 Okay, so welcome everyone and please come on in, sit down, it's all good. My name is Char Booth, I'm Associate Dean of the Library at Cal State San Marcos, which is right down the road. Luckily I didn't have to do any flying for this presentation, which was lovely. I also don't use Twitter all that much, but I've put my handle up in case you want to holler at me at any point in this presentation. I love to receive feedback on what I'm talking about and I also love to engage in the context of conferences, so you are more than welcome to do that. Before I get started in earnest, I'd also like to thank you for joining me during this hour. CNI has the most brutal concurrent session game of like any conference in the world. They stuck me in the big ballroom, there's a camera on my face, there's these amazing spotlights and I know that you've made a choice between seven really amazing concurrent sessions to be here, so I appreciate your interest in this and I appreciate your time. I also want to thank the people who are working to make this conference happen. I know a lot of labor goes into things like CNI, so if there's anybody in the room who is a CNI affiliate or working on this conference, thank you also. So the project of this talk, the title of what I'm talking about today is Libraries, Information Equity and Economic Justice, and I want to do a little bit of reflection on why I'll be talking about this of all things at CNI today. On its face you may think this is a little bit of an un-CNI topic, but I hope to, like I was just saying to my old boss Kevin Mulroy, diverge and converge back to make sure that I'm aligning the message of this talk with what CNI is all about, information access and developing innovative technologies to make sure that the greatest amount of access is going to the fullest group of people. So in my former roles in libraries I tended to be focused on information literacy, public services, different sorts of projects that were really focused outward on educating people about how to discover, use and really manipulate information towards their own ends. And over the last few years I've had a very different role at Cal State San Marcos, I'm the associate dean who's focused on resources, operations, budgets and that sort of thing. And this convergence of a kind of a different view on the library, the practical project of the library, has got me thinking about the ways that libraries use and apportion their own resources towards this bigger project of information equity, which of course is what libraries I believe are all about. So I'm coming from the standpoint of thinking about information literacy in my past, information access and the barriers that exist to information access and also how libraries as institutions with a massive resource base can make critical intentional choices about how to kind of use those resources for a greater social good. Speaking of social good, I'd like to start with a quote from Jaeger, Taylor and Gotham from a 20,000 15 book called, libraries, human rights and social justice. The human rights and social justice functions of libraries are truly what make each library a community good. I believe and I hope you share this belief that knowledge is a fundamental human right, just like sustenance, just like shelter and similar to education. We are challenged to consider as people who are affiliated with libraries to understand the power and responsibility we have to fully embody that mission of being a community good. It's also incumbent upon us to think about what our community means. Who is our core user community and can we, like Joan encouraged us to do, to think beyond what we might consider like a narrow definition of community and think about a broader project? So at its core, my conversation today is about barriers, unfortunately. The barriers that exist between people in the cultural record and the barriers between our institutions and the steps that we can take within our own institutions to reduce information inequality through the prioritization and realignment of our own resources. And what resources we have, it's an amazing thing. Aerial member libraries alone in 2015 had a combined expenditures of over $3.4 billion. And if you scale that up to the vast network of libraries that exist in this country and across the world, you have a real capacity to make true change, actual change in the landscape of information equity. And it isn't just financial resources that I'm talking about. Of course, now that I focus on operations, I think a lot about the human capacity that is embedded within libraries. The people who work in our organizations, they represent a vast collective force with the ability to impact discourse and action in higher education and beyond. And if you need proof of that, just look what has happened in the scholarly communication landscape around information open access, open educational resources, and open data. Without the dedicated efforts of librarians themselves, people who are working in scholarly communications and digital initiatives, OA would not be where it is today. And OA is not where it will be and where it can be, but it's come a long way in the last 20 years thanks to the efforts of librarians. And I have a selfish project as well. And this gives you part of the reason why I'm talking about what I'm talking about today in the context of CNI. At CNI, the attendee base of CNI is basically a room full of people who make decisions about how libraries use their resources. So I'm thinking about you as folks who have a project of directing the priorities of your own institutions and therefore the power and the capability to shape the ways that they work on behalf of others. And of course, I want to acknowledge that in the context of our different types of libraries, our different Carnegie institutions, our different