 Hi everyone and welcome to San Francisco public libraries jail and reentry services departments training on academic library services to incarcerated people. This training is part of our training series made possible by the melon foundation for our expanding information access for incarcerated people grant project. We cover a variety of topics in this training in training series related to all types of library services and information services for incarcerated people. And the trainings will be publicly available on our YouTube channel and available through a la's learning management software. They're freely available through a la if you would like to receive professional credit or a certificate for attending this training. All you have to do is sign up through a la's learning management system. We'll start the training today with an introduction by Stacy Burnett, speaking about her own lived experiences with information access inside. And then we'll hear from a variety of librarians in a variety of contexts who are working with currently incarcerated students. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Stacy Burnett and pretty soon. I can officially tech three letters after my name MBA. It's been a rather unusual path to get here at almost 50 years old, and my very first college class was taken in prison. In 2008 I was sentenced to five to 10 years in New York State, and it was a terrible time. I was struggling to find meaning. And at the sentencing hearing, I promised the judge I would emerge with a college degree. I hadn't known anyone who had been to prison before, but based on what I had read and thought I knew about prisons. I thought criminals were coddled and got free education. And that prisons were idyllic places, we just couldn't leave them a giant rent free college campus with bars. I was disavowed of that notion within an hour of my arrival at Bedford Hills. We were publicly deloused. I was yelled at for not rubbing the light shampoo and quick enough, and standing in that shower stall waiting those five agonizing minutes for that life treatment to work, being screamed at by guards. I felt my humanity just being stripped away. I was going down the drain with those little soap bubbles in that cold water, and I was grateful when I got that scratchy green button up shirt to cover myself, I would have to wear this shirt for five years. I was 0378, but I vowed that I would be 0378 with a bachelor's by the time it was over. Bedford had a college program but I was shipped out before I could attend any of those classes. I was off to Albion, which is the largest New York State prison for women. There was college, but I was too old for it. No one over 24 could attend because it was paid for by a youth grant three out of five New York State prisons had college programs. But statistically I thought I would have the opportunity. I wound up doing almost all my time at the only two facilities that did not have college for me, and I was angry. I spent five years scrubbing floors, mopping sewage fixing broken appliances in between stints and solitary which was not idyllic at all. I was writing classes parenting classes religious classes classes on anything, but nothing that gave me college credit, and I was still six, I was still seeking something. When I tried to apply for college after I went home from prison the first time I was rejected because I had to check off that box for felon. I was in prison two more times because prison is tough, but the last time something magical happened. I landed at iconic which offered barred prison initiative. I applied, and I, I cried a lot. Alone in myself staring at that acceptance letter, because I was accepted. It was finally happening for six hours a day I was in this idyllic place. I was not in prison. I was in a cave with Plato. I was inside the walls of medieval Europe doing primitive accumulation. I was in that God forsaken field for 200 pages of Anna Karenina. And I was learning, but I was also relearning how to question. I had been so wrong about prisons before I stepped foot inside of one for that first time. I guess what else I was wrong about. I learned how to interrogate everything. And to this day, I challenge all of my assumptions, and I'm now, I'm no longer afraid to be wrong. All these pieces of myself that were hard and rough. The information that I was now taking in sloughed off all of those rough edges. I learned critical thinking skills. I didn't even know what critical thinking skills were beforehand. My perspective changed as I learned. And, and that's the, the magical thing that happened. It's very challenging to get information inside of a prison, but I spent two to three additional hours every day in the computer lab I developed this intense interest in all things Oscar Wilde professors librarians, the bard site director, and tens of thousands of pages of research about all aspects of the lifetime clothes and shenanigans about Oscar. And I still have every shred of paper of research I accumulated. That's how valuable this information was to me. I'm very profound about reading day profundus while in prison, reading multiple interpretations of it. The, oh, he's so whiny. He's just a foolish man pining for a boy, or, oh, this is his, his repentance. He's not a foolish man pining for, for, for his sins with his maker. But when I had that context, all of that information that had been made available to me. I actually was thinking, no, these critics don't get it. He's not a foolish man pining. He's not on a, he's not being apologetic. He's unapologetic. He's defiant. He's never passages with the same lyrical quality as the sarcasm in the ballot of Reading jail, and those we've not endeavored to understand the full context. See cowardice in those passages, a litany of me a copos, but actually, it is the wit and wisdom of a man it is lowest who refuses to bend to the convention of his times. And I never thought I would be challenging assumptions about literature. The ability to access information changes how I feel about information now that I'm home and a productive member of society. I don't fall for tired tropes, I check out sources. I decide, I get to decide if I believe what I'm reading is true. I grow out things that don't resonate, and I can can choose. That's the point. I learned how to choose what information is valuable when it's set in front of me. There's a lot of time, a lot of time without access to much more than the escapism of a vampire novel or a whole bunch of James Patterson. But the educators who invested their time and talent in polishing in polishing me couldn't have succeeded without the support of the academic librarians at the main campus. The outside request to a community library was fulfilled by the prison librarian. I knew I had five days to read it. Take notes, absorb the contents before the book would be released back into the community, though I had to stay. I knew that these words would have to sustain me until the next batch of books would come. This is how I rediscovered my humanity and how I was able to now recognize it in others. So it really is a privilege to spend time with you all. You're my light bringers. You're working to preserve and dispense knowledge into darkest places where few dare to glance, let alone tread. The education I received while