librarypunk - 130 - It’s bad news roundup, pardner 4

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

This week we’re doing a news roundup on book bans. We also cover Gaza protests and radical literature as police propaganda, and what library workers can do to archive and support the current protests. Media mentioned https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/16/library-legislation-restrictions-protections/ https://x.com/librarypunk/status/1786563891893342537  LFP Vendor Scorecard: https://github.com/alisonLFP/libraryfreedominstitute/blob/master/LFI2/finalprojects/Library%20Freedom-%20Vendor%20Scorecard-%20110719.pdf https://litwinbooks.com/books/feminist-pedagogy-for-library-instruction/  VandeBurgt, M. M., Rodgers, B. M., & Brown, K. (2021). Testimonies: The rewards and challenges of letting their voices be heard. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(5), 102420. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102420 Journal of Radical Librarianship https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/12  Related: http://radicalreference.info/ Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary: https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/59859/  Youtube Video Downloader Justin Recommends: https://www.4kdownload.com/-54 https://archive.ph/ https://climatemirror.org/ https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving https://pitchfork.com/news/steve-albini-storied-producer-and-icon-of-the-rock-underground-dies-at-61/   https://soundcloud.com/poddamnamerica/the-problem-with-spotify-w-steve-albini  Zines and Distros https://linktr.ee/mbtadistro  https://haters.noblogs.org/zines/  https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/  https://www.autistici.org/fugitivedistro/   

I don't know what kind of recording direction this microphone is. Like, I don't know if it's like a park and bark microphone or if it works. Do you know this term, Sandy, park and bark? I have not heard that term. Park and bark, it's a singing term. It's where you just get right at the front of the stage or whatever and you just plant and you get your microphone and you put it right up here like you're supposed to, not like this. That's not how you use a microphone. You use the microphone like this.

And then you just, you park and bark. Sometimes you do that in an opera too, but without the microphone. So for Bluebird's Castle, for example, because there's only two people on stage, and it's a gigantic orchestra, if you do the way it's written, to hear, to be able to be heard over the orchestra, it's the Phillies just park and park the whole time. They don't really move around the stage. Hi, Arthur. Arthur demands to be the center of attention. As he should. I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcombe Library, and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they then. And I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he, he, him. I got a new strap-on harness today.

I can't wait to have your cock in my mouth. It's so funny. I honestly want to take up his suggestion of going into, what's it called, book looks and finding the rating where it shows how many times a book says fuck shit, cock, ass, stuff like that, and guessing which book it is based on the numbers. That seems like a really fun game. We've got a game for the show. I know.

I was like, we should do that. I'm going to give you the blowjob of your life. I'm so glad you clipped that. So if you haven't seen it, John Oliver did an episode that had main segment on libraries. Yeah, my psychiatrist asked me about it last night if I'd seen it. Oh, boy. I didn't have a whole lot of takeaways from it because I feel like we've covered everything he's talked about.

I think the main thing to say is that it's better than, like, it's pretty good. Yeah. You know, it's like all shit we've talked about and all shit we know, but like, he's got like a, like, a lib take in there. But otherwise, it's all like exactly the kinds of shit that we've been saying even, including diagnosing that this isn't about books. This is about trying to remove queer people from public life. Like, that's how he concludes it. And I'm like, yeah, that's correct. This isn't about books at all. So, yeah. Yeah, I noticed that, like, at the beginning, too, he talks about how it went from school libraries to public libraries, which I feel like is something that, like, the very first time we started to talk about this, we were like, this is going to happen. And then it immediately happened. So, like, children and school libraries, it's like, then it'll be about public libraries. And now it is. And yeah.

Yeah. I do like that he starts it by talking about the distinction between regular weeding where we do throw away books, right? That happens very routinely, as we all know. And book challenges censorship and even just the process of relocating books from one section to the other, which I think people feel like is a good solution that like that's not censorship, that's fine and just move it from one section to the other. But like it's that it's, it's, still part of the same thing, and I'm glad that he included relocating as a form of censorship. I was like, yes, yes, good take, John Oliver, good take. I also like that he talked about obscenity laws and how they're being applied very broadly, including children's books about like the book Everybody Poops or books about like farting and stuff. Like, what is obscene in our definition of obscene about learning about a bodily function that, for all intents and purposes, right now isn't sexual. Like this isn't a sex ed type of book.

This is a like everybody poops, everybody farts. You don't have to be ashamed about it kind of book. And like those were labeled as obscene alongside like genderqueer and stuff, which I found it fun that there was actually a clip from the author of genderqueer being like, this is my book is a kid's book. And contrasting that to the parent who's like, it looks like it, it appeals to It looks like cartoons. It looks like cartoons.

I'm like, you have no. Okay, your preconceptions of what a graphic novel is does not erase the actual history of graphic novels that have long been for adults. Also, I don't see you in there trying to fucking take down the Walking Dead, which, by the way, is way more graphic than gender queer when it comes to sexuality. Oh, yeah. Or like all of the, like... It's cartoony. I'm like, you don't know what art is, do you? Like how many women get raped in like Batman comics? Right.

