 Good day, everyone, and welcome to the very first episode of Information Going Wild. My name is Maurice Coleman, and I'll be joined soon by my co-host, Paul Signorelli. Today on our very first episode, we are so, so, so glad to have our David Mankees, who is the Virginia and Charles Bound Professor of Librarianship at the iSchool at the University of Texas at Austin. He has authored, co-authored, or edited 20 books, written over 40 book chapters and journal articles and numerous pieces for the professional audience. In fact, one of those things will be our jumping off point today. David, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me. So as our very first question for Information Going Wild, it is one of our standing questions. What brings David happiness? What brings David happiness? First and foremost is my family. I have an amazing wife who keeps me on track. I have two smart boys who are clearly more deadly and interesting than I am, but luckily I'm an empty nester, so we're going to have to compete with them daily. And I have a dog that I get to throw a ball and play fetch for hours with. So that gives me my sort of pure joy. Okay. So today, we're going to talk about the Lankies Collarys from the Nepal Library Association's journal article that should be in the show notes on YouTube that you all can click on. It is a riff, an expansion of, I'm going to say it wrong, Raganathan, Raganathan Kim, Raganathan's, Five Laws Librarianship. I'm going to read the five laws and then the five collars that David came up with to support, enhance, extend the laws, and we're going to do a little bit of discussion around. The first law is books are for use. The second law, every person has his or her book. The third, every book has a reader. The fourth is save the time of the reader. And the fifth is a library is a growing organism and David Griffin on these, the collars. Number one, the mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. Number two, to be a librarian is to be a radical positive change agent within your community. Number three, a room for the books is a closet, but an empty room with a librarian serving their community is a library. Number four, bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities. And number five, a library should be a safe place to explore dangerous ideas. What led you to rethink, reimagine these collars, David? Well, Raganathan's laws are well known in the profession and we teach them and they're really incredible. As I said in the article, many people have tried to change them, alter them, move them, slide them, et cetera. And I didn't think it was necessary. I mean, even, you know, he was writing these in 1931. And so when he talks about things like book so for use in every book, it's reader. I like to interpret that very broadly to be things like services and resources, et cetera. So one, I didn't want to, I didn't feel I needed to rewrite those laws. The second one is that, or where the corollaries come from is just basically it's a summation of my career. These are different points and arguments that I've developed over the years in working and studying different libraries and put them together because while Raganathan talks about sort of what we do, he doesn't necessarily talk about the role of the librarian. Or when he talks about the library as a growing organism, he doesn't necessarily, that law alone doesn't really talk about how things grow and what's the process and with whom do we discuss this and how we connect. And so that's really the, the idea is sort of taking a lot of my research and work in community centered and learning centered librarianship and saying, you know, those, those laws stand. But we need to go deeper now to look at sort of how we implement them and how we develop them and how we continue to evolve them over time. David, community is such an important part of your work. I was prepping for this by going back over a few of the things that you've written over the last decade or so in new Atlas or Atlas of New Librarianship in 2011. The theme of community runs all the way through that. Can you just add a little bit, as you started to say, this is a summation of your work. Take that from Atlas and take it into the corollaries and lead us through that a little bit. Yeah, the Atlas itself came from a realization that we were looking at starting with social media when social media, when it was like, oh my God, should we do my space in the library? Because I'm old. But when we looked at, you know, the explosion of Facebook and then Twitter and et cetera, I think the question was, is there a role for libraries in or with or for social media? And we really tried to take a library institutional approach to doing the analysis when we were sort of thinking about this and we found out it just doesn't work. That the standard definition of libraries as collections and organizations and, you know, sort of things that happen to have some people within it is upside down. That really what we're talking about are people, in this case, librarians working with other people, in this case, the community. And from that interaction from the values and goals and from the understandings and the principles of librarianship, that's where a library emerges, which is really, that's encapsulated in sort of rule number three, which is the corollary number three that a room full of books is a closet, but an empty room with a librarian serving the community as a library. It literally, you know, I was just talking to a dean the other day and they were talking about trying to get faculty back into the department physically in the department after COVID because, you know, according to that definition, we have a lot of closets here with people not in there doing work and et cetera and connecting. And so, yeah, it starts with when you turn the focus around and say, how do we define what a librarian is without referencing the building, right? What's a librarian, whether they work in a building or not, whether they're working online, whether they're working in a for-profit setting, whether they're a consultant, what have you, that's what these things come from, right? That the books are for use is great, but it starts with the use and who's use and the use is the community that's being served. And so, as you say, Paul, community sits at the middle of this and librarians are the interface between the community's needs, the solutions, and the solutions will develop into institutions or facilities or