in prison, both formally and informally really freed me, and I couldn't have done it without the librarians and when I snatch my degree from Leo Botstein in a few months, trust and believe it's your achievement too. Thank you. Thank you Stacy for sharing your experiences with what it is like to get access to knowledge inside and how important it really is. My pen pal Patricia Pruitt, who's been incarcerated for most of her life at this point in Missouri. She's currently trying to get out. Reese just started college about two years ago. And one of the things that she shared with me is that this is the only life goal that she's had the entire time that she's been incarcerated. And it's so incredibly profoundly meaningful as you've shared to have access to education and to the resources that support learning and being in the world and finding your place within it. Thank you again for that. And I'm very, very excited to hear from the librarians who are with us today about the work that they're doing. We'll start with a presentation from Amy Brunson, who works at Mount Tam College. I'm Amy Brunson, I'm the director of library services and educational technology at Mount Tamil Pius College. And I'll start by explaining who we are and what we do. And really the best way to explain that is through our mission statement. The mission of Mount Tamil Pius College is to provide an intellectually rigorous inclusive associate of arts degree program and college preparatory program free of charge to people at San Quentin State Prison to expand access to quality higher education for incarcerated people and to foster the values of equity, civic engagement, independence of thought and freedom of expression. So in short, we're a privately funded community college inside San Quentin State Prison, which is located in the Bay Area just north of San Francisco. All of our students are working toward associate of arts degrees 100% tuition free. So for a little backstory, we began operating as a fully volunteer run extension site of Patton University in 1996. The facility was located in Oakland, and then in 2003, sorry, we became a nonprofit and adopted the name prison university project, but we still operated under the umbrella of Patton University until they closed their doors in 2018, which is when we started the process of gaining independent accreditation as a community college. The accreditation process is very long and rigorous and over the next several years we built up the infrastructure needed to support ourselves as an independent college, and this brought up the need for library services and technology to the forefront. In 2020 we changed our name to Mount Tamil Pius College or MTC for short. And finally in 2022, we were granted initial accreditation as an independent community college and that's where we stand today. We have about 30 staff members now and our program relies heavily on volunteer faculty, and luckily there are so many amazing colleges and universities in the Bay Area with instructors and grad students who volunteer their time to teach and tutor our students. This is a view over the lower yard of San Quentin and in the background you can see Mount Tamil Pius, which is what we're named after. So I want to give a snapshot of our patron population. This is where our patron population stands for the spring 2023 academic term. So our students make up the bulk of our patron base. We have 527 total students this semester. This includes students who are actively enrolled in courses and those who might be taking a break from classes but plan to continue their education with us. We also serve our graduates who are still sit at San Quentin. They are eligible to continue to take additional classes and extracurriculars with us if they choose faculty and staff. Also interact with the library occasionally and some use our laptops and receive support for that as well. So like I mentioned, we have about 30 staff members and this semester we have 136 volunteer faculty. I've also listed perspective patrons here with waitlisted students and active paroled alumni, meaning alumni who have paroled but are still in contact with us. These are two groups that we're always looking for more ways to connect with and support. So they will likely become library patrons in some form or another in the future. And we do get questions about how the restoration of Pell grants for incarcerated people is going to affect us. Our students attend MTC for free and we don't plan to change that. So Pell likely won't affect the makeup of our student body very much. But I do hope that it will provide opportunities for some of the prospective students who may have otherwise had to sit on our waitlist for a long time, get into a different college program sooner if they choose a little more about our students. Any person incarcerated at San Quentin with a high school diploma or GED is eligible to enroll the current age range of our student body right now is 23 to 82. We have a mean age of 51.6. So our student body is very ethnically diverse. We do operate an immense facility but we have students who do not identify as males that there's some gender diversity as well. And we have a handful of deaf and hard of hearing students, some of which require ASL interpretive services, which the prison provides. Students also have a really wide range of educational backgrounds everywhere from, you know, recently receiving a GED to having multiple college degrees already under their belt. This is our graduating class of 2021 and 2022. This is the first commencement we've been able to have since 2019 due to COVID. So it was a very special day. So a little about my role. I started my role in April 2022. I'm currently a one person department kind of laying the groundwork for the library services and technology access that are really essential for any college to have. So I'll start with the library side of things and then move on to technology, but much of those two areas are very intertwined. So one current priority is establishing a library management system. We have a small library space in San Quentin with about 8000 volumes. And we also have some overflow space in our off campus office. Most of our books are textbooks or other assigned reading for courses. The collection is not digitally cataloged so up until now all library indexing has been done by hand by student volunteers. And it's really hard for anyone to figure out if we have something that they're looking for. I recently acquired a web based library management system through Alexandria ILS, and I'm in the beginning processes of customizing that system and cataloging the collection, which is challenging due to, you know, for one the amount of time it takes and also because I've never really been on the back end of library work like this so I'm just kind of figuring it out. I'm also working to expand our collection and build a digital one. So right now I'm purchasing books kind of as needed when we get requests from students and faculties students and faculty. And then San Quentin has its own institutional library, which is much bigger than ours. So I can refer students there if they're looking for something that the San Quentin library already has. While I'm in the process of sorry, while I'm in the process of cataloging our collection. I'll be working