You know, like on page. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's why I brought up the Walking Dead is because that happens multiple times in the Walking Dead. And it's like, that's not the one that you're like,

my kid thinks this is a cartoon. I'm like, no. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm glad that the author of Gender Queer was like, my book is not for children. It could be for teens,

but it's not for children. It shouldn't be, quote, in the children section of a, library, if we're going to have these sections, that's not actually where it should be. It could be in, like, the teen section or the adult section if we're going to do that kind of thing. But it's not for teenagers. I loved their quote, not every book in a library is for children. Like, not every book in a library is for everybody. Everybody could read every book in the library. But I guess, like, the intended audience, like we've talked about some kids know when they pick something up if maybe it's not for

them. They should still have access to it. Most of the time, they'll be like embarrassed. or just not know what's going on, right? So I was very happy to see that, like, to get the little clip of the author. Because, like, I feel like so much of this, I'm going to turn into Lee Edelman now. Like, so much of this is, like, equating public libraries just with children and for getting that other types of people,

and children are also people who have autonomy and should be able to read whatever they want, right? But that, like, other types of people use libraries. And not every, not every single fucking thing in public life needs to cater to children. Right. Also, what was it? Porn is a sugary treat?

You fucking loved that one. I mean, it is. No. The thing that like the community that harassed their library director out of her job over 400 books that weren't even in the fucking... The library. Right. And like I like that he talks about how this is a concerted effort by organized groups, people who are picking up lists from Facebook and other websites and shit. Because like, yeah, and I think that a lot of public

libraries are changing their materials challenges process. Yes. To be, at least at my library, you have to have read the book in its entirety for the challenge to be considered. And you can only submit one book per materials challenge. So if you wanted all 400 of those books to be submitted, you would have to do the form 400 fucking times. And it would just be considered one. So, like, every person who wanted all 400 of those books would have to do it 400 times, right? So, like, I feel like that's kind of the first line of defense that a lot of libraries are doing against this concerted effort, which I think is a good plan. Like, yeah, you should have to actually read the entirety of the book and no, you shouldn't be able to throw down a whole list of books and be like, I want all of these reconsidered.

That's not the point of the materials challenge process in the slightest. Right. Like sometimes, like, we can't read every book that we buy for a library. And you know what? Sometimes, I mean, obviously, I don't think that children should be banned from reading anything. But, like, maybe sometimes we get a book and we put it there and maybe it would be more appropriate elsewhere in the library. Right. Maybe a book is like fashy bullshit or poor quality.

Like, there's a lot of reasons you might want to challenge. a book in a library that aren't right-wing Christian fundamentalist or even necessarily like left-wing political like either like there's lots of reasons um it just because the fact that we don't read everything that we buy yeah and and having talked to like public librarians a lot of the times when these things have come up in the past it is because it was a simple like mistake made during cataloging like a book that should have been in the yi section accidentally ends up in the children section because the first book of the series was considered children, but then, you know, or other things by that author were considered. Like, I remember hearing that story. Like this author wrote a children series, like a midgrade series and then wrote older teen series. And the librarian who's cataloging it didn't pay enough attention and just threw that new book series into the children section. It was not where it was, it shouldn't have been there to begin with. So like. And not that children can't read that, but it was written for teenagers. Exactly. Like. And, you know. Everything about it was supposed to be for teenagers.

So even, yeah. Yeah. So it's just such a weird perversion of the process. Yeah. And I think John Oliver does a good thing in this episode by like making this an actionable episode. Because he talks out like it's a, the quote was, who's on the library board matters. And so he's like encouraging people to go to the library board meetings and everything.

Like my favorite quote from the whole thing was protecting. libraries is a fight, but it's also winnable. And I was like, yes, dude, that is correct. Like, this was surprisingly like better takes than I was expecting. Yeah, same. But yeah, I like how he quoted the one librarian who was like, did y'all think there wouldn't be a consequence to your vote? That's the whole fucking point of the voting. You took away our entire funding and now you're saying you don't want the library to close. Like, what the fuck did you think was going to happen? Yeah. People approaching their votes and their like civic duties. as symbolic as opposed to being actual actions that you do to participate in the society

that you are part of, you know, like, sorry, that's been my high horse lately. Yeah, like, this shows where like electoral action and like actually matters materially is this local kind of stuff, right? Where it's small community making decisions like this. That's where it's actually like kind of important to get involved electorally sometimes. And he showed exactly why. Like, it's, you see the material consequence, like, of this kind of work, way more than you do at, like, the state or federal level. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I did have one critique of it, which is I wish he would have gone into how this, how the groups behind it are, like, a sub-faction of the Republican Party. Like, a lot of it is around the DeSantis campaign, probably because they had to spend their money because they could, because he set up his pack wrong. So I think that might be one reason they funnel money that way. But it's a lot of it is really from like, Moms for Liberty is like entirely a Florida Republican run movement. Yeah, we did the whole episode on it. Yeah.

So I wish you would have gone into that a little bit more and maybe dug up some other stuff and named some names because it's, it is pretty astroturfed. I mean, there's a lot of people who are just taking the ball and running with it. But Mom's for Liberty is definitely an astroturf organization. Yeah. Yeah, because it's like, I know one of the other things about book challenges is that like often, like sometimes they're from people who aren't even in. that library's district. And so some people, some libraries now are in the policies are going, by the

way, like you have to be a card carrying member of this library in order to submit a challenge. So, yeah, it's a good segment. I recommend people watch it. Again, it's everything that we've been saying on here for months now, but for the type of audience who will be watching this, this is probably more in-depth and more actionable and more material as to what the actual issue is and what its purpose is, then I feel like a lot of news reporting that focuses solely on like, oh, it's book bans and that's, and that's bad. The topic of the books and everything, like where it's solely focused on books and not what the end goal is of banning books. So I'm glad that he was like, this isn't about books. This is about pushing queer people out of public. And I was like, wow, John Oliver, go off.

