librarypunk - 152 - LIVE SHOW AT IFFY BOOKS!

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Recording of our first ever live show! Guests Alison and Jennie talk with us about organizing, contracts, AI nonsense, updates, and more! You don’t want to miss the audience participation either!  [e-mail] Email for LFP mailing list.  Media mentioned SPARC contracts library: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/contracts-library/  Data Cartels, Sarah Lamdan - https://www.sup.org/books/law/data-cartels  https://commonslibrary.org/organizing-people-power-and-change-the-one-on-one-meeting/ Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher - https://files.libcom.org/files/%5BMark_Fisher%5D_Capitalist_Realism_Is_There_no_Alte(BookZZ.org).pdf  The fourth Librarian Futures report reveals critical gaps—and opportunities—in how librarians can lead on AI integration in higher education  https://www.sagepub.com/explore-our-content/press-office/press-releases/2025/05/20/new-technology-from-sage-report-explores-librarian-leadership-in-the-age-of-ai  Siembra ICE training: https://www.siembranc.org/ Kay Slater, Library Trends upcoming article on AI.  https://labornotes.org/events One on One training https://commonslibrary.org/organizing-people-power-and-change-the-one-on-one-meeting/  Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/whwtxubp  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG

They have all kinds of cute little, like, tinkering things. They've got a really cute logo. You could buy a t-shirt or a tote bag. Yeah. Had a really great conversation with Steve about tactile buttons. We love the clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Yeah.

There are so many clickety-clack things in here that you can buy. Yeah. Does anyone need to stim? Yeah. Do you need to stim? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's why I have the fan even when it's not hot.

We know our audience. Yeah. It's library school students. This isn't postponies. Check out Gigi's podcast postponies. Got to love a podcast host who's like, don't listen to my podcast. That's me. Don't have a...

We suck. What are you doing? Ask me for my blue sky at a show recently and I was like, we got to... Someone asked me for my blue sky at a show recently and I was like, we got to know each other more before I do that. Yeah. That's like third base. It's like asking to see my underwear. Right. No.

Yeah. Literally. It took you a second. The library future is Blue Sky and not by accident on the Federal Society. Blue Sky account that I owned and told me second away. Dang. They took away. The Federalist Society from you?

I thought Blue Sky was supposed to be a place for freedom. Yeah, right? It's fucked up. I just become a Second Amendment guy. Yeah. I'm a third amendment guy. Third Amendment guy, you will never put a soldier in my house. I don't think they should

even have barracks. Put a soldier nowhere. Yeah. Just don't have them. No, no soldiers. No, they took away Lexis Nexus from me. You had Lexus Nexus. And I kept getting tagged by lawyers. They're like, thank you Lexus Nexus for the assembling for the Empire

Award. We got one minute. Okay, what do you shout at me for? Yeah, quit yapping. Right there. You run this podcast, too? Nope. Everyone knows you're in charge, Justin. I'm seeing the light. I'm seeing the light in the back. All right.

All right. I'm going to try a thing. Are we recording still? We've been recording. Okay. Cool. Nice. Are you going to...

Funny. All right. Well, this is the highest quality version of the theme song I can get, so let's go. Great. The speaker is here, honey. Let's just sing it. Yeah. There we go.

Can you tell we're a free podcast? DIY, bitch. Yeah. We don't have a Patreon. We do this in our free time. I'm going to talk over it. Let's make this as difficult through Justin as possible. No, shut up.

Kill it. Robots trying to take my job. I'm Justin. I forgot my job title again. I don't really care about it. My pronouns are he and they go. Hi, everybody. We're going out of order, I guess.

Yeah. Woo. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian. And what are my pronouns are he-him. My brain doesn't work anymore. Just update them. I'm Sadie.

I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. And we have guests. Yeah, we do. Hey, what's up, Queers? Yeah, that's right. Clockcha. My name is Allison. I use you her pronouns, and I am the director of library freedom project.

Got some fans. Yeah, okay, cool. Thank you. Hi, I'm Jenny. I use she her pronouns, and I am the director of Library Futures at NYU Laws, Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, which I always get wrong. Woo! All right. Yeah, everybody round of applause.

Thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to our sponsor, Gigi! And HIPBY books. And HIPE books, thank you, NIPBs. Buy things. Buy things. They sell batteries here. So if you do want to lob batteries at us during the show, you can sell.

support your local info shop by buying batteries. They are on that shelf behind you. Yes, heckle us. Justin, did you know that lobbing batteries is a great Philadelphia tradition? I'm not even making that up. I just, I didn't, no.

Oh, fuck off, man. You see what I have to pop with. I see. I'm going to lob a battery at you. Isn't it traditionally 9 volts? It's a D battery because the guy they were lobbing them at, his nickname was like D battery or something. So they were like,

D bad. It was a sports situation. and it was an opposing team. I don't actually know. It's like I'm a Philadelphia nationalist. Go birds, but I don't care about any sports. So I don't know the particulars of it, but that's basically what happened. I think it's cheering four birds in general.

Yeah. The birds of Philadelphia. Any bird. Yeah. Go birds. Yeah, go birds. Your pigeons are underfed. They're not round enough.

We got some fat-ass pigeons of Boston. We have some really fat pigeons here. Yeah. Cool. All right. Thank you everybody for coming. Thank you. This is so cool.

Yeah. We've been doing this since 2021. Yep. It's four years. Four years. Yeah. Cool. All right.

Let's get fucking going. All right. This is what it's like behind the scenes, by the way. Yeah. Look behind the curtain. I cut out silences. Yeah. So, like, automatically.

So it tucks like 15 minutes off every episode. What silence? None of us will have stopped talking since we sat down. I have never shut up in my entire life. It's my promise to you. You cannot do more than five people on a podcast because it literally becomes. is impossible. Cool.

I did want to talk about, because we had Kelly Jensen on the podcast recently, and if you are affected by the I-M-L-S cuts, please go, yes. Boo. Boob. We have my audience reactions for once. Yeah.

That's cool. What the fuck's up, Philly. What the fuck is up? How many people are here actually from Philly? Fuck the feds. Yeah. Holler. E-A-G-L-E-S.

E-O! That's right. Cool. Go birds. I don't have my sound a soundboard, so I have to do my own soundboard. Jay gets a moment of peace. Are we going to get like Foley?

Like live Foley action? Yeah, from me. With my mouth, into the mic. Get the mic closer to you because I'm worried it's not going to pick up. Eat it like this. I have to eat the mic. Yeah, I don't know why they're like that, but that's how we don't get feedback. Elemental.

Yeah. We're at a punk show. So yeah, go to. absolutely holding it like Henry Ron. I can't stop doing it. We're doing it since I'm 16. Let's open up this pit, Philly.

Yeah. I did this at work one time and I just forgot that everyone is really quiet into mic so they handed me the mic and I'm like, what about public, private situations? Just screamed it. So yeah, check out Kelly Jensen's stuff and then if you are affected by it,

please put it in there so that we have like a tab of what's happening with IMLS because it's both me and her are trying to like track these things so that we have like an idea of all of the different like downstream impacts and it's really difficult so hopefully making it a little more crowdsourced will will help getting an idea so that's my plug for this segment but you don't need a segment when you have two guests so yeah guests hi hey so the subject today is library advocacy what are you doing and what are your options? and I believe Jenny has a big update. Yeah, Jenny, you're up. We do have a big update. So yesterday, Library Futures got to announce that we received a big grant from the Arcadia Foundation in order to do work on contracts, on digital contracts with folks. So we'll do a bunch of research for quite a while. We will hire a lawyer.

And maybe one of the only good things I can think of is that, that there are probably a bunch of lawyers who used to work for the United States who now want to do more radical stuff and might be willing to come and work with us, maybe. And so we are going to hire a lawyer and they will effectively take on small to medium-sized institutions as clients and negotiate contracts with them. And from that work, we will understand much better about what is negotiable in the sort of contracts that we sign from vendors all the time and what is not. We'll create a big database. I see that Nick from Spark is here and they have a wonderful contracts database already

and sort of building on some of the work without being duplicative of that organizations like Spark have been doing, but particularly with public libraries. I actually had somebody say to me yesterday, like, wow, that's really cool. renegotiated our overdrive contract since 2006. And like lots of stuff has changed since then. So, yeah, and it also will sort of help hopefully start to head off some of the issues with AI slop in digital collections and really setting guidelines and really setting limitations and boundaries around that as well.