with our academic directors and faculty to identify gaps so that our collection can better support our curriculum and our students interests. And then a digital collection is something that we've made baby steps on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or CDC are recently acquired an EBSCO license. So our students now have access to a research database from inside the prison for the first time ever just very, very exciting. I'm also in the process of getting students access to JSTOR with Stacey's help. Thank you Stacey. As well as Bookshare where we'll have accessible ebooks for students with reading barriers. So once those sites are approved I'll continue working to build a more comprehensive collection of ebooks and research resources. And the major challenge here is just the time that it takes to get websites approved which I'll talk a little bit more about on the next slide. And currently we don't have any formal library policies or procedures. A collection development policy is really important for any library to have. But I think for us it's significant because it will help us defend possible challenges from CDCR when it comes to the content that we provide in our collection. And then as for circulation policies. Right now students just check out materials by filling out written checkout forms there are no due dates or fines or rules about how many materials a student can check out. For tuition free college we also have a fine free library which is not going to change. But it's important for us to have rules we can point to in case San Quentin challenges a student about the materials they have checked out. We really want to have clear policies that protect our students. Part of my job is also advocating for student access to traditional library resources. So to give a couple of examples. It's getting access to materials in a timely manner. It can take a really long time to get books inside every book has to be approved by prison staff and we've had requests go unanswered for months at times. So I hope to establish a more streamlined process that allows us to bring library materials in much more quickly without as much red tape. And we also need to hire another librarian or library assistant. We don't have things like open library hours in person reference help or the ability for students to place holds. And these things are all really important that they require much more time than I can give currently. So I'm advocating within MTC to hire someone and we're also working with CDC are to create an incarcerated library clerk position. We also need to build external library partnerships because we're a very small and newly independent school. We don't have access to resources through a larger university. So one of my priorities is getting connected with other colleges and public libraries in the Bay Area to provide our students access to a wider net of resources. So moving on to the tech side of things. I'm going to talk a little bit about CDC computer lab. Last year we secured an agreement with CDC are to bring in laptops for students. This happened just before I arrived. My boss and coworkers worked with a technology consultant to get this done. And from what I understand it involved a lot of meetings with CDC are at the state and the institutional level. So we started with 35 laptops and opened our computer lab in March of 2022. This semester, the lab is open for eight two hour sessions every week. And each session is staffed by one outside volunteer and two student volunteers who I recruit and train each semester as needed. The laptops are fairly limited in what they can access, but students do have Microsoft Office suite and Google Chrome browsers, and the internet is mediated and only a handful of websites can be accessed and I'll talk a little more about that later. So I'm working to provide computer literacy learning opportunities for students. Aside from working independently in the lab. Students can register for computer skills workshops. So we're currently offering workshops in laptop basics, Microsoft Word PowerPoint and Excel. And each time a new resource is made available like EBSCO for example, I'll try to visit classes and create written guides and offer workshops to instruct students and how to use it. Since starting computer workshops this past summer 112 students have attended at least one workshop. Integrating online learning into MTC courses is a huge priority as well. CDCR has a contract with canvas learning management system. So we have access to canvas through the prison. Canvas allows instructors to upload course material assignments and discussion topics, which students can view and interact with. It's been challenging introducing canvas to our courses for several reasons. One is that many students don't have much computer experience so there's a learning curve there. CDCR only has a limited number of student accounts to offer us and to communication with CDCR is often really disjointed and setting up a course involves a ton of back and forth between me, our instructors and the CDCR canvas administrators. Right now we have two classes using canvas, and we plan to grow this number each semester. Identifying and addressing technical issues is also something that takes up a lot of time and energy. There are a lot of technical issues that arise when using laptops at St. I don't have time to get into the specifics of them here but I will say that probably the most challenging thing about it is that I don't have administrator privileges for our computers. So anything above like very rudimentary troubleshooting has to go through the San Quentin IT team who you can imagine have a lot on their plate already. And then broadly I'm working with and around CDCR to expand technology access for students. I have a couple of additional points here. The technology agreement that we reached with CDCR last year allows for us to check laptops out to students for them to keep with them and take to housing or anywhere else in the facility. And this is something that we've just recently been able to do because we were able to purchase an additional 115 laptops, but getting those in working order and distributing them involves a lot of communication and time. And then I briefly mentioned earlier that students can access a mediated version of the internet. So right now there's only a handful of websites that our students can access. So I'm always looking for additional websites and digital resources to supplement our curriculum and help students develop their technology skills. But the process for getting them approved is really opaque. I communicate with some folks at the state level of CDCR to request additional websites and programs and it takes about six months for them to be approved or denied. And then it may take another month or so for the new resource to be up and running on our laptops. So looking ahead I just want to kind of end on a hopeful note with a quote from one of our students who's also a computer lab assistant. The opportunity to spend time learning new technology empowers me to hope bigger and work harder. It is my strongest belief that having computer access and even limited internet access allows me to realize how society functions while professionally preparing myself for work relationships. This gives me