collections or what happens. So that's what it's trying to sort of take rank and eighth and interject the community and the librarians into it. And that's where the corollaries really come from. One more thing with the atlas and tying it into your third corollary there. If I remember correctly, one of the more playful radical thoughts in terms of collections from atlas was it's way more than books and online materials. At one point, I think you were talking about how the people in a community could actually be part of the collection if used properly. Can you explore that a little bit for people that haven't seen it again, tie it back to your corollaries? Sure. So the idea is that the true collection of a library as an institution or place is the community that's being served, right? That we build, if we build and acquire materials, whether those are books or databases or makerspaces or whatever, it's in response to the needs and aspirations, particularly the aspirations of a community. So it's shaped around that community. And so that's really the idea that putting people at the center here, they're the collection and the books, they're tools. They're tools to help those community members get smarter, to help members find meaning. And even more recently, which it came really clear to me in some talking about the atlas and this work, right? That was 2011. It's been a while. And even most of my career was discussing things like libraries are good for democracy somehow. Libraries are really good for communities somehow and that we're really nice places somehow, right? And the somehow needed to be filled in in your specific setting. And then recently, I run across a lot of research around this notion of deaths of despair, which is a depressing topic, but really important. And that was a realization from some economists that people, that life expectancy has been rising for over a century, but suddenly is stopping and in fact going down. And when you look at the causes of death that's bringing down life expectancy, first of all, you find it in an odd place. You find increasing mortality among middle-aged folks. You find across colors, across genders, etc. You're finding this and older folks from things like suicide, because that's not when suicide is supposed to happen. And drug related overdoses and alcohol related diseases. And the sense of really social isolation and disconnection. And in fact, there was a study done by the Surgeon General who talks about the loneliness, social isolation, is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This comes back to that notion of the librarian serving the community. It comes back to that notion of knowledge creation. It comes back to all of these things to say what a good library does is save lives. It brings people in. It helps them find meaning and it helps them connect to the environment they're in. And therefore it needs to look like the environment they're in. It needs to have, understand the values and principles and not just be based on one rubber stamped blueprint that all libraries should belong to. And that what guides the design isn't the books and materials or the values of the librarian, but the aspirations and needs of communities. And so to me it really became, and had I discovered this, probably would have ended up with that corollary document. The goal here with all of this is to help people have healthy, happy lives and help communities gel in times of great isolation, great separation, great ideological divide, libraries jobs to pull people together. Not because it's nice, but because it's literally life saving. That went a little left field. Sorry, but I think it's important to get that out there. No, I think that's fine, David. You talk about library serving people and there's the nomenclature of who the library serves. Community serves people, customers, users. You've talked about this, but I want people on this podcast to understand what you're very, very, very specific about your language and why you're so specific about your language about the people who use the library in whatever shape it takes. Yeah, so first I think a big shout out to Joan Fry-Williams who I credit but honestly stole this idea from, where she was in a library doing strategic planning they were in the physical library and they got to the point of writing the report where they said, well, what do we call them? And the them is everything that's not a library, a librarian, I should say. Are they customers? Are they patrons? And she said, I have an idea. And she stood up and she walked out the door. She went on to the floor and said, so what should we call you? And their answer was overwhelmingly members. I have a card. I'm a community member. I'm a member of this library. I have a sense of ownership. Now, membership is not perfect because you then implies there's non-membership. But that idea of co-ownership becomes important because when you build libraries from the ground up, when you build it from community up and how we understand it, then you also understand that the role of the librarian is not to do something as a servant to outside of or service for but with community and what they need. So when we deal with things like book challenges at book things, I think that book challenges in public school libraries are a good thing when they are honestly presented, read, and discussed. And then it becomes a chance for the community to have. I want to say and understand what's going on with this collection and how we do it. Not that they're going to win or lose, but that there's a conversation. It's very different, by the way, than here's a list of 500 books that I got from a friend and I don't live near you and please ban these things. But at that local level. And so member is the word I like. And I've done, I've replicated Joan Fry-Williams informally many times and found the same thing because the old joke is that there are two types of people that have users, computer scientists and drug dealers. We don't want to be used. We want to enable and we want to facilitate and be a platform for and customer. I get it. I get I have conversations with really great librarians who love the sense customer. What they really love is customer service that we are in essence, geared towards that community. And I pride a problem with the customer because not just it's got a commercial overlay. That's delightful. But it really is this notion of co-ownership. A customer, we want them to be satisfied with what we provide