One of the conspiracy theories I believe in is that like the media perception, of defense attorneys and lawyers in general as like skeeby assholes is like a part of copaganda because like well i i organize with lawyers those people are fucking fearless like you also probably get to see the good lawyers that's also true uh but yeah i think it's a both and situation yeah yeah they're dirt bags but there are dirt bags there are dirt bags sometimes yeah we need dirt back socialism i was i was i was talking to i was doing an interview with I forgot his name. I will repost it when he posts the interview.

But I was telling him, you know, you're allowed to, like, get mad about stuff you believe in. It's kind of like a normal thing to do. Like, if someone says you can't have queer people in this country, I will get into a physical fight with you. Like, because it's not a live and let live, like, sort of option for me. So it's like, you know, you need people to be combative. I'm always talking people to be more combative. Especially if you have good politics. If you have bad politics, stay at home.

everyone here has good politics because you came to the show and I also love to be combative I love to fight so fuck you fight me I can do anything yeah queer as and fuck you

yeah queer as and fight me thank you for your update Jenny yeah well thank you thank you for starting off with that get those coins yeah it will add the project will be four years

which is a lot of time but it gives a lot of space to sort of really think through how we're going to do it. But sort of speaking of being combative, like one of the things we hear the most is like it's too risky to talk to a rep as a person who's paying them, I guess, for some reason. But anyway, instead of sort of having the risk beyond the individual institution, we can take on a lot of risk. And basically, like, a lot of the work I think that we're trying to do is like give your risk to us. Like, let us say the shit that you can't say. Let us like sort of take on some of the

like risk mitigation from institutions from the more shitty general councils who are like, don't do anything, like don't anger your vendor for whatever reason. But I don't care. I mean, yesterday I was in a room with Steve Potash from Overdrive for some reason and was like, Overdrive is owned by KKR, which also destroyed nursing homes and newspapers. And I thought I was really holding back. but multiple people were like, oh my God, like, you really went for it. And I was like, no, you have no idea.

I took out a bunch of slides. If that was going for the throat, then you're not prepared to see the reality. Yeah, seriously. It's really weird how you kicked him after you started crying, but it was, you know. Stop, he's already dead. He was already down. No, that's great. So, like, how does the renegotiation process work?

So, like, universities and purchasers, like libraries come to you, and then is it, like, you negotiate, like you give them advice about what they should say in the negotiations? Well, so the hope is that we'll run an open RFP. So basically, anybody who has a contract that's up for renegotiation and wants us to, and wants advice effectively, will come and we'll go through a process. We put, I cannot remember how many, but we put in the grant, like how many we will try to do a year. and yeah, if you have, if you work in a library, particularly a public library and you have any kind of contract with, you know, evil hoopla or evil overdrive in particular coming up, and you would like to work with an organization to figure out what terms you can negotiate in which terms you cannot, definitely reach out and we can try to work through it. It's a little bit of an experiment and it's sort of the question is like, I don't think that we actually know.

what is negotiable and what is not. Yeah. And the hope is that by doing a few, we can start to make like a library of negotiation based on contractual work. So it'll be kind of like the Spark Contracts database? Yeah. So that's why I shuddered it out. Okay.

Yeah. No, I'm sorry. Yeah. I've been running too many things. No, it'll be very soon. It'll be sort of like the Spark Contracts database, but more about the negotiation process itself. I got you.

the negotiable terms within and non-negotiable terms within different vendor contracts. And can you explain open RFPs for people who aren't in that? That's not part of their job. And open RFP means that we will put out on our website. I request for people to, with a bunch of questions that asks, you know, do you want to be part of this process? And then we'll go through a vetting process just to figure out like which ones we think are going to be. we can help with actually

in which like where we can't help but that's actually like not for a year like it's going to be a while. So we're getting the inside scoop. Yeah, it's inside scoop. It's a long, these things do take kind of a while. Awesome. But we will have a job application

out or job rec out I guess next week. Nice. Yeah, it's for all the lawyers who listen to this podcast. I don't know how many that might be one. People might know a lawyer. Do we got any lawyers? Have anyone been arrested? If you're a lawyer.

Do we got any library school students here? We know right. Yay, library school students. Allison, I wanted to talk to you about updates with Library Freedom Project. So we were at your AI panel. Yeah. Which was good. Thank you.

And there's another one, right? Somebody sent me a text that someone sent them, so I don't know who this came from, but they said it was the best ALA session they have attended in 25 years. Wow. Yeah. All right. Congratulations. I know that this is not relevant to the podcast listeners, but for the audience, we will be doing the session again at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Go to it. So the version that happened today was the real version tomorrow is the hungover and tired version, but sloppiness counts. So, yeah. But yeah, who cares about that? The podcast listeners are like, who the fuck? Why, that was like weeks ago. What's going on with Library Freedom Project? That was your question.

Well, it was just like updates with you, and we were talking about, like, I think I have a bullet point here for risk. and I don't want to be the theme of this. Okay, well, let me just give a little sort of like over bird's eye view of who we are and what we're trying to do. So Library Freedom Project is an organization that works with, that we build community with library workers,

and we do political education for library workers to try to support libertory change in our libraries, in our communities, with our labor unions, with ourselves. And our focus is basically on privacy, anti-surveillance, critical analysis of technology, and what we've been, you know, as a part of

that, we want things that other library organizations, present company excluded, other library organizations won't touch. So something that you may have encountered recently, given our current political conditions, is like already all the people that you work with who are like super afraid of taking any kind of political or politicized stance about anything have become even more frightened, some would say even cowardly, about approaching the conditions that we find ourselves in now. So a big focus that we have in this moment is how do we get more library workers willing to take risk for the things that we care about, show up for the people in our communities who are most impacted by mega bullshit, find the ways that we can actually like step in,

and recognize that while everyone's risk has sort of increased, I think that there are a lot of people who think of themselves as at greater risk than they actually are. Agreed. And like that is what one of the things that we're really trying to cut through. Like, look, yeah, everyone's more scared now, but that doesn't mean that you, like, middle class, white, cis, et cetera, library worker, are somehow going to be like, the next one up against the wall. You're just not. So what can you do with your positionality to defend the kind of world that you want to live in?

Also, people who are at greater risk of like specific marginalized identities and everything are allowed to define their own. Justin, shut the fuck up. Gigi started laughing and I started laughing. Uh-huh. He started laughing at the same time. Uh-huh, okay. But...

He talks with his hands and he has a bad mic. That's a point. So I knew when he had to hold the mic, that he was going to do this a couple times. Okay. I'm not going to learn. Blatant homophobia. I'll tell you what. We hate to see it. It's being a transphobia. Yes, he's homophobic. We exist. No, but like people who are at greater risk are also allowed to decide their own risk-taking tolerance. Yes. Because one thing I see a lot in organized spaces is like, I think well-meaning like white folks being like, oh, well, we have to like take all the risk because these people can't.

And I'm like, but I think people who are like marginalized get to decide how much risk they're willing to to take. Totally agree. That's also a thing. Yeah. I think the other thing is like some of it is risk and some of it is like are you willing to, are you willing to even take the risk within your own employment like to support your own colleagues? Yeah. Like these are jobs at the end of the day. And like, you know, I think that I see a lot like, you know, if someone, for example, for example,

example, again, not naming names, like, you know, decides that they want to do a bunch of advocacy with Librar and Freedom Project or around, you know, the e-book issues, around the vendor contract issues. And they're like, hey, this shit is fucked up and bullshit. Like, and get, then do get targeted by these huge corporations, by administration, but, you know, if they want to, if somebody wants to stand up for Palestinian rights, for example, like, are you also willing to take the risk to stand up for your own. colleagues within your own work. I can unionize, by the way. You can put this stuff in your CBAs. And even if you can't actually unionize or anything, you can still organize your workplace, even if it isn't an officially recognized union.

Like, you can still organize with your coworkers and you can stand up to this shit, right? Like, I'm a city worker. So, like, oh, we have to cooperate with ice or whatever the fuck ever. And it's like, no, you can also just, like, create a rapid response network with your co-workers, like, straight up. Like, I'm fucking tired of it. Yeah, and that's how we build. I mean, what Jenny's talking about, it's like we have to build greater trust with each other.