hope that MTC can have the opportunity to change the trajectory of more lives while empowering this community to learn and grow with technology. So I just think these sentiments are really well put and I have the same hopes for the impact that my department can make on our students. This is a photo of some of our alumni. So many of our students do go on to pursue bachelor's degrees or other further education after they graduate with us, whether it's through correspondence courses from prison or attending a four year college in person after their release. This group of alumni was taken at our holiday party in December and several of these guys are now actually full time staff members at MTC. Thank you very much. My email is on this slide if you want to connect, and you can check out Mount Tam college.edu if you want to learn more about our school. Hello everyone, my name is Josh Han and I'm here to talk about the NPAP library Northwestern Prison Education Program Library at Northwestern University Libraries. As I said, my name is Josh Han. I'm the humanities and prison education librarian at Northwestern University Libraries. I'm also the liaison to many different departments in the humanities. And as of spring 2021, I've started working in the prison education area and helping to support the Northwestern Prison Education Program. Through this presentation, I'll be able to tell you a little bit about Northwestern and the prison education program, how we started the library support system, what that entails in a little bit of detail. And then I'll share some other easy ways I think that folks can get involved in this kind of work. For folks who are not who don't know about Northwestern University or I've never heard Northwestern University before. It's in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago and it sits on the traditional homeland to the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Adawa, and it's still home to vibrant native communities and movements as well. The private institution is part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and also has campuses in Chicago and Doha Cutter. We're a tier one research university with 8,000 undergraduate students and 14,000 graduate students. And the collaboration I'll be talking about today and the prisons that we're teaching and working in are up to three and a half hours away from where we're located. They're not facilities near the campus. And so before I get started on this, I just want to say that due to the logics of carcerality, it's important that we are careful and committed with the language we use to describe those most affected by the prison industrial complex. This is something I stress and all the training we do for this work. In this presentation, I'll be using the terms incarcerated persons and incarcerated students instead of the dehumanizing language of the state, which often uses terms such as prisoner convict felon, etc. And while at times I will be using the gender binary terms that the Department of Corrections uses to classify and differentiate between men's and women's institutions. I would like to acknowledge the existence and lived realities of trans queer, two-spirit and non-binary binary folks who are disproportionately affected by the prison industrial complex and state violence. And if folks are interested in learning more about language, I really recommend the underground scholars initiatives language guide linked on the left and on the bottom right, the language project from the Marshall project which has really amazing essays by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people thinking and talking about language. The Northwestern Prison Education Program is a partnership between Oakton Community College and currently enrolls 80 incarcerated students working towards their associates and bachelor's degrees and a general liberal studies degree that includes courses in the humanities, sciences, social sciences and more. So through Oakton Community College, they received their associates degrees and through Northwestern, they received their bachelor's degrees. And if you're interested in more about NPAP, which I'll talk about a little bit more throughout this presentation, there's a website link just below. Whoops, I did not want to play that. Northwestern Prison Education Program currently is in two prison facilities right now. The first one is Stateville Correctional Facility which is where we have three cohorts of 20 men each. And some of them have received their bachelor's degrees and I'll talk about that, or their associates degrees and I'll talk about that in a minute. The men's facility is a mostly maximum security facility, but to demystify that a little bit obviously like a lot of things in carceral settings some of these rules and things are very arbitrary. While the men here have limited movement and limited time to access resources. Well, sometimes a little bit harder for us to get in and out and to get things in and out of the prison. I don't want to, you know, participate in any kind of fear mongering around like what a maximum facility, maximum security facility is Logan Correctional Center is our as women's facility that we're in. It's a multi level security we have one single cohort of 20 students. And this facility is a lot easier for us to get information in and out. And there's very interesting different reasons for that which we can talk about off camera. At NPEP. It's a very small staff of three people so a director assistant director and a education coordinator. And like a lot of programs that we'll probably be talking about today. So NPEP involves a ton of volunteer labor. So undergraduate students graduate students and instructors and I want to acknowledge that labor, first and foremost, and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go on. So the NPEP students like I said there's three cohorts in the men's prison and one cohort in the women's prison this is a picture of our first cohort receiving their associates degree and we now have two cohorts that have have accomplished their associates that needs to cohorts that are now on to working towards their bachelors at Northwestern. They're all working towards a general studies degree. Most of our students are serving long term sentences and the ages vary from 20s to 60s and 70s. And I want to also say that NPEP, along with being an educational focus mission also provides access to wellness services to our students and transformative justice resources. And so we have a very holistic approach to this which I really like. And that also includes tutors for academic purposes tutors for writing purposes and also tutor librarian support which we'll talk about. I encourage you to visit the link on the bottom left here to learn more about our students, a lot of them are doing amazing work that's getting published on the outside. And it'd be great for you to find out more about them and kinds of work they're doing. Before the library collaboration with NPEP began in spring of 2021, I have been noticing how Northwestern kept referring to NPEP students as our students. And I was curious and a bit suspicious about what kinds of access incarcerated students had compared to students on campus, and wanted to be sure the library was doing everything I could to include NPEP