Like, not always. Yeah, he's like pretty good. Like, the whole beginning of this episode is just him, like, just doing a bunch of like pro-Palestine, like, student encampment stuff. So he's not fucking around. Good for him. All right. For the next thing in the news roundup, I wanted to talk about a, I think this was the one that I saved. But there are some, I guess, like, roundups coming out of all the legislative stuff that's happening, particularly like the book bans.

the librarian qualified immunity stuff. I just realized my voice is really loud. It sounds fine to me. It looks like it's peaking on my end. Oops. It always looks like it's peaking on your end. Yeah, maybe. I also had it way up because of a meeting where no one could hear me.

So it's not normally this loud. Okay. Yeah, it's definitely peaking. Okay. The WAPO piece is called Red States Threaten librarians with Prison as blue states work to protect them. That's not entirely accurate. There are some blue states.

that are also doing this like Virginia and technically Georgia's a blue state. Is Virginia technically a blue state right now? It's based on how the presidential votes go. Okay. Virginia? Virginia went Biden. Oh, okay. Yeah, Virginia is very purple right now.

Like, it's very in the middle. Much more than like Florida. Florida will go either way than presidential, but Florida tends to almost always have Republican legislature. Yeah. Whereas New Hampshire always votes blue federally, but at the state level it's just all Republicans. Yeah.

It's so weird. Yeah. That was a weird place to live. So it's nice to see like infographics and stuff, like laws restricting libraries, how many there are. Like Utah's got like four. What I was surprised is there are a lot fewer protecting libraries than I thought, because I thought a lot of these had passed.

Like I thought New Hampshire had one. I thought Vermont had one. But apparently those have all kind of died. So it's really interesting to see. Just Illinois, right? Illinois, California, Washington. Washington has two laws. I had heard about the Illinois one, but I hadn't heard about California and Washington.

Yeah, I mean, they're all kind of different. Like the one in Washington, like, puts aside money for libraries as well. So. Whereas the Illinois one is just about bands. Washington mission. Whereas Illinois is just about book bans, right? I think it's one of the earlier ones, yeah, that it says you can't, like, you can't have political partisan reason for removing.

Okay, but people are just going to go around that and say it's not a political partisan reason. Yeah, of course. Well, that's the thing is, like, trying to make something content control. They've even got a good governor right now, but, you know. Yeah. So, like, this is a bill pending in New Jersey, protecting library workers. But, yeah, a lot of these that I thought had passed didn't. And some of them I thought had passed, like, the bad ones were blocked by Vito. So it's a good, it's a good piece because it's kind of just up to date on all of the different

laws if you wanted to look at it. And it's got a separate category for the ones that remove qualified immunity for librarians from obscenity laws to minors, which I was just listening to the 5-4 podcast about case from the 1890s where qualified immunity kind of starts. And it's like you can't sue your own state in federal court. And then since then, that's where qualified immunity is added up more and more and more. So like all the people you can't sue. And because of like the civil rights movement, they kept expanding it. Like you can't sue cops. You can't sue the, you know, judge. And librarians are city workers or county workers. So. Yeah. But, you.

Generally, in the laws, you have immunity as an educator. Oh, okay. So that way you're able to show like a sex ed book and not get in trouble if someone doesn't like it. Yeah. So those laws are kind of being modified. And that's what a lot of the opening librarians up to prosecution is about, which is funny, because all the times we talk about how librarians are agents of the state when they work for the government. And it's like, this is your own, like, enforcement arm of the state, but it's the liberal part of the state that, you know, fascists don't like. And that's why they want cops to be librarians, which brings us to cops raid encampments and weaponized books and zines.

So hopefully everyone saw the guy from the borrowers, who's the NYPD associate dean of propaganda or whatever the fuck is title is with that blown up version of terrorism, a very short introduction. Obviously, like a fake book printed cover. I mean, it's a real book. It's just way smaller. So that was obviously some sort of like cover he printed out and slapped on another book as evidence of, it's like of contraband, which is very funny because this John Oliver also brings this up in the episode, by the way, and says that one of, this isn't a handbook on how to do a terrorism. This isn't, here's how we do 9-11 to Electric Bugaloo. There's literally a chapter in there on like, how do we stop terrorism or something. Like it's a book about, it's like a sociological, you know, you know, political book or whatever. It's like a very short political science text. Yeah.

The Cambridge very short. It's Oxford, right? Oxford or Cambridge, yeah. I think it's Oxford. Sorry, adjusting in my chair. And they went on like national fucking daytime TV when they showed their little like propaganda little movie of when they raided Columbia with that weird stare off. Yeah.

with the ladder on it or whatever. Recent episode of Pottium America talks about this, so y'all go listen to that. But so they show that and then they're like, here's this contraband and here's the fucking bike locks. And then they show like this, this fucking book. And this made me, like, people are dunking on this and rightly so, because this is so obviously like manufactured. This is so obviously fake, right?