them. A member, we want them to be satisfied for what they're a part of. And so it'd be clear that what we call it within the profession I push for member. What do you call it between you and your community? I call you a neighbor. I call you a faculty member. I call you a student. I call you a customer. I don't care. In fact, it should be negotiated with a company. But within the profession, we need to be very careful. Patrons, we're not 18th century painters getting patronage. Clients, once again, there's that sense of service to and not service with. And so that's why I spend a lot of time thinking about and pushing for this term, member. I want to jump on that with a little bit of what you were talking about there with the use of member versus other language. You mentioned in passing that it sort of empowers the people in the community to decide what they want to be called. And then we work with them as part of that community. What would you counsel current students and people out there in the information field in terms of identifying the idea that our language isn't keeping up with our changing situations. And what can we be doing to actually make that language more reflective beyond just saying, what do you want to be called? It's because you're right. It pervades everything we do. And one of the what's interesting, of course, is there's a strong history of language in librarianship. In cataloging, there's the concept of literary warrant. When you use terms and descriptors, whether they're from a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary or keywords, what have you, those words should come from the community or their application. So if you have a children's book about my two dads, does that go in the children's section or does that go in the controversial section or does that go into the gender section? Does that go into where does it go? Should come from, once again, a knowledge and interface and interaction with the community. I was talking with a new dean of a library program and she was talking about doing curriculum changes and she had just met with the catalogers, sort of association of catalogers in the area and they said, you're doing a great job of teaching our students the student to the book, right? I read this book. I can understand this book. I can describe this book, but you need to be teaching them the student to the community to the book, right? How, what term, what language? And so that's part of the modernization. Also literally language usage, how we come in and, you know, from, you know, Queens Library collecting 100 plus languages and what do we do with those different languages and how do we bring them in? And this comes to me to a larger concept which is for a long time, we used to take all this discussion about community engagement and pocket language and we threw it in this big bucket called soft skills. And you know, when one of the things that people don't necessarily realize is that students coming into library science program and not every librarian goes through a library science program but it's a pretty representative sample. Students used to come in in their late 30s, second career. They came with a lot of professional background. They came with a lot of basic training in professionalism and engagement. And now that is in the low or mid 20s. We get a lot of people coming directly from undergraduate programs into graduate programs of library science. They need to learn community engagement. Soft skills of how do you talk to a community, find out what they care about, know about, know what the cultural taboos are, know who the senior elders are, know who the control structures within it, know political literacy. We can no longer just treat it like a big bucket of soft skills. And so now we are increasingly in research and in education turning the soft skills into the concept of engagement and cultural literacy and cultural understanding. And that's not just keywords for critical race theory and critical librarianship that has a place and certainly informs that. But it is that larger concept that as librarians, your job is to make that human being over there a better human being. Not to make sure that all this stuff's in the right place just in case that person wants to be a good human being. So language comes into this 100% and we need to interrogate our own use of language and a lot of it is we need to invite our communities into that process as well. And a big part of inviting the communities into the process is making sure that your collections match your community and match your mission because it's different for every different area. One place may have cake pans, one place may have tools, one place may loan out, I don't know, a tire gauge, a tire pressure gauge. Whatever the needs of your community are, I think that's really important for future librarians to realize your communities are always unique. No matter what, they're always unique. They can look the same, even cookie cutter developments. You put the people in there, they're all different. So really making sure that you know when you go to your first job, your second job, your third job, get to know your community. And that's either the public library, academic library, what's called the special library, that's not necessarily public or academic. Whatever that community is, you have a job to make sure that your collection matches their needs and that you get to know the community so you can begin to think ahead of them. You should be one or two steps ahead of the community so that you can be there and say, hey, I can guide you to this stuff. Here's some stuff we've learned. Here's how you can apply it to yourself and how you can apply it to improve your lives. So I want to push back just a little bit on that. I mean, yes, our collections, first of all, I thank you very much. Collections as we think about them are much more than just the books. We've already, we talk about this great revolution in libraries and this massive evolution that's happened and we focus on things like makerspaces and collections of things. And we focus on the sort of service aspect, direct community interface, but if you look at the true revolution that's occurred over the past 20 years, it's in collections. We have taken the idea of a collection of things that we own and we inventory to things that we own and we inventory and that we license and that are digital and sometimes provide access to and now the internet's part of it and now we