students. This led to the creation of the NPEP library, a service I coordinate but which is supported by dozens of library workers across Northwestern University libraries. This is mostly manifested in supporting the research needs and interests of NPEP students through creating new processes to facilitate research consultations with a student population who have no access to the internet and limited access to outdated and underfunded prison libraries. The bulk of what we do is indebted to and building on the work of library colleagues at Jackson College in Michigan, and their support of the Jackson College corrections education program. So that library began offering reference services to NPEP students by way of the research request form pictured here on the left. While all forms are transactional in nature, we tried our best to create space for student agency to tell us about their assignment and their own words, select the types of resources most helpful to them. And some light guidance on crafting a research question. And of course lots of space for sharing anything from comments to actual individual citations. Students have access to this form every quarter for every class. They can fill it out during class time or study hall or on their own time. It is gathered up by a tutor or myself or an instructor during study hall each week, and then taken back to NPEP and scanned. And then we take them and process them and what we return is very important. We return a letter from the library addressing any kind of questions they had providing context information literacy moments and inviting always inviting any kind of follow up correspondence. We also always provide a copy of the form they submitted back to them, because this is something that they can't really like file away they don't have an email save was what they asked for so I think it's always very important to to return that to them as well. And we can provide up to 100 or around 100 pages of resources such as new stories scholarly articles and cyclopedy entries works of art poems, etc, etc, anything relevant to their work. But we try because they don't have access to the internet to do a very broad range of things, whether that's in a Wikipedia and encyclopedia entries right the first pass kind of information that we take for granted when we're learning a new topic to scholarly articles they really do get a range of materials as best we can. The process and training I just described a little bit about how the process works. It's very manual, very labor intensive in a lot of ways and includes a lot of processing and scanning and a lot of paper a lot of printing. But within the library every quarter depending on which kinds of classes are being taught, I will reach out to all the subject librarians for those classes, do a quick training session. Just to orient them to the work and offering space for questions and things they might be concerned about. And then I am able to attend study halls as I can to get time with the students to work with them to talk about things around information literacy library resources and things like that. Currently librarians, including myself access to students is very, very limited and usually happens within like maybe a couple of minutes on a break during a class or during a study hall when I can only talk to so many people within a single like three hour stretch. There are some issues that come up with this kind of work when you're when you're sending in hundreds of thousands of pages every year. There's censorship and self censorship. So for censorship, these are a couple of things that have not gotten through. The first one is in the belly zine which is an abolitionist journal that the Department of Corrections considers as an organizing a tool for organizing within the prison. That's not to say that we don't get abolitionist stuff in a lot we do, as long as it's related to the course but there are certain things on their list that we definitely can't get through. Another heavy problem for us is for the Department of Corrections, every image of a person they need to be dressed appropriately to visit the prison. And so a picture of a ballerina bearing her shoulders will not get through. And so sometimes this can lead to what we call self censorship right where for once or one time I had a student who requested a bunch of artwork by a particular artist, and I had to actually redact some of the artwork in order to get the other pieces in. It's the least joyful thing a librarian can possibly do I would assume, but it's something that we have to do because in a lot of ways we are there at the discretion of the Department of Corrections. And so I try to make the Department of Corrections make those decisions for us instead of self censoring but there are certain things we just know we can't get through. And it's not worth jeopardizing the entire program. There's also lots of lockdowns and delays so doing this kind of work you need a lot of patience and flexibility instructors need to offer like very flexible due dates for things and we have to be reactive each week to different kinds of delays in this work it's not very seamless it's not very much the same thing every week. And that's just something built in. It's often hard to build relationships with students like I said we don't get a lot of time to have back and forth with them to really do the kinds of research consultations that librarians are known for and enjoy doing. And so sometimes that can be a very hard, hard thing to handle and the work kind of feels transactional. The workload can be kind of heavy sometimes I think that's the least of our issues. Everyone that has worked with on this at the library is very happy to do it and make space for it. And sometimes we just don't always get it right. It's not easy to hear back from the students but sometimes we hear back from them that we didn't find the right kinds of resources and or misunderstanding each other's interests. And so those can be the kinds of hard things and it's easy to get down on yourself but what I tell all the librarians and library workers here is that this is not us this is this is the system and these are some of the things that we have to deal with. So the response and impact for the students is overwhelmingly positive. They love access to librarians and library resources and they share that often with us. Students definitely feel a deeper sense of autonomy and the research projects and interests that they're doing I think this echoes very much what Stacy was saying earlier. Students feel a stronger connection to the outside world and scholarly community. So this the impact on students is great. They often are very interested in libraries and librarianship after this, which is fantastic to hear. It's also great for librarians because it's an opportunity to build connections with faculty who are teaching these classes, every class that and pep teaches is also taught on campus. And so it's a great way to access and collaborate with more professors as well. We have teachers who support this work often need research support so we're oftentimes working with undergraduates and graduate students as well. And it helps with the increasing scholarship in carceral studies as well. While the reference work that we do is the main component. We're