communities make these decisions that we make on behalf of a social justice mission of libraries very different. So the strategies that I put out today, they're not meant to be one size fits all, but they are intended to say that independent of the institutional context that you come from, it is possible to make critical, principled, ethical decisions about the way library budgets are run in order to have a broader social impact in terms of combating information inequality. So I want to shift focus now and think about what makes libraries libraries, what draws us all together, despite our institutional context and what kind of project binds us as information professionals. So the Library Bill of Rights has been around for a long time. I often use this document in my presentations to make a variety of different points. And today I want to make the principle point that libraries are truly altruistic information organizations organized around a non-profit imperative, which is becoming increasingly rare in this world of information commodification and commodification of all things truly. It's also increasingly important as we see the rising tide of things like fake news and just basically epistemological crisis, what is truth, this kind of discourse that's going around in society, libraries fulfill a unique and essential function towards pushing back against that kind of discourse. But if you want to dig a layer deeper and think a little bit more complexly about libraries, there is a deeper kind of meaning or complexity to this picture. Libraries are not perfect, we still have work to do. For every one of our foundational structural principles, access, advocacy, openness, there is a flip side that I think we can and should work on to truly forward this project of universal access to information. And it starts within our institutions at the ground level. So challenging things like a myth of neutrality that our institutions can be inherently neutral in the face of a variety of different challenges, the homogeneity of our own staffing bases, just look around the room, most of us are white, let's be real, it doesn't reflect the broader context of society. Restrictive fines, things that we may not need to levy on our users, fines that haven't been critically examined in the past, policies that may throw up more access barriers than we attend to, and of course, the paywalls that we still are up against ourselves that are levied on us from these large, extremely profitable publishers. So I want to challenge us to consider these barriers. From a human level, from the level of real people. And I want to quote an article that I highly recommend that everyone in this room read, especially if you're interested in collections and collection development. Michelle Bailden of MIT recently wrote in CRNL News, an article titled, Extending the Open Access Mindset, that if we focus on the needs of real people right now, we must remain flexible within our proposed solutions. This is the mission of social justice itself to think about real people, marginalized people, and how they're impacted by the decisions our institutions make. This also challenges to redefine what we think of as our core user groups, which I already mentioned. Applying the mission of our institution beyond its immediate boundaries, despite the pressures that we feel from our core constituents and stakeholders towards a broader commitment to confronting information equality. And to do so in a way that acknowledges both the digital and the analog. And that's my project here today, to talk about real people, real problems, from that digital and that analog standpoint or framework. So in sum, what I'm trying to do in now 55 minutes is explain what is complicated, let's say, with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, all of us, and provide achievable, attainable, practical goals for social transformation. I believe we can do this on a daily basis, I really do. And I want to think about this idea through two frames that of economic justice, simply and in principle, economic justice is a component of social justice theory, which recognizes that structural inequality is a reality in all sorts of different institutions and organizations in the world that creates differences and equities, such as classes and racism, homophobia, and so forth. These things pit people with privilege against people without privilege. And issues of economic justice specifically are clear and things like homeless lists look around downtown San Diego, unsafe jobs, unemployment, income inequality, poor health care, and declining public education. And that last one hits us really hard ourselves. So from a systems perspective, which is how I want to talk about economic justice, it's about making sure that the benefits of growth and prosperity and resources are dedicated towards people over projects, over profits, over systems. So if we're keeping human individuals and their experiences, sometimes their experiences of marginalization at their core, what can we as academic libraries do to create a more equitable distribution of our own resources? The second frame is information equity. This one's probably a little bit easier to just intuit. This is a simple principle that who you are, what you earn, what your institutional affiliation is should not matter in terms of the amount of raw knowledge-building resource materials that you're able to access. This is not the case. We all know that this is not yet the case. The cultural and scholarly record should be as available to a rural resident looking for information on environmental pollutants as it is to a researcher at a large R1. That is really not the way things are right now. And libraries as a collective can do more than any other profession and any other group of individuals or organizations to make this change. Despite