We have to find those people. Maybe there are people we work with and maybe they're not. Maybe there are people that we meet at ALA or they're like at our state library conference or whatever. Maybe they're outside of the library world, but I'm talking about within the library context and what we can do with our spaces there. But like starting to have these conversations, what's your group chat where you talk shit about your boss, right? that's a great starting point for organizing, even if you're not in a place where you can be like, and we're going to start a union. It's like what Jay is talking about, there's all kinds of other worker organizing that can become

the seed of something much bigger. And to your point about ICE rapid response, we actually have a resource that we just created in LFP. It's like just about to get published. So email us at info at libraryf freedom.org if it's not on our website by the time this goes up. but how to create a rapid response network, but not even starting 10 steps back of literally who's in your group.

How have you built trust? Who are the people that you don't trust? How do you exclude them? How do you like prevent them from being the ones to call the cops or whatever? So all the different steps to create your sort of affinity group or whatever you want to call it and everything then that you can do

once you have that unit? Who all is unionized in the audience? Yeah. Nice. Let's go. I will add an ad-a-midium. Do not do this shit on Microsoft teams. Do not.

Do not. Thank you so much, Sadie. It is so searchable. Yeah. If you're a city worker, it's foyerable. Yeah, and that too. If you work at a public library, it's foiable. And, yeah, having just been through some major shit at my job where we got reminded

exactly how foiable everything is. Like, keep that shit in mind shit when you're organizing. Shout up to Brian Eto for calling out. Yeah, that goes for Slack. Anything connected to your work account, do not use it for this shit.

Yeah. Just talk to people in person. I know we're all like scared library introverts or whatever, but like learn how to talk to people. I swear it's fine. That's not fair. It's a public service profession. People do know how to talk. Sometimes.

But also, I think, People are conflict diverse. Yeah. And they're like, you know, but I think that there's great tools out there for like having organizing conversations that give you literally a script. And if you're nervous, here's a good way to disarm that. Be like, hey, Jay, I really want to talk to you about this thing. But like, I'm nervous.

Yeah. Just say it. And it actually, it's wonderful how well that works. You can be like, oh, it's gone. Or at least the other person is then like, no, it's cool. We're good. You don't have to be nervous. A one-on-one is as easy as asking a co-worker

If they want to go get coffee on their break And you can start from there Facts Facts I lost my transition I forgot Yeah what do you guys want to talk about now I've never lost my transition

I have to make a trans joke at least once Yeah I know That was a setup I completely lost my train I thought Because it was like five minutes ago Yeah word Yeah I know It's also extremely hot.

Thank you everyone for making it out in this evening. Yeah. What happened to that like rain we got like Thursday night? Like, and it was all misty and shit yesterday. What happened to that? It was like beautiful. Yeah. Philadelphia, sorry.

Swamp. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Boston had like some real bad heat this week. It was rough. The weather podcast now.

This is the weather podcast now. Shouts out. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody else have any weather take? Yeah. Facts. Is it a conspiracy that it's gotten harder to predict the weather?

No. The weather machine. We're like, what's your take, man? I 100% agree. Why is the weather prediction always wrong now? Yeah. I liked subway takes until they got all corporate about it. They used to just interview normal people and now it's like, for real, right?

It's like celebrities. And then their takes are so much more tepid and stupid. and now I hate them. He's hot, though. No, I agree. But hot people can be stupid too. I know. And have bad takes.

Yeah, I know. Stupid hot people. You're still valid. Thank you, Allison. Do we want to talk more about, like, privacy and security and, like, meeting this moment? Because I feel like that's the thing people are, like, worried about. It's like, how do we even get, like, do talking with each other? Yeah, we were talking about threat models before.

That was what. I was thinking about. Yeah. Well, I was saying, like, someone got on to me for, like, getting a, like, a new Roomba that maps out your house. And I'm like, I don't think anyone can do anything with that information aside from nowhere where my, like, fridge is. Yeah.

Not in threat model. You don't have to worry about every last thing. I mean, yeah, like, we can riff some more about risk. I think that it's one thing to be like, you should think about your risk more realistically. But it's a, but most people are like, what the fuck does that even mean? And so there's some frameworks that you can use when you get your little affinity group together and you start having conversations like what do we what's in our immediate environment that we need to like stand up to. Is it like vendor bullshit and AI slop? Is it like that we're concerned about ICE having a presence on our university campus?

Is it, you know, name your thing, right? When you start having those conversations, you can also start thinking about. your own risk assessment. Sometimes it's called threat modeling. And we do a lot of it in Library Freedom Project. And it's basically like taking an account of who you are, like the conditions of your existence, both like, you know, social, economic, gender, race,

all of the things that like make us who we are and also make us more or less at risk. So starting and thinking about those things and then thinking about like, okay, what do I want to do? And who might want to try to stop me from doing those? things. Then those are your adversaries. And then you think about what can my adversary really do? You know, can they get me fired? Can they out me to people? Can they like beat me up? Can they, you know, there's a whole bunch of different things depending on your context. And you're thinking about

this as a group. You're also thinking about like how you're in relation to other people. So my risk model as a white cis woman is different from somebody who has a different identity than me. So like, I'm also thinking about who I'm in community with and how the choices that I make impact the people that I'm in community with. And so anyway, it's a group activity that you do. And so after you think about what your personal risks are, what kind of adversaries you have, then you start thinking about like, okay, so what am I going to do about it? What steps do I need to take to protect myself and my organizing. And it means that like,

you know, some of these conversations, like Sadie said, like we're not having on my Microsoft teams or like any other kind of work owned devices or platforms. Maybe we move our conversations to signal. Maybe we have them in person. Maybe there are additional things that we need to do.

Like, let's say what my affinity group wants to work on is researching how my university is contracting with like Israeli companies or something. So, you know, you would, one, not only not want to use your work devices, but you might also want to like, if you're like, I'm still going to like steal some work time. I'm going to be like on, I'm at my desk, but I'm like on my phone or whatever. Well, you're still connected to their Wi-Fi. So you could use a VPN. So there's all different kinds of things stuff, different tools that are appropriate for our own circumstances. It's not a one size fits all model, unfortunately, because I would just tell you it. But yeah, that's, that's a lot of. of what we're thinking about in LFP right now. Yeah. And quite frankly, I think I feel like a lot of this could actually be a great anti-anxiety exercise. Yes. Because once you start thinking about this shit realistically as opposed to just a, oh my God, I have to flee to Canada, even though I'm, you know, the last, yeah, even though I'm the last

person who's going to be like, you know, need refuge there. But like, yeah, like, once you start thinking about it practically and you start thinking about it alongside people. Yeah. Who are like you, it can take down that anxiety a lot and turn it into something more actionable. You're so right, Sadie. It's like, right. It's like what actually could happen versus the things that I don't need to worry about, that I don't need to just like create a stress ball about. And then also it's about the kind of practical actions you can take with yourself and your group towards harm reduction.

And how does this sort of like thinking about threat modeling and privacy and digital security like like, like Ginny, like how does this apply to sort of like the work that like library futures is doing and like how we can actually like at the more like contractee work level like put this into practice? So much less and I really I really admire the work that obviously the Library Freedom Project does. We are much, we do just sort of different work. And I think I think what I'm seeing with a lot of particularly the public librarians that we work with. And I guess I didn't sort of give an overview of like, what are we as library features? I can do that in a sec. But, you know, one of the things that I am seeing is like I have the privilege to work every day in advocacy.

I work for a big university that our colleague calls, quote, very entrepreneurial, which means that they basically like don't give a shit what we do as long as we bring in some money for the university. It is a real estate company that is also a university. So at university. Yeah, the university, right. There are two genders of university, which is one that's a real estate trust with a school attached, and one's a football team with a school attached. And sometimes they're both. But yeah, but one of the things that I'm seeing is like, particularly with vendors,

things have gotten really bad. I mean, most public libraries can't build a digital collection at all. People are seeing incredible levels of censorship across, platforms in particular, just absolute dis and misinformation and digital content. And there are a large number of advocates who are frankly kind of doing this in addition to their work because they care so much about their communities and the kinds of materials that they get. And one of the things I think a lot about and that we are trying to address in many ways is that, you know, it's not like everybody in the over 90% of public libraries use overdrive

because, like, they love overdrive. Some people love overdrive. But like, it's not because the terms are so great or whatever. It's because it is, it works, right? It does the thing. And I think sometimes when it comes to choosing resources, there has been a push toward, you know, whoever sells it best and has the best product to, that you can just plug and play. in without a ton of thinking about just like kicking the can down the line of what's going to happen

in 10 years when you've rented your digital collection now for 20 years and overdrive has now sold itself to the 20th private equity company that it might be owned by and closes or decides that all the data that it's collecting from you that they're going to somehow weaponize against public libraries or the federal government decides that they're going to seize all the data from overdrive. And so now, like, particularly with the Libby app, the majority of people who are using overdrive in many places are using it in the Libby app because they have absolutely no incentive to take people out of the app because then they can get their data.