And also them just being like idiots who don't. don't know what like a textbook is. Well, this also shows how they've been training with the IDF because this is exactly what the IDF keeps doing in Gaza, which is like, we can't know book about Hitler. And it's like, yeah, and you also keep finding rare antiquities that you keep stealing from Gaza too. Yeah. But this made me think.

So with book challenges, for the most part, we've been seeing them in public libraries and the school libraries, places where children are. But we haven't really seen them as much in academic libraries. Like, I can't think of an example right now. I'm sure there are some, but I can't think of them off the top of my head, right? But if cops are using this that they quote unquote found at the Columbia, so the Columbia or the CUNY student encampment, like, look what these college students are reading from the outside agitators or whatever. Which. side note, outside agitators are a good thing, actually. It's what solidarity means, you fucking idiots. Like, goddamn. But are we going to start seeing book challenges in academic libraries now? And not over things like genderqueer and stuff, but over like political books like this. Like is the, you know, the 100 years war on Palestine. Because if you had all these professors, like having their courses canceled and stuff for talking about Palestine, like when are those books going to be removed from the library? So that,

this had me worried about that. But then also, then, like, it made me think of, like, the format of our books. And, like, if they're going to, like, fabricate bullshit like this, like, is there, is it better for us to use ebooks? Then, like, is it better for us to buy ebooks for the library, like, so that, like, students can have them more discreetly. And it's harder to fabricate that. Like, I guess, like, how, like, how do we prevent this kind of propaganda, basically? I mean, I'm sure we can't prevent it, but what are measures that we can take to, like, make it harder for them to do this so that when they do it, it's obvious to not just us. So that's what that made me think of. And then I see someone made a note about the Patriot Act. And, like, I know, was it Simon

tweeted yesterday or today about how, like, ex Libris and, like, all of these, like, cloud services, that libraries use. Like, we don't own them. And so our patron data isn't actually controlled by us. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely had coworkers who have had police show up and ask about, like, patron records and just had to go, well, you need a warrant. And that's really all you got to say, because I think in a lot of these situations, it's just going to be like a local sheriff.

It's not going to be the Department of Homeland Security coming. And they're not going to think to have a warrant. They're not going to have one of those FISA warrants or whatever they're fucking called. They're just going to show up and hope that you're acquiescent. And all you got to say is give me a warrant. And if you are the person who configures your ILS or you can talk to that person or whatever, there are probably settings about what kind of data you retain and for how long. My library right now is going through the process of migrating to WMS.

And part of that was like you can choose just to not save data including like including who was the last person to check something out. or like search history or like all sorts of things. You could choose just to not preserve that at all. Or if you do want to preserve it because like, you know, in my libraries, sometimes like, things don't, might not get checked in or out correctly or things are missing. So sometimes it can be helpful to see who the last person was who had it. But I can choose to only keep that for like a year or something.

You know, I can. And those are settings that can change. So like look to see what your settings are. I know Library Freedom Project does. or did have like a scorecard for like vendor privacy. But like go through and see like what kind of patron data you are keeping and for how long. And then if you can change it. Yes, Sadie. I was going to say and don't assume that just because you can't see it as an end user of that ILS, that it doesn't exist. I know in Polaris there is the sort of basic I can, you know, as a staff

member go in and look at the record for a book. It'll only show you the last known patron. And it only keeps certain records for like a year or something like that. But as an IT staff member who has access to the actual entire backend database, if we're not running the reports that wipe out that data, we can literally go in and see any time a book has been, has even slightly changed status and who did it at what branch, et cetera, et cetera. So bring that up with your IT too, if they're the ones who are involved in your ILS, but also get that shit in policy. Yes. Get that shit in writing.

That is part of your data retention. Yes. How long do you keep this patron data? Like, what actions need to be taken on a regular basis? Like, can you automate it? Is it, can you automate it? Is it something that, you know, somebody has to manually go in and delete? That's going to vary between ILSs greatly.

But I guarantee you, especially any ILS that is used in public libraries, has some sort of capability. So don't let anybody be like, oh, well, we can't do that. But yeah, for your data retention policy, it's not even necessarily like a, you know, you don't even have to be like, well, police can get this data. You can just be like, there's probably state laws that govern how long we can keep this shit. Why aren't we following that? We need to have it in writing. Put it in writing. Yeah, I know Koha has the ability, even if you don't control the back.

in database where you can anonymize your circulation records. So if like, because we're currently on co-hon, we're moving to WMS. And I think you can do. And what I would do is at the end of every year, is I would delete the people who had graduated. And then I would anonymize all of the circulation data except for things currently checked out. So there are a lot of things where if I go and look at them, it will say this was checked in, this was checked out. And when that happened, but the record of who did it is no longer there. It just says a patron from the library. That's what it says. So if you have Koha, that's the thing that you can do. I don't think you can do that in WMS, which is sad. And so, FYI. But yeah, that's a nice feature co-ha. Point to Koha, which I generally