incredible gains made towards open access over the last 20 years, still only 15% of current journal publications are available as green or gold away. So that doesn't count hybrid away, which some people even question whether that's open access in and of itself. So with those lofty goals and those large frames, I know that this feels like a very huge project, right? So these are truly stratospheric level ideals. So what I wanna do over the next part of my presentation is bring this closer to Earth. Bring this down to that human level that I talked about. And I'm gonna do so by telling a couple of stories of my own experience, because I definitely like to speak from my own experience about what it looks like for people who are kind of struggling through situations in which access is not a principle that they have much affiliation with. When people are marginalized from information and how institutions such as libraries can do different kinds of projects to broaden and open up that resource base to more people than you might consider to be part of your core constituency. So my first library job was at Ohio University and this is back in about 2006. I went to library school in Austin, Texas at UT Austin and I kind of shot out of there like a rocket to this rural research institution. It's about a mid-sized public institution that was doctoral granting, but it was definitely situated in the context of rural poverty. We're in the southeast corner of Ohio, which is an Appalachian area that had a lot of intergenerational unemployment. So we were treated really much like a public library by a lot of people. Working on the reference test there, I would get a lot of questions about how do I create an email account? What's an email account? People applying for unemployment, that sort of thing. And I got my own taste of living ruraly and my own sort of information in access situation. This is my cabin in the woods out there in Ohio that I lived in literally in a hauler. I lived off of Bean Hauler Road. This is an amazing location name. And the interesting thing about this place is that there was literally no way to have internet access out there. Dial-up wasn't even an option because of the general crappiness of our phone coverage. So I got the bright idea as a student at Ohio University to go for an online master's degree in a house with no internet access. And I made this happen and the way that I made this happen was a total workaround. I would take my laptop to work. At the end of the day, I would load up like 800 tabs in my browser with all my course readings and all the different learning management system things that I needed to type my assignments into. And I would just pray that nothing would crash while I was working on it, right? So this is pretty much the most benign example of information poverty I could come up with, right? So here I am, a librarian, person that was raised upper middle class, white person, tons of privilege. And just by the fact of not having access to the internet, I literally almost couldn't complete my second master's degree. And I wanna acknowledge this as a very vanilla or benign example of information poverty because there's really a lot more people that have it way worse than that. But it may be one way of thinking about the fundamental challenges that still exist between people, information access, and education. According to the Pew Research Center, 11% of US adults still don't have access to the internet. 22% of those are rural citizens, people located in rural areas. And I wanna extend this analogy to the concept of isolation and information isolation. When I worked at UC Berkeley, which was the institution I went to after Ohio University, of course huge R1, amazing base of resources, 26 libraries or something at the time I worked there. And it was really a vastly different context than working at Ohio University. At the time that I worked at Berkeley, a friend of a friend reached out to me, this is a very interesting individual, you can see him there with his hand in a jar of fermented foods. This person went around the country giving workshops on fermentation to basically share the knowledge that he had learned in the context of being sick. So he had a health problem and he found that fermented foods made him feel a lot better. So he goes around the country as an educator teaching people how to make this food. He's also extremely scholarly as an outsider scholar if you wanna think about it in that way and was researching a book at the time of doing all these different workshops. And so Sandy reaches out to me, knows that I'm a librarian. I was like, okay, Char, so I live in rural Tennessee, I don't have a public or an academic library anywhere near me and I have all these extremely obscure random articles that I need, can you help me? I was like, well, I do work at Berkeley and there's a lot of things that we have access to that you don't. So maybe I'll just hook you up a little bit, scan a few things, download a few things, send them your way, right? So this individual started to cultivate this personal interlibrary loan resource base in order to connect him to these articles and these book chapters that he needed to complete this work. And I make this example because what resulted from this outsider scholarship and a bunch of librarians maybe violating some access regulations was an incredible work that made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. And the funny thing that Sandy did was thank every single librarian that ever helped him out and sent him anything which was totally like narking on people, right? But at the same time, it was an incredibly interesting thing to see how many people had literally kind of violated the access provisions of their own institutions to help this individual out that literally would have had no other recourse to