have, right? But as we've expanded it to include fishing poles and kayaks and things, we've still been able to generate this larger concept of a collection. We've evolved within the profession what the concept, which is always core of our 4,000 year history, we've evolved that to the point where it is a unified or at least coordinated access to a wide variety of resources. The part I wanted to push back a little bit on about being ahead of your community is no. Anticipating the conversations and seeing things coming because you are part of the community is different than trying to sort of sit back and survey and think about it. That is what I really meant, David. Thank you. That is really what I meant. You're part of the community. You are working with the community. You see stuff coming. Hey, let's put the community in touch with a resource that can help you with that. I think that's a very important job of an information professional is that is your job is to, as you say, in the collars, et cetera, your job is to build the community, figure out what it needs with them, and get it to them. Yeah, and the other part that's important is a lot of it. We used to think of, I used to say, because I'm old now, but when I was younger and wrong, but I would talk about librarianship serving with their back to the community, pointing forward into the future. The idea that we were providing them resources that didn't exist within a community, right? So we had lots of travel books. We had lots of books about other places and other things and other ideas and authors that lived elsewhere and ideas. And now we turn to open our arms and embrace and become part of that community so that it's local collection is not just this little shelf in the corner for authors, but it's teenagers taking over the manga stacks so that they are the ones who put in the materials at what level and they begin to own that collection and process. And it's a place of creation that libraries have always been a place of creation. It's just we're increasingly moving further in the creative process that we support. What do I mean by that? A lot of libraries have been collecting materials and you come in, you have a brilliant idea. That's an act of creation. It's creation of knowledge. You have a brilliant idea, new synthesis of things together, a new insight. You take that insight outside of the library and you write a book and create a picture, you do a painting, you start a business, whatever it is. And people don't see that in the library and so therefore they always look at the library as a place of consumption. This is where we get it this way. But the whole reason that we're doing this consumption is production. And so now with things like 3D printer, sure, but simply hosting entrepreneurs in public spaces, having people come and do cooking demonstrations to help people who are new to the idea of nutrition know how to make nutritious meals. Helping people find housing and jobs because we know they can't find learning and meaning if they can't find shelter. We're getting, as we begin to understand our current role, which is to be a platform for community improvement, we're beginning to roll out services that go deeper down the areas of production as well as this sense of collection and consumption. And so that's another part of this that's going on. Which takes me to corollary two, to be a librarian is to be a radical positive change agent with your community. And I thought of that as there's the act of doing things, there's the action of doing things, and then there's the activism, all with the word act them because librarians act and do things. You have as a librarian the power to make positive change in community. You can be, you know, hitting with the sap on the head or you can be very subtle about it. Here's this thing I'm supporting you. I don't have to make a big peacock about it and wave all the flags. I can just do it and have it here for you. If you're here, I'm here to support you. And that's, you can have different levels of the act, the action, and the activism as a librarian. And sometimes you have to know which one of those things you need to pull out of your toolbox and when, and that's part of the soft skills you talk about. David is, when do I do this? When do I, you know, have to steamroll and get involved with my friends who I've already made politically, by the way, every single person who's in library school, the first job, second job, third job, fourth job, 10th job, get. Make sure you learn as you move up the ladder. Make sure you know who your local politicians are. Be friends with your local politicians. Be friends with your local police department, sheriff's offices, et cetera. You want these people on your side when there isn't an issue. Before there's an issue, get them on your side. Be friends with them before you have some stuff go down. And that way they're there. They know you're not just using them. So that's just a little tip. So the act, action, and activism, you can also affect change very subtly. Go to the person. Hey, you want to talk to the mayor about something? You have these book challenges coming up. Talk to the mayor. What's going on? You know, do you know these folks? Tell me what's really going on? I'm not sure these people are really part of the community. Is this really a community standard thing or is this some larger scale thing? I don't know. Help me with this. Help me through the process. Yes. And once again, that can be a school principal, a teacher. If you're in that context, it can be the provost. It can be the faculty. Right? It's true anywhere you're going. They're all communities. That's part of, you know, Ranganathan was talking about public libraries, but he did a lot of work in academic libraries and the rules aren't written for it in a public library adoption. And a lot of my work is to try and break down what I consider artificial distinctions. You know, New York Public Library has much more in common with a R1 research university like the University of Texas than it does with Gerald Community Public Library. Likewise, Austin Community College has a lot more in common with Gerald than it does otherwise. And so I wanted to be really clear that when I say the word community, that can be a community of scholars, it can be a community of doctors, a community of lawyers, can be a community that is two things to find a community. One, a known common variable. They're all working here. We all live here. We all study here. We