Back when almost everyone and everything was trying desperately to get or “be” online the culture posited some ideas about what that might mean. Would we need paper anymore (the paperless office) and what about libraries?
Offices have as much paper as they ever did and libraries, well, we still have them but after the elevation of Emily Drabinski as President of the American Library Association, you might not want them.
According to her bio, [the self-identified Marxist Lesbian] … doesn’t view libraries as an aggregation of knowledge for the improvement of individuals. Instead, libraries are meant to create mass movements for the “public good”:
I believe in building worker power as a means of transforming our workplaces, communities, and ourselves. I am running for president of the American Library Association because I believe our institutions—school, public, academic, and special libraries—are fundamental infrastructures of the public good. This crucial moment calls for leadership that understands the importance of mass movements for restoring and expanding investments in us. We must help our publics understand the connections between our daily practices of selection, acquisition, description, circulation, and preservation of information to broader movements for a more just society.
Talk about a hack. Nothing about Marxism results in the public good.
Drabinksi is very clear about the role libraries should play in America and it’s not about improving each individual:
Equity as action.
Social and economic justice and racial equity requires that we make a material difference in the lives of library workers and patrons who have for too long been denied power and opportunity on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, spoken language, and disability. As ALA president, I will direct resources and opportunities to a diverse cross section of the association and advance a public agenda that puts organizing for justice at the center of library work.
All of this helped the voting members of the ALA pick her to take charge in 2023 and it is a journey they would like public libraries to take along with those who frequent them.
A journey we could just as easily take online or, on the evening news, in most public schools, increasingly in “Christian” churches, on almost any university campus, on professional sports fields, and countless other places.
In other words, if the library was ever a place to escape that (excepting the occasional Drag Queen Story Hour), that safe space may soon be dead.
At least we’ve got online research, right? At least until the DHS ministry of truth finds out.