what he needed in that scenario. So what you have in that context is people with information privilege helping people without information privilege. And now I'm gonna make an analogy that Kevin's gonna like. When I worked at the Claremont Colleges, very different group of students than at Berkeley or at Ohio University. So seven liberal arts institutions, very elite, a lot of really smart students, but also a lot of really privileged students, students that came from very economically affluent backgrounds. And of course, being a teacher, I had had about eight years up to that point of teaching information literacy sessions for people who, you know, a little bit bored, maybe not like right there with me where I wanted them to be until I started talking about information privilege. When I would write on the board, you know, X million dollars and then go through this backwards conversation with students trying to analyze what that figure meant and what I, you know, hoped that they could come away with from it. We would kind of deconstruct that acquisitions budget, how much scholarly communication costs them as students at an institution in terms of tuition. We would really dig into the money. And it was the most compelling way to talk about lack of privilege and access in the context of higher education. And it was a way to really motivate students to think about why information is closed and why information is open. And most importantly, the responsibilities that they had as information privileged people to then push out the institutional resources that they had access to beyond the boundaries of the Claremont Colleges. And also to realize that when they graduated, the tap would be shut off, which was a huge revelation to all of them. They didn't expect that. And it was hard news for them. So one of the ways that we did this at the Claremont Colleges was to edit Wikipedia articles together. There was a class that I worked with for years on end that was a really amazing course. It was Introduction to American Politics. And what we would do is organize groups of students into about four or five people and we would assign them to create new Wikipedia articles where none existed for core concepts in American politics. And what we found was that, like presenting information privilege as a concept of information literacy instruction, that students were incredibly engaged in this work. It was very hard. We had to drag them at some points, kicking and screaming through the process of developing a highly robust tertiary source. But at the same time, the project that came out was one of ownership over a piece of the public record that they had created. So invariably, when students would present on their final projects after the articles had been published, what we would see is that they were very fascinated in how many page views they were getting, how many article edits that were coming through, and as a result, realizing really the scope and the impact of their own scholarship. If you can call Wikipedia scholarship, which you actually can, as MIT Sloan School tells us, there was a study that I would really recommend people check out if they're interested in Wikipedia, which was published in September of 2017, which showed that primary research coverage of topics in Wikipedia and scientific disciplines influenced the way that secondary studies were published. So the better the primary coverage in Wikipedia or the tertiary coverage in Wikipedia, the more secondary research articles they would see coming out of that Wikipedia coverage. So moving forward to present day, Cal State San Marcos, and I want to contrast my experience at this institution with the institutions that preceded it. So our learner population at Cal State San Marcos is very different than any I have worked with before. 47% of our freshmen students are Pell Grant recipients. Underrepresented minorities are about half of our learner population. First generation students are also about half of our population, and we just have a lot of challenges among our learners. Statistics show us that about 25% of our low-income students will drop out before the end of their second year. So the project of our institution becomes trying to figure out how to keep these students enrolled in school. The CSU system, all 23 schools in the CSU system has a really interesting project devoted towards understanding students' basic needs. And by basic needs, we go back to those fundamental human rights, housing, food, clothing, physical health, healthcare. And what they found was really shocking to me, frankly. 41% of CSU students, and keep in mind, this is 500,000 students across the state of California, reported food insecurity. So this is a persistent lack of access to nutrition. 41% of our students, again, like this really almost jerks me up as I talk about it. So you have people who are learning while hungry, attempting to be successful students while not having enough food. We also found that 11% of our learner population reported experiencing homelessness in the last year, which is a really profound figure. And it is not isolated to California, nor is it isolated to the CSU system itself. The Department of Agriculture estimates that one in seven United States households experience food insecurity. So this can be extrapolated to any institutional type that are represented in this room. So I challenge you to think about what kinds of barriers are confronting your students in a very human, fundamental, kind of lived experience way, and how your library might be able to assist them if they're experiencing those challenges. So recognizing that student basic needs are a huge concern, the CSU-SM California State University, San Marcos, has done a lot of projects oriented towards understanding what students are kind of coming up against in terms of learning persistence