all do business here. And a system to distribute scarce resources, which can be time, can be money, can be real estate, can be tax dollars, can be tuition dollars, what have you. And that means there's, that's going to imply governance and etc. And so, yeah, the mission of library and to approve society, whether you're doing that in an academic library or a government library or a medical library to do it. Yeah. And two, the word radical, and sorry, Paul, the word radical, I just want to get it out. That has multiple meanings and I like them all. First of all, Maurice, yes, I love the three that you talked about. A hundred percent. But radical is, in biology, radical means the root or core of it, right? If you transplant a plant, you have to make sure the radical goes with it or it's going to die. And yes, it means radical as in very divergent but it also means radical. There are all these terms, it also means like cool. And the notion behind a radical positive change agent is, once again, love how you put it, knowing when of those you're going to use it. And this was originally developed because librarians would talk about changes they wanted to bring about in the community and often be extremely resistant to change within their own organization. And if we want to expect change within the communities that we serve, then we need to model and be aware of that. Sorry, Paul, I didn't mean to cut you off. That's all right, it's all part of the same thing here. Maurice, among the words he used, was talking about activism there. As you both know, I've been involved with the California Library Association over the last few years doing work on helping librarians get a better sense of themselves as activists. I just want to get that right out. As you talk about radical positive change agents, we are talking activists. The more I work with my peers here in California, the more I realize to do what we do in libraries is to be an advocate, if not an activist. And I was wondering what you could suggest in terms of that second corollary of yours to people, A, how should they be viewing themselves as advocates and activists? And B, what would you suggest that they do to be better at it? So a lot of internal conversation within the library field is, how do we are activism on behalf of ourselves? How do we create, and Maurice, you had a great layout of different ways of how do we build these partnerships, relationships before they become an issue? So that's part of it. But also, how do we work as a force that helps the community advocate on their own behalf? And so, how do we take a group that comes into the library to pretty much work around a broken system? I'm in the library because I need more tax documents because I called up IRS and they never picked up the phone and I need this, right? And we go, okay, here's this service and we'll do this. A great example of this was a student of mine, now a great librarian. And she was working as an adult services librarian. She was working the desk. And one of the things she did was she helped people, low-skilled laborers, they came in people that they didn't have necessarily computing skills, etc. And she helped them apply for jobs. So for example, they wanted to work at UPS because there was a shipping center and they wanted to work as a janitor. And in order to apply to be a janitor at UPS, you had to do an online form to make the application. And not only, we know, not only do you have to know enough to do an online form, they actually track how fast you do it. They track this, all this other information. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. And so what she would do is she would help them fill out the form. And then when they left, she'd pick up the phone. She called HR at UPS and said, that's another person who came in who just wants to be a janitor and you force them to go through the system. Can we do better? And how can we help people come up with these discussions? One of the things I've been really heartened about when I look at challenging books is the most, the best, no, not the most best. Anyway, the best advocates for freedom of expression and freedom of access and all these things are kids that get up and say things like, history does not look kindly upon people who ban books. Why are you restricting to what we get to know? We know this is right. And how, and the librarians, the reason the kids do that is because the librarians have built up a really strong relationship and built, demonstrated those values. And so the kids want to get up and advocate on their behalf. And the behalf of the kids, what we need, what we understand. And so that activism isn't just about let's make sure librarians are important, but how can we make sure that our communities can come together and advocate on their behalf for issues that are facing them? My favorite story that was actually students at Harvard School of Education, these graduate students, they came to the director of the library at the time, John Collins, who's fantastic and was a, was a wrackle in the 60s. And they said, you know, you really, you're closing too long. You need to be open later to which John said, you know, you could just not leave. You could call your friends and they could just not leave. You could around that time have a seat in the lobby if, and say to people, you're an, are you, he's like these kinds of things, right? I had an academic librarian who worked with students, student athletes, and the student athletes were having a given issue or the library was having a given issue. And she went to her student athletes and said, I want to, you know, I want to blog about this, but they won't let me. And she goes, would you consider blogging about this? And so suddenly student athletes were bringing up that, right? It's, it's our goal is, yes, to have people find the love of reading and to find some escape, but ultimately it's to help people make the world better. And even the better is I can have some, some personal health and personal time and escape, but it's in that larger context that the goal wasn't escape. The goal was a healthier world to be a part of. Right. You need an escape in order to recharge your battery so you can do better things. And so number, down to Colorado, number five, a library should be a safe place to explore dangerous ideas, which we sort of touched on because book challenges are part of the challenging and dangerous ideas that people are exposed to. One of your, it really isn't the first