don't like otherwise. Also, fuck X Libris. Stop getting that for your libraries, move away from it. There's better systems that are cheaper. Yeah. Do you want to bring up the Zim distros? Yes, I do. So in addition to the NYPD finding Terrorism 101 books, contraband and showing them on TV, the Israel like war account, like there was like some sort of Israeli account like war news or something that tweeted about like all of the all of the contraband and evil propaganda that was found in the encampments. And some of those things. that they found were zines. Because as we've all been seeing at these encampments, is that students have been setting up libraries, which fucking rules. If you are a student at one of these encampments, past or present, and you help set up one of these libraries, please let us know, because that fucking rules, and we're very proud of you. And a lot of the materials in these libraries was obviously, like, books and stuff, because like, Hey Market, AK, PM, all of these

places where like, hey, if you're in a campment, shoot us an email, we will send you free books. Good job. Also, a lot of zines were there. Largely anarchist, but not exclusively. It's just the anarchist like putting our zines online for free so that people can print them out, because that's what we do. And a lot of them were skills

based, right? How de-arrest tactics or like proper holds to do when you're like doing riot stuff and kettleing and all that. Like tactics and instruction and stuff like that. how to, you know, what to do if you're being arrested, things like this. And this was very

funny. And a couple of zine distros on Twitter, including the haters cafe, were like, lol, it's fun to see our stuff like being like yelled about by Israel as proof of outside funding. Because they were using this as the whole like outside agitators, outside funding thing. Like, look at these anarchist scenes that made their way into the encampments. And it's like, homie, like, they printed those off. Or I saw that MBTA distro, which is like a Boston, also just broadly Massachusetts, a zine distro. Like, I saw them on Instagram and Twitter being like, hey, if you are one of the Boston encampments,

shoot us a DM and we will bring you zines for free to have. And I saw this a lot. And so the fact that, like, Israel was trying to say that, like, the presence of anarchist zines was proof of like outside agitators and outside funding is very funny because zines are fucking cheap that they're just being printed right but also like a lot of them are from outside because people are providing resources and solidarity and sharing free resources and stuff and this may me want to like also share like that these distros like you can go on their websites and most of the time just print stuff off for free. And you can distribute it yourself. Like, you don't have to pay for

this. We do this at the Lucy Parson Center all the time where people will print these zines out from like MBTA and Sprout distro and all of these other places. And they will print them out and they'll just bring them to the Lucy Parsons Center and they're sitting there for free that people can take. And so if you were a library worker or if there's still an encampment at your institution or something, like print these out, bring them to the encampments, bring them to your public library, bring them to local bookstores, like, just leave them in coffee shops, like, fucking do some guerrilla distribution. You know, the guy who did parterre box started off by, like, printing it out and cruising men at the Met and leaving him in the men's room. Like, you know, just do whatever.

These are free and you can do it. And a lot of these distros right now are focusing on, like, encampment tactics, like, for these students, right? Like, DRS techniques and everything. Like they're not just yelling about politics or anything. They're like instruction manuals. Basically, they're really cool. Or there's like interviews with people from Palestine. Like I know Black Rose interviewed Fowda, which is an anarchist faction in Palestine right now. And MBTA distro or no hater or haters cafe, one of the two, also made that a zine that I've seen distributed everywhere.

Like when I went to the Boston Anarchist Book Fair, all the tables that had zines, a lot of them all had the same exact zines because they were just printing off from these distros online. And I grabbed a couple of links to distros. There are many more, and many of these places will have, like, a page where they list other distros. Like, I know the MBTA distro one has a page where it's like, here's distros that we like.

So see if there's one in your area. A Sprout distro has no geographic region. But, yeah. So I thought that. would be. I just thought that was interesting that they were like, oh no, the zines. The anarchist zines, the outside funding of the anarchist zines. It is outside agitation, but it's free. So I thought it was funny. That reminded me I was reading about civil rights protests because someone on Twitter was being an idiot. And it just got me so worked up that I had to

like start reading about the diversity of tactics and the civil rights movement. And that was one thing that happened a lot with like the sit-ins was people would just students would start doing it and then people would just come in out of nowhere and be like okay here's what you need to do like here's how you organize here's how you keep the moving going here's what you know and it would be like experienced organizers have been doing it for decades yeah yep and that's a good thing we should be like and this is not an opportunity this is not a saying go vanguard don't be PSL and like try to force your way into everything. and like take over and think that you're the one that's doing it right. No, if you are not a student at one of these encampments, what you need to do, what is actually helpful, is to be like, this is what I have to offer? Is this helpful? Do you want, like, I was talking with a comrade today,

and the way that they phrased it was like, I am the tool, you know, not the like person using the tool. Like, I am here to be used, basically. How can I be useful? You know, here, I can do X, Y, C. Like, this is what I've been doing with any of these groups that I've been involved in. It's like, hey, I'm a librarian. These are my professional skills that I know not everybody has. Are these useful to what we want to be doing here? Like, can I, can these skills that I know I have that not many people maybe have, are these useful in this space? And sometimes they are. And sometimes they're not, you know, such as life. And that's not even my, like, political skills. That's just like, like, hey, these are things I know how to do that not everyone does. That's like the way to do that. You don't just go in and say, I know how to do this and you don't. You know, it's collaborative. We learn from each other. This is something in the book, feminist pedagogy for library instruction that's talked about is that like, you know, you can't completely remove hierarchy and instruction, but you are learning from the people that you are giving instruction to as much as they are learning from you, right? And they also