So it, you know, I think sometimes in Sarah Lambden's work, who many of us know really proves this, is that, you know, the kind of public information tech that we rely on is big tech. It follows a lot of the same playbook. It follows a lot of the same patterns. And it is also, I think, often gets a pass because it's library stuff. So it is actually, frankly, like, very underregulated. And now that we don't have a functioning Department of Justice, for example, to investigate what a monopoly might look like in these spaces, you know, how are we as advocates going

to approach privacy and security as well as the ways and ways. which companies who license content abuse contracts in the United States considering, like, in Europe, you can't put anything into a contract. Like, you can't just have a, you know, a 95-page contract that has who knows what in it. Here you can. And so we've replaced owning media. We've replaced owning a collection with what Jason Schultz calls a mutant form of contract law. It always comes back to contract law. If it's labor, if you say, study anything about like the formation of free labor or anything you just realize how absolutely a stranglehold over your life contracts can have because a lot of like even after the imagine

of free labor a lot of people were bound by like we can drag you back to your job or we can keep you in this contract for so many time like it really like fills in all the gaps of the law in ways it's like really well i mean it taken to its logical extreme i mean we've already seen it there were a couple months ago i might have talked about this last time i was on the podcast because So horrifying. A couple months ago, there was that example where somebody signed up for a free trial of Disney Plus. And because they signed up for a free trial of Disney Plus, which included a forced arbitration clause, when unfortunately, their wife died from an allergic reaction at a Disney park. Disney said that they had no grounds to sue, even though their allergy had been very clearly discussed with Disney.

And they had, it was really tragic. and all they were asking was for funeral fees. Disney tried to use that contract from a free trial of Disney Plus that they had signed up for many years ago in order to say that they had no standing. In another example, I don't know the specifics as well, but there was a woman who had signed up as a gig worker for Walmart during a holiday season.

They had signed a contract to do that. And while shopping at Walmart about a year later, I think their family was harassed and arrested because they were black in a Walmart parking lot by the cops. And Walmart used that contract against them and said that they also had no grounds to sue because of a forced arbitration clause within that contract. So, yeah, I mean, contracts rule a lot of stuff around us. We do not know all the time what we're signing. And in a much less extreme or consequential example, The Amazon Kindle contract contains a lot of terms that contradict each other, and it's, you know, X number of pages long. Nobody's going to read that shit.

And it's just, it's very unclear if that's on purpose or if that, like, if that's, or if it's just sloppy, frankly. Learn copyright law. Learn contract law. No thine enemy. Yeah. Well, our most popular webinar ever was how to read a contract, which I guess, uh, was a little bit of a surprise. We've been saying we're going to reprise it for months, but we are going to reprise how to read a contract part two and also develop many more

resources around how to read contracts. I've been having to get better at legalese because I'm a union rep now. I'm like on my unions e-board. And so like yeah, shouts out unions. Like when you feel like a grievance, you have to do it in like legal talk and it's the most insane shit to like translate what happens into like, well, and then this person, who's affected can then be made whole and whatever else an arbitrator might decide, blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, it's like the way you have to like wrap your mind around just like these made up standards that we've come up with is like. But it's also like, you know, if I don't want to sign the Amazon Kindle contract, but I want

access to ebooks, what am I going to do? It puts you in a double bind. Yeah. If I want to be, if I want to, if I need to do gig work for Amazon or Walmart or whatever, but I don't want to have a force arbitration clause, then I don't have any real standing there. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, like contracts are not collectively bargained. Now we're in a space where class action lawsuits, which are wildly underutilized and ineffective and hard to do, are, you know, potentially going to replace a lot of the kinds of

legal action that we could have taken to begin with. And so I think, yeah, I mean, there has been a lot of, I guess I can say, say this here. Like one of the first things that came up when we, we just had a pretty big ebook summit with someone was like, what if we could negotiate our ebook contracts collectively like a union? And it was like amazing. It was like great. But I think that that folks are starting to understand that like if you get a group of people together who want to negotiate a contract together, it's very powerful. And that is why public sector collective bargaining is illegal in, at least in the state I live in, and in many other.

States is because it is really powerful. But that doesn't mean that you can't still organize just because you can't do collective bargaining. Oh, no, absolutely. And they, you know, meet and confer is a big thing. Yes, meet and confer is real. With some folks I organize with, they do a lot of meeting conferr. Yeah. It's really powerful.

Yeah. That's why I brought it up because like contracts in labor are like, it's really why we harp on unionization so much because it is really like it fills in a lot of areas that you are not really protected in law. My union has an anti-AI clause in it. Yeah? What has it anti-air-clause? My collective bargaining agreement.

It has like a technology clause that's both that you have to let us know and also we're allowed to say no. Oh, wow. Can you send me that? Yeah, I sure can. We need that. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, we need to bring that up tomorrow for the guys in the front row.

Yeah. The guys in the front row that we reference were a trio of dorks who came to our AI ethics talk today. And they were all together. So I'm assuming they were like vendors from the same company or something. but one of them was wearing a like, accelerate AI and gaming shirt and they were so mad the whole time. And it was funny.

Yeah. And they said nothing, because what was there for them to say? Nothing. Allison stared them down. It was great. Yeah. There's something that,

I don't know why this is like crossed my mind, but as far as like, I think Jenny mentioned, like, seeking out information in this moment. I've had a hard time talking to information literacy people. I know that sounds like, a wild gear change from what we've been talking about.

Let's talk about information literacy. But it's seriously, I kind of want to get a read from both of you on like, because we're working with AI and people are always talking about like, what's the information literacy approach to this? And like, can we have AI literacy, which is a term I really hate? Because like, it's just literacy. Let's just leave literacy alone. Let's let it have its own space to work in.

You got to do the framework. Yeah. But whatever fuck ACRL calls it. Every single chat interaction I do, I have. to pick an ACL framework that aligns up with. I don't know what will be done with this is fucking nothing. Like every other survey I have to fill out at work. I absolutely asked my boss, I'm like, so does this data ever get looked at or used?

No, waste my fucking time. But like, what is kind of the approach in this area talking about like AI and data brokers for like discussions about information literacy? Because like I really, I think I've scared off a lot of information literacy people from coming on the podcast. so good well they're wrong um well i think the first thing to say and i think you're kind of hinting at this is that like unfortunately in the moment that we're in right now there are a lot of library people who work on information literacy who for various reasons fomo hype not having

read a fucking book even though they're library worker um really are they think that the the proper responsive information and literacy in the realm of generative AI is like we need to teach people how to use it. Instead of what I think it should be and what our approach in LFP is, is we need to teach people like what it is and what and who paid for it and how it works to the best of our ability because obviously we know one of the issues with it is the people who make it don't even know how the fuck it works. And you know, the various other issues that it raises, you know, copyright, labor, the fact that it's draining our fucking rivers

and burning trees. We do have stickers at our booth that say chat, GAPT, eats trees. There's like five left, so get them while they're hot. Somebody grab me one. Grab one for Sadie. If you're listening to this and you're at the booth right now. No, we'll grab you one.