time that libraries have had issues with this, with different challenges of access to information. Shall we say, I don't know, in the 1950s and 60s, perhaps, there were challenges to libraries serving all of the public. Or in almost anywhere, if you're in a different cast, you have access to libraries. Libraries back, the early version of libraries in the United States in the turn of the century, you had to be a patron. You had to pay to use them. The idea of a public library was radical. Oh my God, people could just walk in and go, Girl, stop. How does that happen? So libraries have always been at the vanguard of the access to information, which leads to community change. What are some other ways that new librarians, old librarians, middling librarians, can really help, really help their communities to become better places? What are some ways that can change your minds or some things they can do to facilitate that? Yeah, when I first used this, I would say that libraries are safe places to explore dangerous idea. And I had very smart people come up to me and say, Oh, isn't that a delightful fiction? That it's kind of like when we talk about the old, I think, old concept of librarians being objective or unbiased, right? It's a very passive idea. If you think about the idea that, for example, librarians are unbiased, are unbiased, like that's a rule, like somehow by going, when we give them the degree, we also inoculate them and give them a quick shot of unbiasedness, right? It takes work. And so to say that they are, that they create safe spaces, that they seek out multiple viewpoints and ideas, that they work towards intellectual honesty, that they work towards inclusion, that they work towards equity, all these terms that I'm, you know, scary saying in Texas, but that's a whole nother podcast. That demonstrates that the professionalism of librarian doesn't end with their ability to catalog, but really with their idea to engage and support. And this is where I've learned a lot recently. The book challenges. So I'm hoping someday that someone listens to this podcast in six months and goes, what's he talking about? But I'm feared it's not going to happen. I say that right now, here's my brand declaration at February 2024 on leap day, that we are at the end of the beginning of the book then, big brouhaha. It's still going to go on. It's still a fight, but it's changed. It's changed from shock and awe, where librarians had no idea that they could be seen in a negative light, much less be demonstrated. We were invited into a bad narrative. That is that it's all about parents' rights. It's a bad narrative, because first of all, it's not a nuanced one, and we wanted to bring nuanced arguments. Parents should be able to pick what their kids can read, at which our response was, you're right, you can. It's in our policy. What's the big deal? You just can't do it for everyone else, to which the response is. So pornography is okay for everyone else. It's built to trip you up. We're now to the point where we're better at this. So for example, the head of the Virginia Library Association showing up at board meetings with bills that said, okay, you did these challenges. Each challenge took this much time of these people with this percentage of hours, blah, blah. Here's a $50,000 bill for what you challenged the other day. And by the way, you didn't read the book. And that's what's really interesting is the other part of that end is we've moved from the shock and awe phase of trying to confront people individually and trying to go to political leaders to a political arena, where we saw legislation passed, and that put us into a judicial arena where we're finding out that guardrails actually like the First Amendment can be helpful. Even in the state of Florida, the state of Florida that passed laws about helping people challenge books, making it, in fact, desirable in school libraries for people to challenge books, the Republicans are putting forth a bill to limit the amount of challenges you can do. For example, you cannot challenge a book in a library if you didn't have a child in the district. If you challenge more than five books, you begin to pay a fee for those challenges. People are realizing that this is why I say it's not going away, but it's becoming more real. And one of the things back to your earlier comment about collections and whether they're safe collections are not safe collections. I've really come to know and respect the ILA Bill of Rights. I'll be honest, for a long time, I didn't pay much attention to it. But since the book banning it, I spent a lot of time realizing that since 1938, I believe, was the first draft of it. What other profession comes together on a regular basis that deals with information dissemination and controversial ideas every single day and discusses how we do this? And part of the ethic that's built in to these Bill of Rights is it's not simply don't ban books. It doesn't say that. What it says is you don't ban books because of specific political disagreement, or if those books are of current value and help educate the community to the issue being brought up. So thereby, if you challenge a book like Gender Queer, that's going to raise questions like, well, what's in the book? And why is that a big deal? It raises questions. And as a good librarian who's part of a community, you now have a community with a set of questions, which means you need to keep that book so that people can make an informed decision. It's a lovely Catch-22, but that's the goal of it. That's the whole idea, which is we're not restricting ideas and by challenging ideas, by declaring that some ideas are dangerous, we as librarians, not because they're dangerous, not because we're just reactionary, not because it's just like, no, we believe everything should be here all the time. It's, okay, you've made it. Our community, you've asked our community to make a determination of what knowledge is available to whom, which is fundamental to a democracy, which is fundamental to being human. Therefore, our concepts of information, freedom, and information access preserve the right of the community to engage in that challenge. And so the outcome may not be the book stays there, or maybe the outcome is almost irrelevant. It's the processes which is why we have those collections and those books. Now, those can be dangerous things, but it's a community's role to determine what dangerous is. And the librarians are part of that community, and the