challenges. And as part of the textbook broke hashtag movement that happened a couple years ago that's still active, we ran a little project that put on a whiteboard, a couple whiteboards in the main entrances of our institution, what would you be able to afford if you didn't buy textbooks? And students wrote sticky notes and put them up on the board and kind of laid out for us a very important set of findings. So once we took these results, combined them, and put them together in this little word cloud, we see that students are forgoing food, rent, and life in order to buy their course materials. And this is a really astounding finding for us and something that has kind of wrapped our heads around different ways that we can come at our students in the system. My colleague Jill Waite, who's a sociologist at CSU-SM, did a extra credit assignment in one of her second year classes where she asked students to talk about the top three barriers to their own academic success as a sophomore. And time and time again, she found that these fundamental human rights challenges were what were really standing in the way of her students and their academic success. So I lost my job last year. I was on parole, I lacked transportation. I have family obligations and home life that prevent me from doing the schoolwork that I need to do. Stress and allocating finances to pay for school. My culture, my race, my economic background. So if we pay attention to these things that our students are saying, my academic challenges are not being able to, you know, find the exact right sources for my assignments and then information literacy sense. They are being able to pay for my housing, pay for my own food and get to and from school. So our project as a library is not to ignore those things that we're learning from our students but rather to meet them head on. To consider and critically analyze how we as a library can become an ally to our students who are facing these systematic oppressions in their lives. And we've done that in part by strategic planning, frankly, we have a five year strategic plan that we recently refreshed, revised, that has embedded in its mission, vision and values, concepts of social justice, concepts of information equity and very practical aims to help move the needle for our students in these core basic needs areas. And I'm gonna give you some examples of projects that we're doing at CSUSM that kind of get at this basic needs question and attempt to have a more information equitability as well as economic justice scenario and landscape for our own learner population. And then I'm gonna, like I said, converge back into the bigger concept of information justice and economic justice. So first and foremost, what we need to do is analyze are we paying our employees enough? One of the first things that I realized when I got to CSUSM is that there was no way to give our student assistance raises. Now, this seems like maybe a small thing but I think we probably all know how much labor student assistance put into academic libraries and they're usually paid very, very atrociously. Sometimes they're only paid through a federal work study until federal work study runs out and they get kind of fired, which is not maybe the best practice but some libraries have to because of budgetary constraints. So I determined that there's really no way to give students raise. I brought this to the University of Human Resources and I said, you know, this is kind of problematic. We'd like to have a wage equity program in place. And I kind of was annoying enough for long enough that they were able to change the rules, creating a better compensation system for our student assistance, which has improved retention, which has improved job satisfaction and increased their productivity. We also pay attention to Cougar's affordable learning materials. So this is, of course, a textbook affordability program that has saved our students over, I think, two and a half million dollars at this point. So putting institutional human resources and economic resources into creating affordable course materials. And I'm so heartened to see so many institutions doing this project. We're also servicing open access collections in our discovery layer. And shout out to Lauren Magnuson and Ian Chan, who are my very brilliant colleagues who are really pushing the needle on what discovery means and how open our own discovery layer should be to these OER resources and OA resources. And in analog capacity, like I mentioned earlier, we're figuring out creative ways to make textbooks available on reserve. So check them out for a semester, then, or excuse me, we rent them for a semester and then check them out to students on two-hour reserve, thus getting a huge amount of circulation and they really do circulate quite a lot. We've also abolished fines and fees that we found unnecessary. We were getting next to nothing in revenue from these and it was really just kind of a punitive measure that was being imposed on our students and in some cases keeping them from being able to graduate due to their resource challenges. So we now only charge for our book losses, for our actual replacements. And I would challenge and ask requests that libraries in this room think about whether fines are actually necessary and what they're achieving at writ large. We've opened a 24-hour space that has a really great, it's just getting a lot of action, a lot of play. And in that 24-hour space, we actually have donations from our Cougar Pantry, which is the campus' food pantry, that put the snacks out available for students overnight. Because we've done research and we've found that a number of those students are actually there because they have nowhere else to go. They are studying, indeed, but they literally have no other home to go to. Other projects include creating accessible