trying to leverage that to expand many of our services to incarcerated students. So we've worked with any press to do publishing support for their work. We have a annual summer book drive. We help students build and write book reviews for the freedom reads library. We've purchased subscriptions for our collections have have taken a change to we purchase subscriptions to prison legal news provided financial support to J stores American prison newspaper. We've also created a social justice fund to collect and prison education and social justice issues more broadly. I'm sure we're hoping to build critical information literacy booklet for incarcerated students that can keep in their cells and always reference. A lot of the work we do now is just loose leaf paper that gets lost and it's hard to keep track of. So having a information literacy and how to do research one on one booklet for them to keep and refer back to will be huge. We're also hoping to teach and information literacy mini course at Cook County Jail so lots of things on the horizon and I think what you want to do is get your foot in the door and then expand these services as much as possible as you can. And the last thing I just want to say I want to make a pitch for the much maligned lab guides. The prison education programs are made up of volunteer labor labor folks new to this work and have little time and space to provide context training and other kinds of support, creating a guide and curating literature and resources is a lightweight but deeply useful way to support a prison education program. And this guide has been found useful for everyone from instructors teaching in prison for the first time to students working in carceral studies. This is using an important way to highlight alternatives to the prison industrial complex and to center voices of incarcerated people. So even if you can't get in the prisons and do the kind of reference work that we've been able to do. I think there are other ways of supporting programs on your campus. So that's all for me. I thank you very much. And my email is there if anyone wants to write with questions, comments, concerns, and thank you for your time. Hello, and thanks so much for allowing me to talk with you today about providing academic library services in a prison setting. My name is Rebecca bot and I'm the community library co coordinator for the education justice project, the University of Illinois college and prison program at Danville correctional center, a medium security men's prison in Danville, Illinois. My co coordinator and I's main responsibility is to lead our team of EJP student librarians and providing library services for our community. Together we provide reference support set collection development policy catalog materials provide programming and do everything that is typical for a small academic library. EJP has about 65 students taking upper level for credit college courses, and they make up the main, our main patron base. We also serve what we call EJP affiliates members of the general population who are not currently enrolled in for credit courses. But do participate in EJP, EJP's extracurricular programs such as language partners, which is our English as a second language program, or cave, which is our community anti violence education. We are able to provide a 4000 volume circulating academic collection out at the prison. We have a computer lab but no internet and are just now able to bring in the offsite J store database. Because our onsite collection is so small we supplement by offering offsite reference support. Students can fill out a reference request form that walks them through the reference interview process and EJP library intern, normally a second year library student provides appropriate materials from the University of Illinois library. We're allowed to send in books from the university's print collection or print off relevant articles. These are compiled into a packet that students can pick up then at the library when they're ready. Students are also able to submit book and article requests and to suggest make suggestions for the library's permanent collection. All of our materials have to go through a lengthy prison clearance process and there's never any guarantee that they'll be cleared. In addition to providing materials we also provide bibliographic instruction teaching students effective research strategies and how to get the most out of the collection we have. This is an area of growth for us and we're looking forward to teaching J stored over the summer and fall semester and evaluating these early efforts and seeing how we can improve. We also provide library programming like poetry readings, author talks and summer reading programs to help continue thoughtful discussion outside the classroom. One of our ongoing library project is improving our information organization and prison library. A lot of the conversations around providing library services in prisons focus on focuses on access to information and all the problems that come with trying to get information into a prison. But once you get the material in the door how do you make it easy to find and to use. For us our library catalog is the starting point. Several of our student librarians are also skilled programmers and they were able to build a database and Python. In addition to the basic author and title publisher information we're able to include some extra fields to make items more searchable. For example we're able to add alternative title searches so that students who look up Lord of the Rings can still find fellowship of the ring for example. We're also able to add subject headings which allow students to search for clearly by topic. We can check books out and back in using the database and it automatically clears circulation records they're not circulation statistics once the book is returned. Because we have a library catalog we also have call numbers which is an easy task on the outside for the very challenging want to do on the inside when you don't have the internet. Our student librarians are good at what they do but it's time consuming and difficult. We're starting to bring books in already partially catalog to streamline this part of the work. To make materials easier to find we often use library of Congress subject headings which are set in standardized descriptors that are used by libraries across the country. In addition to those we use natural language subject headings in this context that means that we use terms that we think our community would think to use when looking for a book. So perhaps they're looking for a book on budgeting and they would use the search term finances instead of personal finance. In other instances we add or substitute search terms because the library of Congress is too slow in replacing subject headings that are either offensive or outdated and really need to be retired. As a community we try to be careful about the words we use and we want our cataloging to reflect that value. The course reserves is another important part of our work in an area where we want to improve. We're a general academic library and our goal is to be able to get students started in their research on almost any topic. However, as much as we'd like to we simply don't have the space permanently provide all the materials