unbothered by neo-Nazis. These all involve making political choices. We are not neutral spaces. We are not merely vessels for the stories of others—we have a role in amplifying those stories, and for telling stories of our own.

I keep coming back to what David Ritter said at GLAMSLAM, the recent one-day symposium for GLAM workers hosted by the Australian Centre for Public History. GLAMSLAM itself was a bit of a mixed bag for reasons that aren’t relevant right now, but I’m still glad I attended. I wrote a lot of notes during David’s keynote, titled ‘GLAM Power as clean energy? Bring it on!’. Reading over my scribbles, I can’t always tell where the speaker’s thoughts ended and mine began. But one paragraph stands out to me.

Yes! We can do the thing against the odds! // Convince people that human ingenuity can get us out of this mess. [Even if] it won’t get us out. It’s a future we won’t see. And perhaps, since we are the problem, we deserve to go. But he will never say that—we need to tell ourselves that humans can make change.
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

It was a rousing and inspiring speech, though my notes are peppered by a well-developed streak of misanthropic nihilism. David knew what story we needed to hear, and told it to a roomful of librarians and cultural heritage workers so that we might repeat the message. This is how we can use our GLAM Power™: by telling the stories that will drive the transition to a more just and liveable planet. To build a better future, we first need the ability to imagine it. (You can listen to David’s keynote on the GLAMcity podcast.)

David Ritter wasn’t the first person at GLAMSLAM to make the connection between libraries and public narrative. The New GLAM-er fringe event the day before included a speaker from a NSW regional public library (whose name I sadly neglected to write down), who came to librarianship with a PR degree. She emphasised the role of the library as a natural home for storytelling, but with facts to back those stories up. I can’t imagine ever working in public relations. I wouldn’t be able to tell a story I didn’t believe.

I often think about the stories we tell ourselves. But today I wonder about the stories we’re clearly not listening to, the stories going unheard. Libraries enthralled so many of us as children. Magical places of safety and story. These memories inspired many of us, me included, to pursue careers as library workers, to become story curators. But who is telling the stories we collect? Whose narratives go unrecorded? What relation do these stories bear to others’? To our environment? To our history? To others’ histories? What stories help us make sense of our lives? What choices do our stories prompt us to make? What do we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night?

Not all stories are hopeful. Some are actively harmful, told in bad faith, designed to mislead, deceive or frighten. I hope that we all might one day reconcile our stories with the abundant evidence available to us, weaving a stronger and more truthful set of inclusive narratives that lead us toward a better future. I hear librarians are quite good at that.

I find solace in nature and nature writing, grounding me in every sense. Last week I picked up the newest Griffith Review, Writing the country, which I’ve looked forward to for some time. David Ritter has an essay in it, ‘We all took a stand’, telling a remarkable, Solnit-esque story about how in 2010 the locals of Margaret River, Western Australia, took on the coal prospectors and won. We both marvelled at how this story isn’t more widely known. ‘As a movement it is so important that we narrate and remember every success. There is power in our stories if we choose to tell them.’

Hugh is notorious for annotating his books, so I took this as permission to read Hope in the Dark with a pencil in my hand. The book felt like an emergency bandage for an open wound, holding in all my emotions to stop them from falling out. Many passages were already underlined, asterisked, or pencilled in the margins. I’m not sure how long I can staunch this flow; at some point I will mourn the future it clearly wasn’t time for. But one sentence neatly encapsulated my current goal. I underlined it, with a sharper pencil.

The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

Or, as David himself tweeted earlier today, in an eloquent and uplifting thread I saw just a moment ago:

Great change is non-linear. History is unpredictable. Elections come and elections go but we must retain belief in what is possible and execute our best plans to make it so.

Putting my money where my mouth is

Posted on by Alissa

This month for GLAM Blog Club we are invited to consider what it means to ‘donate’—our time, our labour, our organs, our money. To give freely with no expectation of return. Supposedly. In practice, sums of money are moved around all the time under the cover of ‘donations’, when they’re really a method of currying favour with the powerful.

Coincidentally, my ALIA membership is up for renewal this month. Having finally gotten around to graduating at the end of last year, my membership dues are now at the ‘Associate (New Graduate)’ level, and at $199 have doubled from the ‘Student’ level dues I was previously paying. I am under no illusions that giving ALIA more money will somehow increase my influence within the organisation. They know exactly who I am. But because paying dues is a requirement of membership, it’s not really a donation. More like a payment in anticipation of services rendered.

So what services do I want? I decided to continue receiving InCite online, rather than in print (though I wouldn’t mind a copy of the issue with my face in it, I think my mum would like that). I’ll keep reading the ALIA Weekly, PD Postings and RecruitLIS newsletters. I’ll go to local ALIA events, but I’ll probably also have to help organise them, and it’s a bit disheartening when few to no people show up.