We'll grab you one tomorrow. If you're a time traveler. And I think what really gets me about this approach is not just that I think it's so boring and anti-intellectual and just like some of the worst that I love library workers I am one we work with them but there's some things about us that I fucking hate and one of them is that we're like oh like if we don't do it this way like we're we're not going to be relevant anymore and it's like this so

cowardly like overcautious and I also think the other thing it really frustrates me about it is that it expects that our patrons are idiots that they don't want the critical approach either that they just want to like type in the machine and like whatever the mathy math computes or whatever. And I think that couldn't be further from the truth. And that goes for no matter what that person's actual literacy level is. So what we do in Library Freedom Project is we have a whole bunch of different popular education resources and trainings for library workers. Some of them are like quite in depth. Like we have one about data brokers and it's like, here's what a data broker is. Here's where they get their information from. Here's how it gets used for

these different kinds of industry. This is how they're turning your personal information into profit. And we use that kind of framework of capital. And it's a very popular resource, even though it's like a little dense. It's got some graphics and stuff too. But then we also have things that we're working on that are like very simple. One idea per a quarter sheet page for people who might not be able to engage in something that's like written at a 12th grade reading level or whatever, but like are not stupid. You know, they're for whatever reason excluded from the educational force or labor force or whatever, but like they have real questions about these things. And so I think that we need to take ourselves a little more seriously, take the moment that we're in more seriously,

and recognize that our patrons are like, they're people who are curious and have questions about this stuff and that we can have a more holistic approach and how we do our info lit. It's like real talk. Why do librarians, like, why are we so patronizing to our patrons? Yeah. Like, why do we think everyone's a fucking idiot? Like, it's strange because I just started a new job and I was talking to one of my coworkers and she was saying, you know, I've got to integrate this thing about AI into the class.

I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was like, I think she might have said AI literacy. And it was like, so they don't miss out on using AI. But I'm like, the whole point of AI is to deskill the labor force so that anyone who is not skilled can come in and do the job for a lot less. money at least competently enough. So on what world do we have to actually teach them how to query the thing that is actively making them worse at understanding the world?

Yeah. I think a lot of people think, like, this will be the internet. Like, this will have a change in the same way that, like, you know, the internet changed reference. And, like, we have to be on top of this. And, like, a lot of academic libraries. It's just second life again. No, literally.

The meme. theme that I made that was on our AI ethics talk that was like, it's the future of librarianship, and it's the, it's the Grim Reaper knocking on the doors. And it's like Second Life MOOCs, remember those? NFTs. There's a whole bunch of other shit in there, right? Library 2.0 or Web 2.0 or whatever. Sorry, Library 2.4.O is like an actual training thing, but like they're pro cop.

Fuck them. Audience folks. Who remembers the whole like libraries doing reference in Second Life thing? Yeah, I do. The younger folks who are here, and I was on the cusp of this, there used to literally be classes in library school. It would be like, we need to set up like a reference desk in Second Life or our university or whatever. Like that was real. And it cost $200,000 to do.

No, totally. And it looked like shit. It looked like shit. I graduated in 2008 and my library school had that class. Yeah. So. Yeah, that was a real thing. We're dumb sometimes.

I remember doing Boolean searches in Google. Oh, yeah. When they still had it. Back in my day. Remember Google Reader? And worked. Let's all get mad about Google Reader. Yeah, the only good thing they ever had.

I feel like I'm sort of on one track. But, you know, obviously access is not where any of this stuff ends. But, you know, if more than patrons are using digital collections. And, for example, when they go to a catalog, because a digital database has decided that what you need is a bunch of slop in it and what they get is missing disinformation and or AI slop for the most part in the top of their results, which has been happening a lot. Or a vendor tells you like, oh, well, you know, you can buy books from independent publishers, but first you have to sort through 20,000 sets of chat GPT directions.

You know, I think that it becomes very difficult to even get to the place where we're talking about information literacy if we can no longer trust that the collections that we're buying are collections that we want. You know, it's this, this thing of like, you know, we all know this, but libraries are not warehouses for books. They do not collect absolutely everything. But I think a lot of the vendors that we work with don't, don't believe that. And everybody has this like endless race to the bottom of AI data and enormous, um, enormous. collections that, you know, are just filling, um, that are just filling catalogs with DREC, they, they won't fix the problem.

Uh, and the problem is major. If you search for vaccine in Hoopla, you get all misinformation. Um, and, you know, you get actual hate speech for certain, uh, for certain searches. And this has been going on for years. And in overdrive, you know, you are trying to buy, but at least Laura Crossett, who's here in the audience says like, well, at least overdrive lets you, uh, let's use, you know, choose what books,

like very sarcastically, because it's like, you know, you search for any kind of independent publisher and overdrive now, and now you're going to get thousands of AI slot books.

And I mean, say to you probably know better than anybody with a microphone, like you're going to get tons of AI slop and how do you even search through that? How do you sort through that? Why is the on the only on the book, suddenly on the library rather than the company

to just provide a good product? Yeah. And like I haven't done a whole lot of research in that space. but like it's a problem on like so many levels like and well I was at I was I was at a colleague's office a couple weeks ago and they had two books out on their desk and they were like do these look like normal books one they were two dance books and they were bound and they looked totally like a book that one would buy they were bought by a dance selector who has a master's degree in dance and has bought dance books for many years they were just lists of directions from chat chippy T when they got them. Like, they spent the money on them. They bought them. And then when they were in, by the time they were in the library, they were like, these are not real books. Because also real talk publishers and, like, vendors like Baker and Taylor and Ingram hate working with libraries.

We're not the ones who provide them with money. Bookstores are. And so when they make it harder for us to buy physical or even electronic books from them, where else do we go to get them? You know, because we don't have the infrastructure to do this ourselves. Like, we can't, it's the, like, we, the way that we have sacrificed our ability to set up a shared infrastructure between libraries or even internally within a library for this kind of thing has, like, meant that we are now just like at the mercy of like, like, oh, we're just going to feed you all this shit. Because then we can't, no other places are wanting to, like, prioritize selling to us. But I also think, you know, it's firing on a lot of levels. So it's like there's the collections issues.

There's the patron education and information literacy issue. There's the being behold into corporations in many ways issue. And then, you know, I don't, I do not work with patrons every day. So like, I don't know how many patrons are coming to the library and asking to learn chat, GPT queries, right? or if it's sort of an invented need. And I think what's more likely is that they're observing our posture towards all this garbage. They're looking at the Hoopla catalog and they're like, the fuck is this.

And all this trust that we've spent all this time building and like, need I remind you that we still somehow occupy this position of enormous public trust at a time when trust in institutions is like at an all time. low, right? It's like us in the freaking post office, right? And shouts out to the post office doing as much as they can with as little as possible. That sounds fair. Yeah, no shit. But like that's what I actually think is way more likely that they're like, wait, I thought that the library cared about literacy.

I thought the library was the place that would like have the sort of critical eye about this stuff. And if we're not to, if we're instead just pushing it. And I think it's not just about trust. It's also that like our patrons are seeing the world that we live in. They're seeing the inshittification. They're seeing the way that, you know, obviously like, you know, corporate power is growing significantly, all these things. And that instead of us taking the posture of like something as an alternative to that, that we're just jumping on the bandwagon of a bunch of shit that sucks, that every. everybody hates. That's the thing about AI, right? It's like how many of us in this room have been like

against all the bad stuff forever, right? Now everybody else is too. Nope, there's tons of people who are against AI who like never necessarily had a critical position about other kinds of technology. And I think we really have to seize that. And it also has to do. And I swear I'll stop talking in a second. It has to do with the way that it is being foisted upon us. It's so much more obvious to people. I guarantee you if you talk to any rando, just go out here on the street in Philadelphia, go to Writtenhouse Park and hang out and be like, hey, what do you guys think about like the AI search results? Everyone's mad about it. So why are we not recognizing that like this is an opportunity for us to have the alternative approach? And like Jay always says, like learn about copyright.

Because there's a lot of people out there like artists who are like, oh, generative AI is so bad. but they don't actually understand how it works or what the copyright issues actually are. They just are very reactive. So, like, how can we... Please don't make intellectual property law worse. Yeah. I'm begging you.