necessary to provide to support the wide variety of upper level courses EJP offers. Another important answer to this is course reserves. We are able to check books out from the university to supplement our own collection for the semester, adding breadth and depth we need to make the library. To help the library keep up with our students's work and curiosity can easily take six weeks or much longer to get an item through clearance so we have to anticipate the question students might ask, or the different directions their research might take them well in advance of them We're a very small library and depend on ongoing support and collaborations with other libraries and groups. The main one for us is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library. Despite being on campus, none of the librarians that are part of EJP are University of Illinois staff or library staff. And so while they do not provide library services they do provide access to library materials. We also have continued to build strong relationships with some of the subject specialists on campus who are able to help us when we need extra support for complicated reference questions. Another collaborator and supporter has been JSTOR Labs who is providing us with our one offline database which is going to be an incredible addition to our library. We're so excited that this will allow students to play a bigger role in their own research process. Reginald Dwayne Betts and the wonderful freedom reads team at Yale provide us with several copies of a new book every single month which facilitates programming and just helps us get more books into the prison. And an ongoing support has been the growing group of formal and informal support in this space among colleagues. We used to feel like nobody else did this work and you are constantly reinventing the wheel. That is no longer the case and it's a joy to be able to talk, plan, collaborate with like-minded colleagues. For all the funds that I think this work provides there are ongoing issues. One of them that has been a biggest challenge and continues to shape our library is censorship. In January of 2019, the prison administration seized around 200 of our library books, all of which had already been through clearance and most of which had to do with race and struggle, reentry, gender and sexuality, etc. Some examples include Cornell West's Race Matters and Visiting Day, a children's book about visiting a parent in prison. The administration deemed these books as subject matter devices and were forced to take them off prison property. The materials were ultimately returned but while the situation was shocking it wasn't unusual. There have been times when we've been asked to tear pages out of books or readers and other times when we've submitted books for clearance that didn't make it through. It can be difficult to build a thoughtful, rigorous academic collection in this setting and there isn't always one way to navigate this issue. A right response today could be the wrong response tomorrow and all responses have to be weighed against the good of the overall program. Another issue that we have is space. While we have designated rooms in the education wing, all of these spaces are multi-use and our library is also a computer lab and a classroom. The goal is to have warm inviting spaces where students can be comfortable studying, living through a magazine and a cozy reading chair or working collaboratively with their colleagues while still having as many library resources as possible. This is a difficult balance already, but one should also be prepared to lose space if there's a shift in institutional priorities or if a new program joins and they need space of their own. We recently went from three packed rooms to two overflowing rooms and that has required us to be flexible and start thinking about how we can be more adaptable, finding creative ways to use the space we have, perhaps shifting to more e-resources to continue to grow in ways that don't require shelving. Despite the struggles in this work, there's so much to do and so much to be excited about. One of the areas of interest for me, and I know a lot of my other practitioners in the field, is how to better prepare students for using college libraries after release. Many of our students are released from prison and start college on the outside, sometimes even within months. And they're coming into college not as freshmen, but as juniors, seniors, and sometimes even graduate students. Most of our students have been incarcerated for over 10 years, a lot of them 20 or more, and the technology they're expected to effortlessly use now didn't exist then. There's a gaping chasm between the tiny prison library we're able to provide for them and the full research university collection. And currently there's almost no support that helps students bridge that gap. Our alumni have suggested that in an ideal world, academic librarians would train formerly incarcerated students as peer mentors. Learning technology as a returning citizen isn't just practical, it's also emotional. It requires a lot of vulnerability to admit that you've never googled something, or that you were doing really well converting a PDF on your phone, but then got attacked by your weather app and you didn't know how to get out. Until we can build these kinds of peer programs, it's important that we raise awareness without colleagues working on the outside. With the restoration of Pell grants, there will be more students than ever who are in this position, and I hope we can work together to create libraries that are safe and supportive for our returning scholars. Along with new students that we'll have with the restoration of Pell, there also be new librarians doing this work. Sometimes they'll be joining the field because they're passionate about prison librarianship and higher education in prison. And sometimes they'll be joining the field because setting up a library and a prison has been dumped on their already full desk and they're starting from nothing. In either case, I'm really excited to get to work and learn with them and hope that everyone who is new to this work would like to talk or collaborate or just be heard would please reach out at any time. Thank you so much for joining us today. And if you'd like to learn more about EJP, there's information there. And mine is at the beginning of this talk. Thanks so much. Hello everyone, my name is Rayon Montague and I am very pleased to be part of this presentation. It's talking about academic library services and incarceration. I am, I work with Chicago State University as a professor in the library and information science program. So, my perspective and my focus for this part of the discussion is a little bit different, because it's not related specifically with one facility or one educational initiative. I'm actually mostly going to be talking about a project that I have been leading called the Information Justice Institute, which is a part of a planning project that is focused on considering those individuals who are incarcerated and recently engaged and their networks of support and library services, including academic library services for them. And this is a photo of some of the project team. You know, Chicago State University is located on the south side of Chicago. And