But I know my membership is not just about me. It’s about our profession as a whole. It’s about ALIA’s leadership of the Australian library sector and the tone they set for the national discourse. Their embodiment of the values and ethics of librarianship. Their support for various parts of the sector in the face of social, governmental, financial and ethical challenges.

These are the services I anticipate. I hope one day to see the ALIA CEO give a speech akin to that recently given by CILIP CEO Nick Poole. He admitted, frankly and refreshingly, that the CILIP of today is not what CILIP ought to be. He pledged to transform the UK’s library and information association into a dynamic, forward-thinking body that collectivises and amplifies the wishes and concerns of its members. ‘The work of becoming an activist organisation, an organisation that campaigns for and celebrates social justice, belongs to us all.’

ALIA is not an activist organisation. I strongly believe it should be one. And yet ALIA belongs to us all, or at least those of us who are members. It’s ultimately why I choose to remain a member, because that $199 gets me a seat at the table. I might not like much of what is being served, but I at least have the ability to demand something else. If enough of us make these demands, the menu might just change.

I also recently donated, freely and with no expectation of return, to two GLAM organisations whose values I share: the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, a community archive of LGBTIQ materials and histories based in Melbourne, and newCardigan, a progressive GLAM collective based in Melbourne and Perth. (Regular readers may be familiar with my strain of cardivangelism.) Both organisations are run by volunteers, doing good work in and for their communities, and could use any funds you can spare.

While cleaning my house earlier today I found my ALIA member’s pin, after many years of forgetting I owned one. I decided to affix it to my Badge Hat, between the ‘Libraries are not neutral’ and ‘GLAM Pride Vic’ badges. I like seeing ALIA in this context. I hope to continue seeing it in many others.

What is a student worth?

Posted on by Alissa

This morning, as I was getting off the bus and into the rain, I tweeted about the first day of my professional placement. This tweet turned into a giant thread about the nature of work experience within LIS, whether placements should be compulsory and/or paid, and the difficulties inherent in taking time off paid work or other responsibilities. I am slightly stunned by the response it got. I hope this doesn’t make me some kind of influencer. :/

You might have to click on a few different tweets to see all the responses. I was typing on my phone and so was slower to respond. Plus I was, yanno, doing a placement. I’m concerned that some of my thoughts on the topic may have been buried or misinterpreted, so here is a very quick overview. I also want to make very clear that my views on this topic are, as always, my own. They are definitely not those of my former employer, my placement host, my future employer or my uni.

In short: I have no issue with work experience or professional placements. I fully appreciate that for many LIS students, a placement may be the only practical experience they get before they graduate. Placements can lead to great networking or job opportunities, and we all know how hard entry-level jobs are to find these days. Plus with so many of us studying online (me included), every little bit of library experience helps. Many students find their placements to be enriching and rewarding experiences that allow them to apply their theoretical knowledge in a practical setting.

I do have an issue with unpaid placements—if they are unpaid, they should not be compulsory. Being a student is financially precarious enough as it is. By forcing students to attend unpaid work experience, we are implicitly sending the message that their labour is worth nothing. That in order to be professionally recognised and accredited, they need to have invested their time, energy and enthusiasm in a host organisation that couldn’t even be bothered paying them. That they ought to have enough funds from somewhere else to support themselves, and that if they don’t, they’re not welcome here. This kind of attitude only further entrenches the class inequality within LIS. The payment wouldn’t have to be much—even a small stipend would help immensely. Something to take the sting out of that fortnight’s rent.

In addition, being on placement should not be an excuse for the host organisation to use the student as free labour doing the crappy jobs. I am fortunate that this is not the case for me. I am doing my placement in a well-regarded institution, doing some interesting stuff. I also had to quit my job in order to do it. I am sandwiching my placement in between short-term contracts; scheduling has been very difficult for me, and I don’t even have children or caring responsibilities (it must be ten times harder for those who do!). I am also fortunate to have good finances, a second job, and a week’s worth of annual leave payout. Plenty of students don’t have this to fall back on.

The issue of who would pay a placement stipend is a tricky one. I believe organisations who take placement students should consider a stipend part of the cost of doing business. After all, most hosts are already investing staff time (ergo money) in training the student and showing them the ropes. The flipside, of course, is that places that can’t afford to pay students will simply stop offering placements, and only the richest libraries will take students. I’m not convinced. I think they would find a way—after all, students are going to be running this profession one day, and wouldn’t you want to make sure you taught them the right things?

I’m glad that we’re talking about unpaid placements. I hope that our conversations today might be a catalyst, however small, for some reform in this area. Professional placements are not, strictly speaking, work—but they prepare students for the world of work in LIS. And they are worth paying for.