librarians are given special stewardship either through accreditation or a certification or a charter or what have you to help the community make that decision danger to which we've built this whole mechanism like the Bill of Rights, like ideas around electro property, that build on the nation's larger concept of that, like the First Amendment and like equal access to things. So, it's a pithy statement, should provide safe, but really comes fundamentally to society's process by which we determine what knowledge gets passed on to another generation, what knowledge is debatable, what knowledge is accessible, and librarians come down not just because they want everything, but they come down on the idea of intellectual honesty, the idea of rationalism, and the idea that if you're going to make that challenge, we need a process and a mechanism and an institution and professionals who can help us engage that question that you've missed. And just to point of order, David, the person you're referring to is Lisa Vargas who's head of a junior library association and is also the 2024 Library Journal Librarian of the Year. So, folks who are watching this, head over to Library Journal and you can find out way more information about Lisa Vargas. She's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for that. Everything you just said takes us to an fundamental question about the state of libraries and the state of their position in society these days. When you really think about it and you look at the history of librarianship and you look at what it's been involved in at the typical level, it comes down to the realization that where most people see them as information providers or entertainment providers, they really are embedded in the very essence of civic development. I've been reading the book by Adrian Johns recently, The Science of Reading. I was fascinated to see how much of the science of reading over about 100 years involved interplay between libraries and schools and politicians. Can you address for our listeners the fundamental role of the library as a player in civic development and how we can work with that at a time when we have trouble even defining what the common good is and what civic development is? Thank you for that softball question. Yeah, I was trying to make it easy for you because we've been here a while and I just didn't want things to get too boring. I appreciate that. There's an American answer to that and there's an international answer to that. There's a nation by nation and frankly city by city answer to that but I really like, I want to end because Marisa brought it up early. The United States built its public library system as part of a push towards expanded liberal democracy and I want to be really clear for those who don't. When I say liberal democracy, it doesn't mean liberal versus progressive versus what it means is that a democracy is more than just voting. It has a series of assured rights within it. Freedom of speech is part of a doctrine that says that these things aren't discussable. We've seen many countries that have democracy that where the leader gets 100% of a vote, that's not a liberal democracy. So that's part of it. Well, that's a great example of consensus though, isn't it? It is if there weren't guns pointed. We're not having that conversation. Nope, nope, nope, nope. But so for example, the advent of public schools was a creation of childhood and people often look at me like I'm crazy but during the idea of child labor before the movement against child labor, there was no such thing. Childhood was just when are you old enough to hold the spanner and where are you old enough to work in the mill? And we as a society decided that there is this protected age where people do not work, where they learn and we created public schools for it. When we created public schools for it, Dewey would say we also then created this is the only positive reference to Melva Dewey I will make. Dewey said the idea that public schools are for children and public libraries are a co-equal educational unit for their parents, that they could promote literacy, they could promote learning, they could become availed. That took a lot of advocacy on the part of Suffragettes, for example, when they were looking at giving women the right to vote and they were looking at new parenthood roles, etc. And we've seen this continuous push about how we work in society. The first public library that many people talk about is Benjamin Franklin who started one in Philadelphia, but he didn't. He started a subscription library where he had a bunch of books, ran out of room in his house, got together with a bunch of people that had a lot of books, rented a space and you had to pay to get it. First public library in Philadelphia was the free library in Philadelphia, which is the current big public library. Created by, and I'm not making this up, a guy named Dr. Pepper who worked at the University of Pennsylvania and he, with his rich uncle who is also a professor, said, library should be for all people without charge. He built on lots of work that was going on in the East and public libraries. Long way to say, Paul, as you said, we've seen and built public libraries for a long time as integral to a democracy, very much around the Bounding Fathers concept of those who govern themselves should be educated to do that, turning to transparency. And libraries have always been seen as a place to do it. And to me, the marvel of U.S. library in ship, public library in ship in particular, is that it's taken 200 and how many years to realize that librarians are radical positive change agents where we are involved, not just in storing and shipping and moving, but it's literally part of what we determine as a society has value to be disseminated. And we've done a really good job mostly with lots of really important lapses, such as white only libraries and things of that nature. But we've done, at least we've been working towards the notion of how do we create a society where there is a right to information, just like there is a right to education. And so it has become ingrained in how we think about it. And it starts in schools, the fact that libraries are in schools, and that a school library is different than what an academic library was when it was first formed. The academic library was the humanities laboratory that became a resource. The school library always started as the ability to go beyond whatever the curriculum was to be free and inquiry driven. And