when we were looking at developing this project, we were seeing how it might align with some of the mission and strategic plan of the university, which is I think is a good one, a good place to consider starting when you're looking at possibly expanding your library services to reach out to facilities. That alignment will enable new opportunities. As well, within the project, we have been engaging in a lot of different conversations and asking critical questions. So for example, we're looking at things like who is represented in different situations and who is not and looking at the consequences of punishment and how these consequences extend across time and space and different situations. And so for example, for us at the university on campus, are we being welcoming? Are we providing services related to helping with reentry with a little bit that was discussed in the last presentation? When we step back and look at the situation, one of the models that we might consider is thinking about the different worlds and as academics or as practitioners thinking about how we are crossing these boundaries. So going back to examples in Illinois, which I am most familiar with, looking just to begin at the spaces where these different facilities are located and you can see sort of a cluster up in that northeast corner for higher ed institutions around the land and then looking at, for example, in this case, state correctional facilities with red dots that are distributed all across the state. And just thinking about the time it takes to get to different facilities and connections. And this has come up when folks in the recent discussions were talking about, you know, this facility is three hours away or and as well the challenges that come with, well, it's not like, it's not like we can just have great internet access between these groups trying to come together because that is also not a possibility. So there are lots of challenges related to the distribution, the logistics, the access. And the last speaker talked about challenges with censorship, the building of trust, and so all these different issues are embedded in a complex set of social realities. And these are the kinds of issues that we've been grappling with in the IJI project. Another theme that I want to talk about before I talk a little bit more about our research in particular is that we have definitely found it's been very important to consider collaboration. And of course, to base what we're doing on a user perspective so IJI, our project involves LAS students and faculty librarians from our library, the Gwendolyn Brooks Library, plus community partners who are coming in our case, representing folks who were formerly incarcerated and that the two groups that we've been working with most, the ECCSC and AWAYIN, information about them is here. And I said I wanted to talk a little bit about the survey results so in 2021 we conducted a national survey to try to understand a bit more about librarians experience with working either offering services to folks who are incarcerated or those who are recently released. Now this was not set up specifically for academic librarians, but this is the subset of folks who responded with academic library backgrounds. So this is a small subset of the group, but still I think this initial data does provide some valuable insights. So when we asked academic librarians if the library they're affiliated with offered programs or services to support individuals who are currently incarcerated, the majority said no. Those who said yes shared some of the kinds of services that they are offering and also shared a little bit of like their insights in terms of, you know, if they, if they thought that folks were doing this in a vibrant way in a robust way. We also asked if the library they're affiliated with so in this case again the academic librarians were supporting individuals who were recently incarcerated so who are in reentry phase. Again, the majority said no, and then the others were not sure. So I think that in itself is a bit telling. It certainly indicates that there hasn't been a lot of consideration of serving this potential population. And even some of the comments that I think this falls outside the scope of academic libraries that sort of implies that there is not a connection when you know we've we've already seen there can be incredible connections. And so, as I mentioned before, in terms of alignment with strategic goals mission vision of the individual institution, if this is not seen as part of the mission that certainly would create a gap. And then again, you know there, there may be perhaps there's a mention but that it's not not an action that we see. So, to do it to look good is not really a great strategy. What would you like to see in terms of offering additional library programs or services based on the academic library context. So folks were being very candid in the survey and said, you know one person said, there's nothing, nothing I'd like to see. And then there are some examples of different kinds of services. Again, a telling comment support for folks who were recently incarcerated. Now that you mentioned it so it's, it's not something that that was on their radar or on their mind before the survey went out to ask librarians about their insights related to these topics. And again, some, some different examples that are up here on the on the screen online publishing lectures story time. You know, really, really the skies the limit in terms of what might happen from all kinds of different perspectives in the library world. The question about offering library programs and our services is this something that you learned about so we asked folks if they had learned about this, when they were doing their LIS education, their MS LIS programs, and within the academic library their response was 80% no. So this, this wasn't on their radar from their, the institution where they were affiliated, and it hadn't been on the radar radar previously through studies. So for me as an LIS educator, you know, this is a call. This is kind of a big warning that we're really missing out here on on considering some kinds of services that are important and valuable and maybe helps to understand why there are so many gaps and inconsistencies. And I should also mention related to this that this was not, this was universal so this 80% of not having thought about this in the context of LIS education was across all the respondents. It wasn't different for the academic library, academic librarians. I wanted to just share a few final thoughts that, as we've already heard today, there are effective models that rely on academic library services and prisons. But this work and more generally access to information is just very inconsistent. And there are many challenges. And there is potential to do much, much more. So, I would just invite you to consider how your you, or you and your affiliated academic or other library may be able to engage in supporting higher education initiatives or other library initiatives related to prison. Or, or also those who are returning to your local community, and also take some time to look through the resources that we've gathered for the Information Justice Institute project. And please reach out if you have any questions or comments. Thank you.