have authority in that space, right? It's a conversation back and forth. Yeah, radical reference talks about, instead of reference interview, it's reference conversations. Oh, I love that. I'm going to steal that. I haven't read that. It's a journal, I think. Is it? Okay. Yeah. I like that. I don't know if they ever got off the ground, though. It was like an OJS. Yeah, if it's still around. Yeah. Yeah. Also related to, yeah, like, speaking of the encampments and stuff that I think is also we should, as library workers and such that we should be caring about, is some of the reason, the excuse that these universities have been using for sending militarized police into harass and beat and arrest their students is that they're changing policies at the very

last minute without telling people. So, you know, I remember when I was in college, people had tents and hammocks out on the quad when the weather got nice out all the fucking time. That's what the quad is for. It is for students to get hammocks and do hacky sack and like hang out. That's what that's fucking for. And so now these like universities, they're like adding like no tents on the grass policies at the last fucking minute without telling anybody, which tells me that also they're not going through the proper process for changing policy probably. As someone who is an asshole about policy. And then they're using that as a way reason to arrest students. And the reason people are noticing this is, I'm guessing, because they, like, have saved or web archived versions of these

policies so that they can compare them. Because that's how I saw it on Twitter that I saw like a before and after. So, like, what role do we have in what is going on right now with that as far as like preserve? Well, I mean more as than like preserves, preserve. and archiving so that there's like proof. Yeah. I mean, archive it is usually purchased by universities. So ideally this will be running automatically. But if your university is kind of small, it might not have archive it, which is the

internet archive service. You can probably set some automated scraping to happen even through internet archive. And you can definitely add things to the internet archive yourself. There's a add on. You can put your browser whenever you want to save something. There's perma.cc, which is very good at preserving. like PDFs and stuff, but it's a little difficult to get because you have to prove you're like with a university, but you can set it up anyway and be like, yeah, we're getting the service and it's

free, and that way you'll have a permanent CC account. Don't university archives, though, also have copies of all of the policies and stuff, or they just do boring meeting minutes and stuff? It'll be in a records retention policy, but who follows their records retention policy properly. Yeah. Also, like, how much of that can you get from public records requests? I'm not sure how that applies. Yeah. Yeah. You can also get people's emails where they're discussing it. But the thing about like policy implementation is like faculty governance is a myth. Yeah. The shared governance just doesn't really exist anymore because when it was implemented, it used to be that faculty actually rotated into administrative positions and then

out of them, whereas now it's all professional managerial people whose job it is to be a manager. So faculty don't actually get to be in the ones. But but even with policy committees and stuff like that. Like, there's no process at my university where it has to go to the faculty senate or staff senate, I don't think. And if it does, it's like, it's just a rubber stamp. There are a lot of committees that are just rubber stamps. I'm on one. I don't, you know, it doesn't matter. There's no reason to, like, reject anything in the committee I'm on because it's just curriculum committee. But yeah, in terms of, like, just changing your policy, you can probably do that. And, you know, as long as you're like an executive vice president or higher. So the provost or the president can probably

just change it on a whim. Yeah. So I guess my point is like, how do we be intentional about archiving this kind of stuff, both as people who work in these institutions, but also more of a, from a community standpoint. I mean, just do web archiving of policies with internet archive ad on. I think what happened in the case with the side by side that was literally people were checking it and then pointed out that it wasn't against policy and then the policy changed. And so then they They just happened to notice it because they were already looking to see if it was against policy. Yeah. Because in a lot of places, it's not against policy.

Like UT, Austin, it's probably not against their policy to have an ongoing protest. Because everywhere outside of a university is a free speech zone at a public university in Texas. It's literally all designated as a free speech zone. So, you know, I don't know if time, place requirements actually are a problem there. I mean, maybe they can tell them to leave at night or something. I don't, maybe, but I doubt there's any written policy about that. And I also doubt they had a very specific one. Like in this case, it was like, tents need a permit unless it's a small tent, which was the policy at, where was it?

Where the policy changed last minute? I think it was Columbia. Yeah, wasn't it? Okay. I don't think it was Columbia. But anyway. Was it CUNY then? I think it was UVA.

Hmm. Yes, it was UVA. It was UVA? Okay. Yeah. The only reason I remember that is because socialist dog mom was at UVA and she was the one who tweeted about it. Mm, okay. And also, a friend of the show.

Dave Gimani is also there and tweeting about it. Yeah. I know a librarian, a music librarian at UVA. UVA also is the one where in their special collections and archives, they redacted, erased, and removed records about that one student getting McCarthyismed after a researcher asked to see. We want to talk about that eventually. I think I mentioned a show before, but that's from queering the catalog, queer philology is which every maston. I'm looking at you, UVA.

Yeah. Also, there was the tweet that was about, what do you preserve, which is a dual-sided question in terms of what do we preserve of this political moment? And then also, what does the risk of preservation have to people's political safety? So, like, I've talked about it. Yeah, because I tell you, I was in a protest video. Good thing I was masked, because it wasn't blurred. Blur your fucking videos and photos, I swear to God. Sorry. Yeah, just get a big sign, sling it around your back when you see someone, the kids. camera, sling it in front of you. That's what I did. Yeah. I was masks and covered my tattoos at least. Yeah. What do you save? Because I talk about this. I've talked about it before with like undocumented oral histories of how do you preserve, you know, because those have been used for deportations at certain places. So how do you make sure that people, if you're preserving something

of someone, it doesn't even have to be someone doing something illegal because honestly, like, none of this shit's illegal. Like, these are like misdemeanors at best because the university told you to leave and then it's a misdemeanor. But even then, like, the university had no basis to tell you to leave. So, but it is still a misdemeanor. So, you know, and I'm sure someone's going to try and hit protesters with felonies whenever they can. Some psycho in the House of Representatives had a bill put forward today that if you are protesting and convicted at a, at a pro-Palestinian protest at a university, you have to be exiled to Gaza for six months. It's your tax dollars at work. By the way, exile is illegal and common law, so I assume that would come up.