and open spaces such as gender-inclusive restrooms, and lactation facilities for parents, for mothers who are nursing, ensuring that we have enough space for ADA-accessible seating in the building. And also, coming up with projects and exhibits that help represent students from marginalized communities back to themselves. So it's very important for students of color, from students from underrepresented backgrounds to be able to see themselves in different sorts of cultural programming. And this is an example of a recent exhibit we did in our library on the history of the Black Panther Movement. It had photographs of original Panther members and then kind of narrative stories of their experience at that time. This is part of a common-read program that featured Ta-Nehisi Coates between then World and Me, which is a fabulous book, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. And creating programming around this common-read book, such as inviting Alicia Garza from Black Lives Matter to speak at our university on the topic of racial justice, a very challenging topic indeed. And finally, making sure that we're apportioning our resources towards justice and our own hiring practices. We're creating a position for a senior assistant librarian that's bilingual in English and Spanish. This is in recognition that we're a border region institution that has a great number of native Spanish speakers. We're a Hispanic serving institution and it's absolutely essential that we're hiring staff that reflect our own learner population. So what ties all of these things together, what ties all of these initiatives and all of these analog, typically, efforts together at CSUSM is that we're attempting to identify real lived human barriers that our students and our faculty, frankly, are meeting and then overcoming those barriers through programming and resource allocation. And that means making really difficult decisions about where our resources are going. And I wanted to mention that this project of information equity and economic justice in libraries, it's not possible for us to do everything, right? So we forego institutional subscriptions to things like Spark and the Library Publishing Coalition because we have these higher needs among our core learner population. So making critical decisions, prioritizing different sorts of initiatives that is absolutely a part of this process. So now I'm going to zoom back out. I'm gonna check the time first. Excellent, I'm right on time. Zoom back out to the stratospheric level and think about the more, I'd say the larger scope picture of information equity and economic justice in the context of libraries as an aggregate on the whole, what can we do to move the needle on this picture? So I'll begin this section with a quote. Again, John Walensky writes that, access to knowledge is a human right that is closely associated with the ability to defend as well as advocate for other rights. And there have been many activists that took this position and really put a lot of their own individual effort and livelihood into making this a reality. Not the least of which is Aaron Schwartz who unfortunately and tragically took his own life several years ago after being arrested for attempting to download the entire JSTOR corpus from the MIT libraries. So what Aaron wrote in his Grilla Open Access Manifesto is about the responsibility of those with information privileges to those without. Those with access to these resources, students, librarians, and scientists, you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not, indeed morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world and you have trading passwords with colleagues filling download requests with friends. And again, I am not advocating for these measures. I'm not advocating for these approaches, but I am saying that they are very real and they have persisted and been inspired by this kind of rhetoric in a variety of different ways. On a smaller scale, the ICANN has PDF hashtag, shows you kind of the efforts of a bunch of different academics who put out a DOI or put out a citation on Twitter and then hope to net back a PDF downloaded by a colleague at a different institution. On a much larger scale, Alexander Elbacayan, who's a neuroscientist and researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci Hub, which Joan mentioned this morning in her keynote, which nefariously, and I must admit ingeniously, takes publicly posted login credentials for pay-walled institutions and uses them to backdoor, pass the paywall, and to spit out, using just a DOI, the PDF copy of a journal. It's really, I mean, again, it's a genius and it's also a huge challenge to the amount of resources that libraries put forward on all of these subscriptions. So this is to say that knowledge is a fundamental human right and it will find a way of being accessible, even if that way is not precisely legal. Sci Hub has been enjoined a number of times by Elsevier and other publishers to stop what it's doing, to take its resources down. Every time they kind of whack a mole, it pops up somewhere else under a different URL and people still use it. And I wanna linger for a moment on how people are using Sci Hub, which I think is very fascinating and very important for academic libraries to think about as we try to forward the kind of massive project of open access. Science Journal found, and this again just kind of gives me chills, that not only are individuals across the global south who have a very compelling interest in being able to get around the paywall because of the lack of resources in global south institutions, not only are people in the global south and people who are unaffiliated researchers downloading from Sci Hub, it's people in our own institutions, in our own colleges, in our own libraries who find this interface easier to