You know, like, how can you take those... That sort of movement and feeling and turn it into something that is, like, useful on... And can help establish trust in the library in a way that we actually, like, deserve. And a huge part of the privatization. of everyday life and particularly the privatization of life through technology includes an erosion of fair use rights. And so, like, as much as the content industry wants to say, like, oh, fair use, it's so bad. It's what's causing all these problems. Like, a lot of the problems with AI, I would see most of the problems with AI are not copyright problems. And that, and that framing it as a

copyright problem is a little bit like a false flag. Like, they are labor problems. They are societal problems and they are part of this general privatization. I mean, even when you're talking about the post office, I was like, the post office is doing incredible work. And also, you know, if you order something online now, you probably have seen that like a lot of private shipping companies have popped up because the government has defunded the post office in large scales. And like, you know, it's one of the things that I hope is not happening that I think, you know, we are kind of at the brink of is with the defunding, with the kind of sudden loss of funds, if it is a way to continue to defund the public sphere as a way to provide a vacuum for

private, even more private interests to step in, which has happened in many, many parts of everyday life. I mean, it's like the number of people I know who are reading capitalist realism now, and I'm like, yeah, I just read out to Mark Fisher. Good, right? And he has this thing called the business ontology where he says that, you know, it's this general idea that everything in the world should run like a business when, you know, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, a lot of the things that we think that we see run as businesses would have been absolutely unfathomable. You know, the continued privatization of health care to the point where Medicare, Medicaid is going to be maybe. annihilated within our lifetime. And like, I do think that, you know, again, it's this kind of, it's very crucial crux

point where there's a defunding while there's a really strange new. It's not, actually it's not strange and it's not new. It's actually very explainable and has been around for a long time, but it's sort of captured the zeitgeist technology, which could create a vacuum for, you know, I don't know, a lack of staff for laying off staff for, you know, continuing to be sold these products that don't necessarily help communities, workers, or the environment. If you refer or think of library patrons and users as customers, you are not a comrade. Straight out.

Stop that shit. It's what Allison mentioned, which was student, there was a study I had recently, and I've been kind of keep my eye on these things because my co-workers are kind of really into AI because they've been so drastically underfunded and many of them have been at the same university for so long that they remember having twice the amount of librarians, maybe

in three times. And so they're like, well, how do we keep doing new things? And so like, oh, we'll just use AI to fill some of these gaps. Like, you know, we'll use the new tool like we always have. You know, we're learning how to use Canvo. Now we're learning how to use chat GPT that spells our

library with three ends in the middle. Like, okay, it's fine. Remember, remember the libraries as gap fillers debate of like 20 years ago, I guess at this point? It was like, librarians are going to fill the gaps for everything in society. And now it's like... And instead we made the police do it. Yeah. And like, and it's like robots are going to replace librarians fill all the gaps. Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, it is weird. For some reason, I was just struck at how odd it is that you can just like go out on the street and everyone's like, yeah, I use like this search engine that's like, yeah, I use like this search engine. indexing all these websites and that's just a normal thing that everyone does with their life. It's like, yeah, I looked up where to find, like, local convenience store on my library catalog.

It is just strange, the kind of changes that have happened in the past few years. But, like, from what I have seen is when you set the framing of, like, use of AI, even if students are already using it to, like, make classes easier, which of course they would. Like, why are you shocked? They will still follow librarians on their stances saying, like, here's why you should be. skeptical of this. Here's why it's not going to work. Here's all the problems with it. So I think the approach of just trying to explain to students, and the place where I work is really bad about this, but as adults, like, listen, this is a real problem. This is, this is like going

to mess up your brain in some way, probably if you use it too much. And it's, you know, it's got all these different problems in terms of like, you know, if I talk about it within labor discussions, like it, people immediately get what the problem is. But if we talk about like, oh, it's, it's fair use issues. Students are cheating. No one cares about copyright. Because it's hard to explain and copyright's weird. People will follow when you're like,

here's the exact step that people with money are trying to do to make you get paid less. And it's not too many steps. Yeah. I mean, so there's a couple things that you said in there, but I want to address two of them. One is like,

what do we do about students who are relying on these tools when you're like, Yeah, that's a position I can empathize with. You have way too much reading, you have way too much writing, and no one is going to respond well if you're like, that's bad and you should not do it. And I'm just going to scold you. For young people, I think we have to like lean into the ways that these tools are

like radically uncool. You use... You know, chat dbt is for dorks. but I also think that another angle for young folks is like, first of all, being like, yeah, it's fucked up that you have so much reading to do that you feel like you can't do that. But like young people as a group care about the environment, climate, like much more than any other generation typically. And so like that's a little bit of an angle to take with them.

But also like, I don't know, you might point out to them that they're like, like, is it worth it to you to incur all this student debt if you're not actually learning the thing. Exactly. Maybe you, maybe you want to actually do that reading so that when you're paying your student loans off later, you're not like, man, fuck, I don't even remember a word of this. Do they not teach the children how to skim anymore? Well, I think probably what's happening is that like it's an available tool and so many other people are using it that like they're just using it.

they're not really thinking about what are the issues with it. And I really believe that like, I mean, there were a bunch of people who came to our talk today who literally said, wow, I never thought of it that way. I never thought of any of these things that way. And I think that's where kind of a lot of people are that you just have to like kind of give them a little bit of an in. I also think here's a thing that is really resonating with a lot of people in my life. I mean, there have been like 15 of these articles recently about people falling in love

with chat GPT, people using it as a therapist, you know, people having sort of like quasi religious experience with it, like, and make no mistake. AI has always been a religion, okay? Always has been. But like that stuff is really terrifying. And you'll notice that part of what those stories have in common is that it's people who have typically like preexisting mental illness or like had not expressed their mental illness until it like came through in this way with chatypt. it's like their first manic episode or something like that. I think that kind of thing resonates with young people because they have a way better analysis about mental health

than like certainly my generation had when I was their age. I think that resonates with people a lot. They don't want to see that happen to people that they care about. And so I think that can be a sort of like shifting or at least problematizing in. Yeah. Well, we are at an hour and I wanted to, we wanted to do like audience interactions.

Yeah, because you're here. Yeah. Wow. It's literally not something we can do all the time. Join the Discord and then you can. Yeah, you can help us in the Discord and watch legally downloaded movies that I sing. Legally acquired. How many people in the audience are already part of the Discord?

Anybody? Shouts out. Yeah. I'm not. So, like, we were talking about, like, how are people organizing? Yeah. Is, like, anyone want to, I know it's hard to get up to the front, but, like, does anyone want to talk about, like, the informal conversations you've been having? Has anyone had a conversation recently with coworkers?

Shout it out and we'll repeat it. Yes. Oh, I'm a New York City employee, so I am unionized. I personally did that whole night. Okay. Hey, that's all right. A New York City employee who's unionized. We'll take it.

Shout out to your union. Hell yeah. What's the name of your union? DC 37. Yeah. Hell yeah. Anybody trying to unionize? Yeah.

How's that going, my friend? having a hard time finding enough people, so the small group of people that we did have just got together in the company and we all tried to do that. Yeah, so we got a friend over here who's trying to organize and they just affiliated or joining with the IWW to help that out. That's fucking sick. What I always tell people is if you have no other options and have no other way to join a union, you can join the IWW and they will tell you how to organize your workplace.

And I think it's one of the weird things about the IWAW is they're very good. at getting people set up and then having them split off. And it's kind of like their ideal now in many ways. Like IWK was like an IWW thing and IWK split off. So like even organizing organizations, I mean, CPSA. Yeah. Anybody doing any sort of like anti-ice or like rapid response like network stuff like in your libraries? Yeah.

Do you want to talk about it? Yeah. Yeah. I'll hand you my microphone. All right. Yeah. Yep. Second word.

Can it reach? I'm just going to describe what's happening right now. We're dragging a mic cord to its natural limit. Get real close to it. Does it work now? Yes, it works now with a mask. I can stick it right over my face. So I work in a larger library, obviously a large library system,

but a larger urban library. So we get a lot of people in the building. We have a lot of, we have large immigrant population. We get a lot of nannies. We were discussing in our children's librarian meeting a couple weeks, or a couple months ago now, what to do if ICE shows up. We have a library policy if ICE shows up, and it is basically stall them until we can tell them

we need to get the library lawyer and have her drag her feet. But, you know, we're in New York City. The unmasked people are like taking Bradlander out of the courthouse. They're not going to stop doing that. So we have a intercom. We have a room in the back with a lock. Our policy is that, you know, ICE agents cannot legally go into ticketed events. And a ticketed event

only needs to be a piece of paper with a sign-up. So we have a code word over our microphone. We page somebody who doesn't exist over the intercom and then whoever's down on the children's desk has whips their sign-up sheet out of the bottom shelf. We have a coloring page. We announced everyone in the room.

Hey, we're doing a coloring event. There are, you know, if you would like to come sign up, you know, your first name, your child's name, you can come into this room. We have gotten word that there are you know, ice agents in the building. They are not allowed to come into a ticketed event.

Come in this room, we will lock the door, and we will not let them into the room. That's about as much as we can discuss, you know, in our discussion, as we could have done legally in our children's library and meeting. But I think it's a good start. I don't know if they will respect any of those boundaries, but they have to respect a lock on a door.