Or like, because when I've done my presentations and stuff on like archival silence about how sometimes it's a good thing, right? One of the good examples of things being redacted politically is this, and I'll find it to put in the notes, is this one oral history of around when Roe v. Wade was initially happened and like around like before it and a little after it. And like the testimonies of like women and men and doctors and like all of these people. And the way that they redacted that information because they were like, we don't know what the statute of limitations on some of this is. Or like what if this becomes illegal again? Which surprise. But like the redaction process is really thorough. And so they were able to still document this political moment that happened.

And these is important bit in history. while protecting the people who gave them that information. It's a really good example of it. In contrast to, for example, when Boston University almost got an IRA person killed because of their redaction policies being insufficient. Yeah. That collection had like crazy rules. It was like, once you die, your report can be released. But like other people implicated were still alive.

Yep. Or mentioned. That's what happened. You need a longer embargo. This is why I always tell people, too, when, like, they want to give us a collection. And I'm like, okay, but it's not going to be public for 80 years, you know? And they're like, well. It's like, because you didn't redact it.

You didn't get consent. You didn't get informed consent. You didn't do anything. We have to wait to all these people are dead. So, like, it'll be there for posterity. But, like, no one can use this for, you know, for at least one lifetime. I mean, who doesn't even knows. Which still be around by then.

Yeah, which, like, sucks, you know, redact things. Yeah. I think you're safe to save. If you want to have an accession policy in special collections, I just listed out some things I think would be fine. Like protest signs, I've seen good protest sign collections, zines, official correspondence, so anything the university puts out, the policy changes. Photos with nobody in them. So things like graffiti or like Twitter propaganda. So like it's like I ain't reading all that.

You could put that photo or that tweet into like a collection, which would be good. Probably written demands that are anonymized. I'm trying to think of like what you can put in that really is going to have like minimal risk but is going to still tell the story. I would probably not recommend oral histories, but you could probably use news reports. Oh, saving news reports is actually really good because news reports aren't archived properly. And they change. Especially with like AP and stuff. Yeah. Like I have a bunch of news reports from the Marti-Colon Cemetery. And those are invaluable because like otherwise I wouldn't be able to get them. And so it tells me about research that people have done,

but like is not around anymore. Like the local news place like made a database of, the graves. No one has that database, but I know it existed and I know someone did it because it was mentioned in a news report. So start, you know, it's kind of hard to tape the news because like it's all distributed. Half of it's online. Half of it's in stupid web forms. But again, just really get your web archiving game up. Yeah. Like, um, I think I've mentioned this before. Maybe I haven't. So when I went to the tribal college library institute back in 2018, yeah, okay, 2018, I think. One of the presenters was the library, and I always forget the name of it. It's the college that was nearest to like Standing Rock and where like the Dakota Access Pipeline

stuff was happening. And it was like the only place where internet was. So people would go there to upload things, you know, and get on computers and everything. And the librarian, he was not indigenous. He was just a librarian who worked there and was from that community. And what he did was that he saved protest signs that were left behind or that people donated. And also he went online and he found memes related to it. And he saved those.

And he talked about when he would share them, he's like, I am violating copyright law by doing this. Because I don't know who the original person was and I don't have their permission. But it's more important that people see these and me, maybe get us to take it down than for people to not see these. And so that's another thing that we can be doing is like memes because those aren't usually don't like contain people in them. They might sometimes, but like, you know, shit that you might see like on Instagram. I know it's like hard to save things on Instagram. But what you can do is you can either like screenshot it or if you like share it, you can you can do a setting where if you share it as a story, it will then download that

story to your phone and you can save it that way. So I might start doing that is I might try saving memes and just like online posts and stuff that I find like images. Yeah. Or like if you at your library maybe ask like maybe start a little program where people can donate their protest signs and then they can be kept there or something. Like what this guy did was he made it an exhibit in his library and covered the walls of that college library with all of these protest signs. from Standing Rock. Showed his pictures. It was really cool.

But yeah, take that copyright risk, you know, take memes, share them, archive them. Well, libraries also have copyright exemptions, too, for research collections. So you're probably not really breaking copyright if you're doing it within, like, the function of your job. There's also the book, Baltimore Uprising, the Teen Epistillary, which I think I've mentioned before. And it's just tweets. The whole book is just tweets from teenagers around the Baltimore uprising in 2014.

And I think all the user names are censored out or something. I think I still have it somewhere. Or not, you know, it doesn't really matter because most of those accounts are probably defunct by now anyway. But yeah, you can definitely save a lot of stuff. I'm looking at some tools. One I want to mention is 4K video downloader. There's a free version, but there's a paid version that I do recommend. If you want to do mass YouTube archiving, it works.