use, more straightforward and more systematic to use than the other legitimate open access resources that are out there. And I think, I would posit, that what's happening is things are open but they're still difficult to access. We have a proliferation of different tools, of different search interfaces, of different acronyms, my God, the acronyms alone are enough to make you wanna memorize for like three years. But the resources are open but they're hard for people to understand how to access. This goes for our institutionally affiliated people, our faculty, our students, as well as people who are not part of that core user community. So if we have open but hard to access, we also have closed and readily available. And this is not a sustainable model. Sci Hub cannot be around forever. It will get whacked down a number of times and it will pop up, pop back up. Perhaps not forever though. So this challenge to libraries, this challenge to scholarly societies is to figure out this access problem, this incredible, difficult, sticky problem to answer. How can we make this open yet challenging to access, close but readily available picture, dwindle into obscurity? So John Winsler, who's a fellow dean in the CSU system, posed in a 2017 article that it's a collective action dilemma that prevents the library community from truly banding together to address this problem, to reduce redundancy of effort in funding, redundancy of effort and resource allocation to foster a new communication publishing ecosystem, or at least to gain enough leverage to start negotiating ourselves back off of the cliff that we are all on with the increasing rates of inflation that we get every single year on our core journal access subscriptions. And I quote John, to truly reduce their costs, librarians would have to build a shared online collection of scholarly resources jointly managed by the academic community as a whole, no small task. This call for collective action is being answered by so many efforts, some of which are being discussed at this very conference literally right now, and I kind of wish that I was in that room as well, but I cannot particle split in that way. So if there's a collective action dilemma, what we have to do is create an institutional action imperative. Contextually specific, depending on the type of institution we are, depending on the needs of our user communities and the broader scholarly ecosystem, as well as the bigger social project of social justice itself. The authors of a recent CDL OA Pathways study, and this is something that I highly recommend people check out, OA Pathways, California Digital Library. The authors of the study write in nature index, quote, if we are going to accelerate progress towards free readership for all, we as libraries, scholars, societies, and authors must make critical choices about how we spend our money. That means deciding to spend less where it is not well spent, making critical decisions about things like cancellations, pushing back against double dipping practices around hybrid OA, et cetera. David Lewis proposes a 2.5% commitment of institutional budgets towards open access, and I quote David, there's money. The critical question is, are we in the academic library community prepared to reallocate enough of it to accomplish what needs to be done? So what I wanna do over the last part of this presentation is talk about the collective actions and the institutional actions that I think are really getting this right, that are doing an excellent job of having a information justice orientation as well as an economic justice orientation, where the decisions they're making about institutional and collective resources are truly guided by ethical imperative to make sure that this access and discoverability picture is truly better for all people. And I begin with an example that might be known to some people in the room at least. There are grassroots collectives, such as Radical Reference, who literally set up shops at things like protests and political conventions that dispense information as needed on the street to people who may be getting arrested for being protesters, who help the sandies of the world when they're unable to, through things like ICANN has PDF or Sci Hub, find what they need. So true research assistance through individual collectives. We also have large consortia making the critically difficult decision to cancel huge research packages as a leveraging technique, as a negotiation technique, right? So one of the ways that we can pressure big publishers to kind of ease up on the prices and ease up on the APCs that they're charging is to say, absolutely not. And this happens all the time and it always makes a big splash, but this is truly what Roger Schoenfeld of Ithaca SNR poses in a 2017 Ithaca issue brief called Red Light, Green Light. What if libraries found ways to bring together the whole library behind the collective, the objective of stabilizing or reducing what they pay. This collective action does exactly that, stabilizes and reduces what we all pay. Boycotts, cancellations, and collective protest in this forum. I also want to call out interesting projects such as Sci ELO, Scientific Electronic Library Online. And this is a global south initiative that brings together countries such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica to create an open access publishing platform and search repository where the scholarly output of global south countries can be as visible and be raised to the recognition of global north researchers. And this is a very important point because a lot of times the output of these nations are subsumed or subaltern to researchers in the United States or European nations. Similarly, the African Journal Online Library seeks to raise the level of access to African scholarship and increase the global profile of African