That's rad. Nice work. That's clever. that's like the button he has in the young pope where he doesn't want to be in a meeting anymore and so he pushes it and they're like, you have a next meeting,

Holy Father. Where I live, there's an organization that has a program where you could volunteer and I'm sure this exists in other places and you get trained

to go to different local businesses and teach them what to do if ICE comes into your workplace. It's an organization called Ciambra based in North Carolina and they're wonderful. I think there are other chapters. I just moved, so I've not started volunteering yet, but it's a great organization

to volunteer with. It's a great thing to learn how to do to protect your community. And yeah, I would, everybody in this room, I'm sure, is at least open to this idea, but definitely get in touch with immigrant rights groups because they have years and years and years of organizing practice for so many people. This is different, but definitely. not new. There's some like really cool organizing happening in North Carolina by the way, like in the public librarians and the public school teachers are doing some incredible labor organizing. First meet and confer in the state. Yes, first meet and confer. I know those folks. They're great. Yeah, they're wonderful. Yeah. So we have any North Carolina listeners. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it was something earlier in the discussion I forgot to mention was with with a lot of things, but particularly like the ice things or if you have a, you know, are you working in a a place where it's not as compliant, not as open to, you know, being, you know, like setting up a support system for if ICE shows up. And when you have people like, you don't know if you necessarily trust them to get the information or, like, call the police, you can always say you'll do something and don't do it. Yeah, you can, yeah. I do this all the time. You can lie. Yeah. It's a crazy superpower. So, and I know that, like, a lot of focus in these discussions have been about, like, protecting patrons, right? Like, what do we do if ICE comes in for a

or like protecting like our trans patrons, patrons, whatever. Are folks doing anything like to protect other staff as well that folks want to talk about? Like in your CBAs or anything? Can't see anything. No? Because I feel like this is something I also noticed when I,

because I no longer work in an academic library, but when I was in academia, like it was always the focuses on the students. Right. It was always on like the users of the library or whatever and not the people who work there. Like this is not just a like, our patrons issue. This is also a labor issue.

Yeah. It was like when you brought up that, I think it was like Zimbabwe's country code is still RH. Yeah. And it's, wow. Yes, it is.

In Mark, in Mark, the country code for Zimbabwe is still RH, which stands for Rhodesia. Yikes. Which is bad. Yeah. Google it.

Yeah. So lots of, lots of military magazines funded a country. Anyway You're totally right Gigi said make a new account on Twitter They'll show you Also YouTube

But with Gosh I completely like Frows on what I was thinking Supporting staff Speaking of which I had a union issue pop up Because I'm a union rep And you know rest for the wicked Supporting staff

But with the country code being RH If you Many places don't want to fix things like that Because they are not patron visible. I thought, yeah, I bet there's no staff who are upset by seeing this. So there's no other people in the workflow that are actually important. So there are a lot of issues that will affect staff. And I'm sure we can apply this to like AI and like job satisfaction. You know, there's always that study about the chemical researchers who, you know, the highest performers performed a lot better, but they hated their job a lot more because they were basically just checking what the computer told them. So they were no longer had any creativity in their job. A few things come to mind for examples of supporting library staff. So one is a shout out to Urban Librarians Unite. I beat you.

Urban librarians unite, if you don't know, they're doing a great deal of work right now around trauma and library work, like I think particularly with public librarians, but not exclusively. And they've done some studies. They do some like cohort building, a lot of community support. and so they're doing really amazing work there.

I also am encouraged by those of us who are working on like intellectual freedom defense, we've started to take more of, like incorporating more of a civil rights approach and not just like a freeze peach approach. My freeze peach. And so thinking about, yeah, things like, you know, my workplace environment and safety and my civil rights in the context. of having to be like screamed at by some right wing lunatic. And then in LFP, I mean, we're building a supportive community of people who are oriented towards this kind of work and these values.

But it's about, it's a lot about like starting with the worker and supporting us and doing this work. But like number one, it's most important that we're supported because you got to put your mask on first, et cetera. Yeah, doing the like, how this affects the worker's thing was like literally like how one of the ways that

were fighting against AI in cataloging at my workplace was I actually I had to I had to sacrifice my own ability I had to use it I had to do some AI stuff to show how bad it was and then I got actually interviewed by my union because like the way that my salary works is like there's like a salary grade and then there's steps within it right and the step that I'm at can technically supervise other workers but anyone below me cannot and I had to like basically when I like gave my little interview to the union because we were maybe going to be doing a grievance if stuff continued in a certain way. I had to be like the amount of time I had just spent just fussing around with correcting the prompts. And this was literally just to be like, can you clean up

some call numbers in a fucking spreadsheet? It wasn't even doing cataloging. It was just like data cleaning, right? And like the amount of work that I had to put into, I had to be like, this was like supervising an employee. And my my like supervisor literally went, say that again. And I was like, it was like supervising an employee. And he went, that's our angle. Because people below me are not compensated to do that. So it literally would have been violating our collective bargaining agreement to have anybody work with it to the degree that I did. Sick.

Now then I was fucked, but, you know. Yeah, and that pervades all levels of library work because I've seen that happen in IT too where I've gotten been like, hey, I need help with this.

I'm trying to find this information and I get back something that's, it took me an hour to figure out was actually complete nutter bullshit. Yeah. And, And I was handed that. I wasn't told that it was generated using JetGBT, and I, like, lost an hour of good time. I could have been using to make that spreadsheet myself, which is what I ended up actually doing. So it's just like, okay.

So, like, now not only do I have to, like, do this work to figure out, you know, part of my job, but now I have to question where my colleagues are getting their information, too. So it's like, it's, yeah, it's not just cataloging or public service work. It's every level. Yeah. So we have a little bit. Yeah. If there are any questions, if there are any questions you ever wanted to ask the podcast.

Yeah. Ooh, hi. Feel free. Yeah, we've got this mic untangled. Yeah. If you have questions. Yeah. Okay.

Previous guests. Kay. Hi. Case later, friend of the pod. I have a shameless plug to make. I have an article coming out in library trends about AI and librarianship. That is like why are librariansians being. stupid right now about

AI. But it's a lot nicer than that. But look out for it. It's open access, I think, so yeah, that's my little plug, but yeah, this is a great podcast. Yeah. That's more of a comment than a question. Say the time. Excellent question. The question is, will you read my article? Yeah, please. It's in

library trends. The second issue of the generative AI special issue that's coming out this year. We will make sure to share that. Thank you. Any other questions from folks? If it is not OA, you can always put it Somewhere to make it away. No one can stop you.

Forced away. No one said a dog couldn't play basketball. I've done that. Yeah, self-piracy. Yeah. That's what I did with my master's thesis because ProQuest wouldn't let me go back and make it away. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a big advocate for self-piracy.

If you wrote it, no one's actually going to yell at you. Yeah. Everyone does it every day on academia.edu. I saw something about like an AI. Someone was like, did you know that AI, academia edu is, feeding your stuff into AI. I'm like, yeah. Do you know what academia at ADU is?

It's a really bad website. Yeah. Trying to like scoge your own. Wow. Everyone's here. Wow. Any questions or anything? Or just anything at all.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll repeat the question. So we have a, uh, someone works at a school and not just like students using AI, but like teachers using it to make like worksheets and stuff because they already have a million things to do. worksheets bottom of the priorities.

And so that's what they're going to use AI to create. And so what are like strategies, talking points for talking with coworkers and other people who might be using AI to maybe encourage them to stop? Do we have any... This is a big OER trend. Is it? Because OER is openly licensed. So you can feed it in.

You can pull it back out. And some of the earliest AI libraries was people saying, oh, we can finally have supplementary materials for all of these OER textbooks that, faculty want because they don't want to make the slides and they don't want to make the assignments necessarily because if you work with a commercial publisher a lot of that's packaged for you it's one the classic problems of oER i'm kind of glad i'm not in that space right now because it seems really awful to like have to deal with the amount of like dealing with people pushing oER to do this this wonderful like openly licensed community and movement that's finally starting to break through

in a lot of ways into the mainstream and now it's like let's say let's feed it all into the bullshit machine. From the book, The Bullshit Machine, please don't make the bullshit machine. Written by Cory Doctor O. Yeah, right. Shots out. He writes so many books.

It's crazy. Chuck Tingles version, I fucked the bullshit machine. Also Friend of the Pot. Can you believe we had both Corey Doctor O and Chuck Tingle on our fucking podcast? Fucking amazing. Legends. I love the check. Like, what the hell?