You can download a whole channel. So if you want to get like everything that's put up, on like, I don't know, CNN's YouTube channel. You can just throw the channel in there and it will start cueing every video that they've ever posted. So it'll also cue playlist. You can put a playlist in there and it'll pull everything. And of course, one video at a time, it works fine.

And it's not that expensive. And I think you get multiple licenses. So you could probably like split it between multiple people and go in for like a three license bundle. And it's a perpetual license. So it was when I bought it. So hopefully it still is. There's also archive.p8, which I believe will work on most things.

I was trying to test it to make sure it'll work on that it's still like functional, but it actually passes paywalls and archives. So I'm going to also put that in there. Yeah, I'm also trying to find when people were doing the saving Ukraine digital heritage or whatever, the Succio. Yeah, there are lots of groups that do stuff like that. Yeah, they had like, maybe because it's over, they don't have it up anymore, but they, because they had like, how do you do, like, web archiving with all the tools and everything? I'm trying to, it's very much like a digital humanities thing.

There was one for climate change data as well. Let's see if I can find it. But that one was very extensive and it would teach you, like, different things. So it would tag it and it would teach you all kinds of web archiving stuff. So I'm trying to see if I can find that site too. Let's see. Oh, the library of Congress has a web archiving thing. Oh, yeah.

And I think it archives Twitter. I don't know if it's all of Twitter. Yeah, guerrilla archiving event, saving data from Trump, climate mirror. Oh, aha. This is cool. I love GitHub. And I love the like awesome insert thing here repos, where it's just like a curated list of like recommended tools and sites and things around a topic. So I just found one called awesome web archiving that has

training and documentation, resources for web publishers, tools and software, community resources, and even service providers. So hell yeah. It was less updated 12 hours ago. Cool. Oh, archives unleashed, I think. Yeah, there's archive box, auto archiver. All right. Well, we'll put a bunch of stuff in the list. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, so we can wrap up. Do you want to talk about Steve Albini. Yeah, I don't have much to say. I always wanted to get him on the podcast and that never happened. But Steve Albini died literally today. It's May 8th. And if y'all don't know who he is, a lot of people call him a producer, but he preferred the term engineer. He, like, his views on music production were very interesting. He was a incredibly prolific music engineer, as well as a musician. Like, so many of

your favorite albums were probably produced by Steve Albini. If you like rock music or punk music, he even produced in utero by Nirvana, or he was like one of the engineers on it. And he had a couple of bands. And the reason why I always wanted to get him on here was of his comments about like Spotify and music streaming and like the music industry. And a lot of the same stuff that we talked about with like Corey Doctoro, for example. And like, Steve Albini was all very much like everyone involved should get paid, like, you know, musicians and producers and everything as workers, but also that people should kind of have free access to music. Like, he didn't like Spotify because it didn't pay the musicians, like the people who put music out. But he liked that people could access it for free.

Like he didn't like title because it was subscription only, right? Like he came from this like DIY, like punk like vibe where it's not about like, oh, I'm going to sell my record for a million dollars. It's I'm going to, you know, encourage fanzines and people passing tapes around and stuff. So I just, because a lot of times people, like people think that it's contradictory for like, I want people to access things for free and also workers should get paid. Usually it's workers should get paid therefore people need to pay for things. But he was very much like, no, the workers need to be paid and also people should have this for free.

And he was on Pod Damn America one time talking about Spotify and like exploitation and music streaming. And I thought it would be interesting to have him on eventually to like talk about that. And also he was very big into analog recording and media because digital files can be erased on purpose deliberately by like record. companies and stuff. And so like ideas about like, you know, digital versus physical preservation and access and everything. So I just thought, you know, I would mention that on here. RIPMPs dude. Yeah. I saw that news and I was just been bummed out and listening to his music all afternoon. I was like, no, it's team Albini. He was so cool. He had such good opinions. Yeah. Oh, hi, Arthur. Are you doing a big stretch? Yeah. I fucking hate El Severe, like Science Directs.

citation button. I'm trying to grab the citation for the... You want me to get it for you from Zotero instead? Would that be helpful? Yeah, it's fine. I got it. Are we going to do Chicago style or APA? It doesn't matter. None of it matters. So I literally sent citations to someone today in like both APA and Chicago and MLA, just whatever was at the top of the generator for the site. I just need someone to put in the notes. There you go. I don't remember when we mentioned this Prater on fear. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, I also put in a question of like, how can library workers, like, support students in their universities and communities if you don't work in a university? Like, how can we be supporting these encampments or just how can we be supporting protests and this current movement? That was like my open question.

Arthur, I know, buddy. Well, I'm going to put web archiving stuff in the notes and there will be. We've already given some practical advice about preserving information, and then the rest is just be there to do support as a regular person. Yeah. Print off scenes, that sort of stuff. We already covered all of it. Oh, and also, don't be a pussy archive things, even if the person's name is like, Faye's cum dumpster or whatever. I'd love that tweet exchange. It was so funny.

Where someone was like, I'm begging people to change their Twitter names so that we don't have to archive things where your name is cum dumpster or whatever. There is filth in special collections. It's fine. Oh, yeah, that's what's for. Yeah, sounds like a you problem. If your face, come dumpster. Come on the show. Anyway, I ain't reading all that. Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Good night.