scholarship in the research cycles of the global north. And it does so by hosting open access journals as well as paywall journals, create an account, and you can kind of debit an account from the number of articles that you download. Similarly, a bit a little bit differently, there are things like Agora, Enare, and ORA which are collaborations between major publishers, nonprofits, and NGOs that help make the scholarly output of global north countries available to researchers in the global south in developing nations. I also want to call out creative and awesome, if I do say so myself, technological tools such as the unpaywall browser extension which uses OA DOI to surface from a digital object identifier much like Sightfinder does, but legally, the whatever open access content or version of an article is out there. If you don't use OA DOI, if you don't use unpaywall, I strongly recommend that you check that out. And organizations that are providing new research workflow platforms such as Wellcome Open Research which covers APCs through the Wellcome Trust and creates an entirely new way of submitting articles, having them peer reviewed, instantaneous publication through the article revision process. Switching from the collective to the institutional, these are a few projects that I respect very deeply and that I want to call out as again, highly successful at orienting institutional resources towards a broader open access effort or initiative. So OpenStacks is a open courseware and technology or excuse me, textbook publishing platform that is based at Rice University. And I believe they have about 30 textbooks available at this point that are fully open and there's library engagement in this project. Excuse me, 29 books are available now as well as open courseware and assignments and things like that. The Data Refuge project is fascinating at the University of Pennsylvania. This was created to help data from going kind of into obscurity from being lost after it's published. Laurie Allen, the assistant director for the scholarship at Penn Libraries and a key organizer of the project says that the loss of data happens all the time. The web that we rely on is really brittle. So what they've done is create a platform that can aggregate and preserve data from a number of different institutional contexts. The Makutu team for digital, excuse me, the Makutu platform for content management of culturally aware community-driven digital collection building is something that I really, really respect. So this is a CMS that allows digital special collections to be created with the consent and input of the communities that have created the content, such as Native American and other indigenous communities. And this is created and run out of the Washington State University Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation. Spark recognized Tidewater Community College for a project that actually creates a $0 sum course text cost, which is an amazing program. Statistics range from between $600 to $1,200 a year in textbook costs, and there are institutions popping up across the country that have figured out ways to subsidize the cost of course text and reduce the student outlay on their resources and in service of being able to pay for their basic needs instead. And finally, very importantly, a whole institutions orient their operations around a social justice project, such as MIT Library's recent global platform, vision and mission, which takes every aspect of their institution and finds ways to basically align it with ethical values and social justice values. And there was a report published, I believe, in 2016 that was like a preliminary findings on a large project they had done to align the library's values with the institution's values as well as a broader project of information equity. So the common point in all of these projects is like MIT to align vision with resources, to have a broader and like a more focused underpinning of information equity and equitability of access for more than just an individual institution and to take the resources that are available in that institution and realign them behind this open project. And they do so in a way that recognizes both the digital and the analog. I think this is the most interesting thing of all. They see the human cost of information inequity, the human cost of economic privilege and information privilege that isn't distributed more broadly than the individuals that hold it. So in closing, I hope that I've made the point and made the challenge that information equity and economic justice are inextricably linked and are guiding principles that our universities and our libraries can use in service of achieving the former in the face of growing information commodification. Libraries have the capacity to conceive of a project of liberation, true liberation for those in positions of information marginalization and to act on these principles in service of the greater good in very human individual ways. So I challenge you and encourage you to think about your own institutions, how they are situated, who their stakeholders are, what kinds of justice oriented decisions you could be making with the resources that are available to you. If those decisions are currently informing the projects that you're developing and the initiatives that you're engaged in. And I wanna leave you with a quote from the amazing Toni Morrison that I think helps focus kind of this project of among us as individuals. When you get these jobs that you've been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, which I believe that most of us are, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. And I hope that we can align ourselves behind that project as information professionals, as our professional clothes of ethics tell us to do. And that was my presentation. Thank you very much.