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Reposting from Information Observatory: “Academic libraries in class society”
A shocking disparity defines the US system of information provision. At one extreme is the multi-trillion-dollar corporate wealth of the for-profit information industry. At the other end is the growing – and deliberately inflicted – poverty of our public information sector. During the past half-century, capital and class together have gravely worsened this disparity.
Scholars have analyzed the depredations visited by the for-profit information industry on the information sphere in general, and libraries in particular. Corporations have enclosed and raided governmental and other public information sites, while doing everything in their power to vilify the belief that information is, and should be, a social good.[1] A recent appellate court decision to ban the Internet Archive from lending out digital copies of half a million books to the public is only the latest troubling example.[2]
Concomitantly, libraries have faced declining budgets which have forced them to significantly hollow out collection development and other public services and relinquish their traditional functions to for-profit database providers and publishers – at the same time expanding and highlighting rare and precious special archival collections to prospective donors and possible political allies as if this is the sole function of libraries.
However, a closely related second factor has also been at work: a class logic. According to Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL),[3] between 2012 and 2021, 31% of full-time librarian positions, 54% of all other paid full-time staff, have been lost in community colleges. At colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, 34.2% of full-time librarian positions, 55.4% of all other full-time staff have disappeared. For universities that grant PhD degrees, by contrast, the number of full-time librarians has actually increased by 13.7% (while all other full-time staff has dropped 21.7%).
Community college libraries serving mostly working-class students, in other words, have been gutted. Eliminating more than 30% of librarian positions and 50% of staff over a decade means that these libraries find it difficult to remain open.[4] And within colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, there is a comparable disparity. For instance, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), has only 9 full-time librarians including cataloging and special collections librarians serving about 16,500 overwhelmingly working-class students[5] – among them 48% are first-generation college students.[6] Since 2019, the library has lost 10 full-time librarian positions to retirement and departure. These positions remain unfilled. Thus, the library is struggling to provide adequate public services like reference and instruction, and is only able to cover the bare minimum of collection development for many subject areas – 30 out of the 58 subjects defined by the library as needed to support dozens of majors, minors, and programs have no subject specialist assigned.[7]
These conditions echo across the country. California State University (CSU), Bakersfield, a 4-year institution with a little over 9000 students – over 50% of them first-generation college students[8] and many hailing from the lower fifth of the income distribution[9] — is served by 10 librarians and a total of 29 library staff.[10] So much for the informational needs and aspirations of first-generation and working-class college students.
The situation at elite private colleges and universities could hardly be more different. Dartmouth College (NH), with an endowment of $7.9 billion,[11] is attended by approximately 6000 students – and sports no fewer than 134 staff including 23 subject specialists.[12] With about 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students[13]and an endowment of $50.7 billion,[14] Harvard has a system of 28 libraries operated by 700 librarians and staff.[15]
It’s not subtle: the starvation of academic libraries that serve working-class students is counterposed to relatively generous support for institutions that cater to the children of the rich – and that sustain high-tech research.
In a radical democratic vision – one that has existed for centuries – the library helps to ground an emancipatory future as an active place for democratic living and learning, where everyday people have equal access to knowledge, and can dream of a different world by equipping themselves with it. To pursue this vision of the library, we need a great array of library workers who acquire, curate, catalog, maintain and preserve, provide instruction about, and circulate knowledge to and for all.
There are enough resources to reverse the current crisis of the library, but this will necessitate reorienting the US government’s priorities away from military spending and corporate subsidies toward social needs. It will also require economic redistribution. The obscene levels of wealth that disfigure today’s society[16] will need to be reduced, via adequate taxation – in order that the bottom half may be elevated, and granted resources sufficient for adequate housing, food, medical care, education, and libraries and public information. An urgent priority within this encompassing program is, once more, the need to democratize our system of information provision.
Special Thanks to James Jacobs from Free Government Information for his insightful comments and feedback.
[1] Anita R. Schiller and Herbert I. Schiller, “Who Can Own What America Knows?” The Nation, April 17, 1982, 461-63; Herbert I. Schiller and Anita R. Schiller, “Libraries, Public Access to Information, and Commerce,” in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, Eds., The Political Economy of Information (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988),146-166; Herbert I. Schiller, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500 (Norwood: Ablex, 1982), 47-77.
[2] David Moscrop, “Copyright Keepers Just Destroyed a Huge Digital Library,” Jacobin, September 20, 2024.
[3] Joshua Kim, “3 Questions on Academic Library Staffing for ACRL’s Mary Jane Petrowski,” Inside Higer Education, February 21, 2023.
[4] These changes are significant even if we take into account there are fewer post-secondary schools compared to 9 years ago, and overall enrollments are down. Worse, hiring temporary part-time and contract workers to manage extremely understaffed libraries is a normalized practice, reflecting the casualization of academic labor across the board.
[5] Queens College at a Glance (2023).
[6] Self-Study Design, Queens College.
[7] Queens College Library Subject Specialists.
[8] California State University, Bakersfield (2024).
[9] David LeonHardt, “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges,” New York Times, January 18, 2017.
[10] Walter W. Stiern Library Directory, California State University (CSU) Bakersfield.
[11] Dartmouth Endowment Report 2023.