Anyway. Well, my first question would be, is there a policy about that? Ooh, yeah, what's your AI policy? I feel like policy is, probably going to be something we're going to have to weaponize and use in a lot because, you know, we don't have the protections legally or whatever. So like, what is your policy about this? Because it's something you can point to. So, like, do you have a policy for teachers about you to make curriculum? Or, like, is there a space where past or current teachers can

provide, like, those sorts of, like, reusable resources? Like, and I don't know, anything about K-12 teaching. So these are like genuine questions. Like, how do teachers do this stuff? And is there a way you can leverage that within your school, I guess? Yeah. We actually have like an official AI platform. So, okay, so we've got an AI platform.

Magic School. Oh, okay. So it's like built. It's like baked into. And remember when magic used to be like magical and not fucking garbage. I got a response to this. I mean, it sounds like, what you're talking about is a labor problem, right? So this person needs to be radicalized about how their labor is being exploited.

And like, I would start by being like, yeah, man, it fucking sucks. Teaching fucking sucks now. And like for all kinds of reasons. Like, teacher's morale is lower than it's, you know, it's like my twin sister is a teacher. Like, everyone is having a really hard time teaching. So like start with validating that. and then be like, you know, what if you don't work harder and faster? What if you just don't do some of this shit?

Because or like ask them quite, you know, get Socratic with it. Like, do you feel like your employer has been asking you to do more and more and more and not compensating you for it? Like, you should join the union or like, we need to get organized in other ways. And also I would add that like, you know, it's like chat, CBT for worksheets today. it's some other shit tomorrow. There's no end to if you start gaining more efficiency, your employer is just going to ask for more and more from you.

So why would you set yourself up like that, right? And so I think that like this person, like, they're obviously tired. They just want to like get through the day and whatever. And I think like you can have this conversation and then turn it into hopefully more of an organizing conversation and fight together. And like what, yeah, like what happens if they just don't create the worksheets? I mean, that's obviously not high on their priority list. So what is their priority list?

Students fucking hate worksheets. Yeah. And like what just what happens instead? You actually get, you know, your students fucking talking to each other and you have to moderate that and that's the part that you don't, you know, you need help with or education on or like, oh God, I had a thought and it's gone now. Thank you, ADHD. I can start and if you want to jump in with that help

Yeah, go for it. Cool. Yeah. So I've got a couple things. One, so when I was in grad school, Dr. Emily Knox was my graduate advisor. Yeah, shout out to fucking Dr. Knox. She's great.

And one thing she told me that has stuck with me is that policies are what let you say no. Obviously, they are sometimes a way to start a conversation, but policies are what allow you to say no. And they protect both you and your employees and also your patrons or students. Moonstever, right? And then the second thing is that, like, teachers, when they get organized, are some of those radical people in this country. Like, teachers unions are the ones that will break

the no strike ordinance. They're the ones that go, I don't care if this strike is, quote, unquote, illegal, we're going on strike anyway, and then they don't get fired. Like, the only illegal strike is a failed one, and the teachers do not fail. Like, there are so many examples of teachers breaking no strike clauses and organizing. If you go to, if you do anything with labor notes, also go to their conference in Chicago next year. I think registration. It's open now, but they have workshops all the time. So many of them are teachers, right? Teachers are so radical because they are treated like shit.

So, like, yeah, it will not be hard to radicalize them, hopefully. Well, and I remember the thing I was thinking of. That was my point. It's like part of the discussion about AI use among our staff in my IT department has been, you know, ways that we can then control the data that's actually being used. So if your system has a designated platform, you know, is it written out if that's to help protect teacher data? Is it going to help protect student data? You know, so like, like, we talk about like using copilot, right? But if we actually endorse copilot, then people aren't using chat GPT and who knows what the hell they're putting in chat GPT.

You know, it's also kind of a security issue, you know, like probably less so in libraries, but, you know, people putting code. and stuff through chat GPT. So there is that kind of angle to think about too and how you can work that to be like, yes, it's a labor issue, but it can also be an issue. So if you want us to use this platform, what are we like, why? Have that spelled out too? I think just this sort of, I think more piggybacking off of Allison. I think, you know, so one of the mantras of the teachers unions is that teaching conditions

or learning conditions and that has driven a lot of teachers unions forward for a very long time and has really made them very successful. But one of the other things about using an AI worksheet is frankly, like most teachers are not teaching something so novel that there is no like grade seven worksheet that has ever been done on it. Right. And like that is, you know, there are a lot of databases or you could even email it, who might have a similar curriculum, like, particularly is, for better or worse, curricula becomes

more standardized across, you know, a state. Like, unless you're teaching something, I can't even think of anything, but, like, you are probably teaching something that has a worksheet already that was drafted. Some bullshit at Boston Latin. Yeah. That was, like, drafted by a human. And in certain ways, it's, you know, it has its own problems. Like, my, my ex-husband was a teacher and one of the issues.

he had was that a lot of his colleagues would kind of just pass the work sheets forward and do them over and over again or pass the same curricula for it and then they'd end up teaching like awful books like a separate piece forever and like every separate piece is good oh okay fine I'm gay it's good the one uh no the alchemist okay I never even fucking heard of that one oh the terrible book um but anyway so like you know I not you do you do not be Basically, like, you can work with other people. Like, you don't have to work with a machine. You can support other teachers. Like, wouldn't it, you know, that's also one of the reasons why we have Creative Commons licenses. Shout out. So that resources can be shared across.

And for those people who are in the room, if I can maybe embarrass two folks a little bit, we do have two experts on OER in the audience. Do we? We have Michelle Reed. who works at Lovera Futures, and we have Nick Shockey who works at Spark. So if you want to talk to them about creating, maintaining, supporting, open educational resources, they are here, they're wonderful, and I hope they're willing to answer questions. We are getting to be at about at six, but... What are they going to do?

Call the police. And maybe this is a good note to end on, but I'm pretty certain that this is something I actually picked up from Allison and the LFP courses I did. Yeah. Full circle. It really always just seems to come back to the, to relationship building. Yes. Right.

So especially in our current client or climate like it's it's so fucking scary and all of this stuff. Like you have you have to work local. And even if that local is just like your friends and family, like there are people out there who have no idea what libraries do. And I'm always like, oh yeah, no, this is a shit. This is the kind of shit that libraries are experiencing right now getting, oh, well, I never even thought about that.

kind of thing. But like, so yeah, like, what is your local situation? What are the relationships you have there? How can you build those and then use that to branch out further? Like, that's always the thing that I come back to. Even in IT where I don't work with a lot of like patrons or customers, I'm still like, this is still relationship building. There is an on this is just relationship building.

There is a great online resource about how you do a one-on-one and we can link it in the notes of this episode because we've used it at the Lucy Parsons Center before. It's great. I'm not making that up, am I? No, you nailed it. Thank you. I'm so glad to be part of the community with you. Oh, wow.

That's what about OER. Because, I mean, that was the entire idea was that people would, our teachers are constantly remixing things and that they would, you know, make these things and share them so that labor isn't duplicated. We save all this labor. We save all this time. And then people who are trying to use AI for OER are like, oh, it's about the material. It's like, no, it was about the whole community and labor saving.

if you fill it with slop, people are going to have to check the slop and everyone's going to go through it and have to fix it. So, yeah, I mean, definitely when you talk with faculty and teachers in K-12, it's all about priorities. You can't make more hours in the day for them. So you always have to, like, get down to the root of the issue. So I think asking questions about, like, what do these, like, worksheets mean to you? And it's, like, for your teaching. And is there something we can do that's a little more human-centric? I'm an anti-workshy anarchist now.

Yeah. Is that it? Yeah, and on that thought. And on that thought. At time. At time. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Thank everybody for coming. This is our first live show. Wow, we've been it. And seriously, thank you. Someone take a picture. We have to get a group picture. Thank you. Thank you to Allison and Jenny.

Yes. Our wonderful guest. Go birds. Gold star guests. and friends of the pods. So I'm going to get around for them as well. Thank you. Thank you.

And thank you to Iffy books for hosting this. Yes. Buy something on your way out. Local legends. Buy something. Buy something. Definitely buy something. Everyone say go birds and free Palestine.

Go birds and free Palestine. Great. All right. Good job. Yeah, we did it. Cool. Good night.