[12] Dartmouth University Staff Directory.
[14] Harvard Fact Book: Endowment.
[15] Harvard University Libraries.
[16] Jake Johnson, “’Global Oligarchy’ Reigns as Top 1% Controls More Wealth Than Bottom 95% of Humanity,” September 23, 2024; Oxfam Media Briefing, “Multilateralism in an Era of Global Oligarchy,” September 23, 2024.
Libraries could outlast the internet … IF …
This article is making the social media rounds so many of you have no doubt seen it — Libraries could outlast the internet, head of British Library says – Telegraph. While I completely agree with Mr Keating, the director of the British Library, he only defined libraries in terms of vagaries like “trust” and “traditional values” and “privacy.” All good terms to be sure, but what was left unsaid — and what I think is most important about libraries and which leads to trust, privacy and sanctuary — is that they’ll outlast the internet … ONLY IF libraries stick to the values that got them this far: collecting, describing, giving access to and preserving information in all its forms.
Stop worrying about whether libraries will survive the digital age, the head of the British Library has said, as he argues that they could outlast the internet.
Roly Keating, director of the British Library, said he was shocked at how many “smart people” still questioned whether libraries were still viable in the modern age.
Saying the institution had countless values worth defending, including trust, he argued that libraries could prove the most “powerful and resiliant network yet”.
“These values predated the internet,” he said. “And if we get it right may yet outlast it.”
via Libraries could outlast the internet, head of British Library says.
“Against the grain: Govt Information at SUL”: Stanford Library Advisory Council presentation
Yesterday, my colleague Kris Kasianovitz and I were lucky enough to be invited to give a presentation to my library’s advisory council about our work with govt information at Stanford libraries (Kris unfortunately had to be in LA for a family event, but we prepared together and made a fun little video of her “in the field” :-)).
Our agenda was straightforward: 1) Describe the universe of govt information in which Kris and I work (including local, state, federal, and international); 2) Talk about 3 trends in govt information and libraries over the last 10-15 years that are worrisome to us; and 3) Describe how Stanford is going against the grain, bucking the trends as it were in order to try and move the documents community forward to a better future!
Our advisory Council is made up of librarians, technologists, academics etc from around the world — like Lynne Brindley, who last year stepped down as the head of the British Library, Karin Wittenborg, from UVA, Bruno Racine from the French National Library, Elisabeth Niggemann from the German National Library, Chuck Henry from CLIR, David Rumsey, Abby Smith-Rumsey, Paul Saffo, Victor Guerra, director of IT from the Mexican Ministry for health, Roger Summitt, founder of Dialog and more. So to get a chance to let these folks know more about what’s happening with libraries and govt information was a rare honor and an important venue for getting govt information issues in front of the global movers and shakers in the library world and beyond.
NOTE: If you want to get to my notes rather than just looking at pretty pictures, click the gear to open the speaker notes.
Lunchtime listen: Barbara Fister keynote at Library Technology Conference 2014
Barbara Fister starts out her keynote — at a library technology conference no less — by saying “it’s not about technology…the work you do really is about understanding people and how they connect to one another and how they share ideas. The way we think about our purpose shapes what we do.” and she was off!
Fister touched on so many issues effecting libraries in the 21st century. The overarching themes of her talk were the universality of libraries — love the slide of the people’s library in Istanbul’s [[Taksim Gezi Park]] — the economics of information, Ranganathan’s 5 laws — which she helpfully updated! — open access publishing, core library values, and pushing back against the corporatization and commodification of information and libraries. Watch the whole way through because she drops knowledge bombs throughout!
“We’ve enabled this mass appropriation of our culture. collectively we need to find ways not just to negotiate better terms of service for ourselves but to provide an alternative to the market-driven philosophies that are distorting and corrupting our information ecosystem.”
Video streaming by Ustream
Barbara Fister has coordinated instruction at the Gustavus Adolphus College library in St. Peter, Minnesota, for over 25 years, but is still learning how to help students (and faculty) learn. She has studied students’ research processes, examined the relationship between writing and research, and teaches an upper division course on how information works.
She has written widely on open access to scholarship and is interested in the future of publishing of all kinds. Popular literacy practices and the ways reading communities form online is the subject of her upcoming sabbatical research. She also is a writer of fiction, having published three mysteries. She is on the board of the non-profit organization, Sisters in Crime, and coordinates a project to monitor gender patterns in reviews and awards within the crime genre.
You can follow Barbara’s generalist tendencies on Twitter (@bfister) and through Library Journal’s Peer to Peer Review or the Library Babel Fish blog at Inside Higher Ed.
Digital Deposit, Good for All: Vision, Myths, Reality
May 22, 2019 / Leave a comment
As many of our readers know, Depository Library Council (DLC) recommended the creation of a working group to explore digital deposit and there was a session on digital deposit at the 2019 Spring Virtual Meeting of the DLC:
Digital deposit should be part of FDLP for the same reasons paper deposit has been for two hundred years: it guarantees preservation of the information and provides services to users of that information. Discusions of digital deposit, therefore, should focus on preservation and users and the technologies that can enable the best digital services.
Preservation
We’ve come a long way on preservation. GPO has (more…)
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