so we've been, we shape this idea early and it becomes larger part of society. And you see that is important because there are many countries that have libraries that do not have that same concept and do not provide that same level of access. And it's very much part of how they developed in the society around them. There was my brief but exciting moment of pretending to be a historian. Please go read everything that Wayne Wiggins ever wrote because he's brilliant and does a lot better job with. Should we hit the pause button? Go read it and come back so we can finish this up. It'd be fun. See you in a couple of years. Yeah, right. Let's take a little bit of brain survey here. Let's, do you have a favorite memory of working in the field or helping a patron in your career? What lights you up when you say this is something I was able to do with someone on the behalf of someone that changed their life? Man, what lights up my life? So I, as an academic and a library professor, a lot of it is, you know, by having students find the aha moments and come together. I did run as part of my doctoral program in my first part as a professor. I ran our government information center. We ran a very large Q&A service called Ask Eric with a couple of hundred thousand people on first websites and all that kind of stuff. But so when I think of memories about when things made a difference, one of the moments was in San Antonio, Texas where I was here as a professor, early 2000s. We were hosting a series of conferences called the Virtual Reference Desk Conference where we were trying to figure out how people could actually answer reference questions online which today seems silly, but at the time took a lot of convincing. And it was the last conference that we had. The government had stopped the contract. We weren't going to be able to do it. And I got up and I more or less said to this community, it's up to you now, right? If you want to continue this conversation, if you want to continue doing this work, if you think there's value of coming together and being together, it's up to you. And they did. They started other subconferences. They kept conversations going. There was a big listserv that people would talk about it. And that idea to sit back and know, not that you did, but that you are part of and that you help build that kind of community, those moments stick out at me. When I see the profession take on new concepts and do well with them. When I see, when I hear the stories of these touching stories that other librarians do and sort of, it's a bit, that's probably perverse that I get joy from other people's giving joy. But it's that notion of the stories that you hear. And so ironically, the story that really touches me is not one that I was even there for, but it gave me the impetus to keep moving. And that was Betsy Kennedy, who was the director of the Casanova Public Library, which is this little itty bitty, very rich village outside of Syracuse, New York in the poorest county of New York. They had a food pantry and the library said, hey, when the families come for the food pantry, let's have a reading book. Let's have some program where the kids have something to do. And they did. And they, you know, bring them in. They do story hours. They do reading, et cetera. And Betsy talks about at the end of this process, they would give them a book. And so Betsy was there and she gave this new children's book to this nine-year-old girl. And the nine-year-old girl began crying. And Betsy leaned down and said, why are you crying? And the girl said, this is the first new thing I have ever had in my life. This is the first new thing I've ever had in my life. And Betsy tells the story much better than I do, but it's that, that book wasn't, this is the thing I can go read. The book wasn't, this is a demonstration. I can read this book was a demonstration of worth and value. And if I can take that story and share it with other people to inspire them to do the same kind of impact and look beyond the tools to what they're doing, that's what gives me joy and makes me happy. So do I have a specific instance? No, but I got great stories that I use on a regular basis, mostly to recharge my engines when it's been a bad day. If you give me a perfect opening to bring in something I wanted to bring into this conversation, and that is your book, The Boring Patient. You've just talked about the importance of the human side of it. We spent a lot of time here about information at a theoretical level, some of the stuff going on. But in The Boring Patient, you really get into your own story. And I want to do a brief quote from it at the very beginning from the introduction where you describe that moment when you know something's going wrong. You do not yet know you have cancer, but you can just see something happening. I'm going to just read a few lines out of it. You're talking to your doctor and you say my condition was driving him nuts as well. He was sending me for blood tests nearly every week and we tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I was not getting better. We couldn't figure out why. Then one day, I forgot how to speak. I came down from bed to watch some TV. I brought up a cable guide and couldn't make out the words odd, I thought. So I called the doctor and then you have the conversation there, which is pretty much gibberish. And your final observation on those two pages, now I have to take a minute out of the story to point out what a nerd I am. You see, while I waited for my wife to come home, I pulled out my laptop, opened my word processor to see if this was just a verbal thing. And I wrote the following, which again, is a couple of lines of gibberish. Did I mention I freaked out? I have no clue exactly what I was trying to write, but I think it was along the lines of, can I write down the words I want to say? I have to admit, I was a bit intrigued. What could be going on? But to be clear, mostly terrified. That is the day blank is that I love and adore, where the insights and that moment when most of us would just be freaking out and doing nothing else and you're going, I need to look this up. What can you tell us about, what gives you that kind of strength that we can learn from to develop that level of strength for ourselves in times of greatest challenge? Oh, goodness gracious. I got a couple of minutes. You don't have to do this off the top of your head. You can compose it. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. My favorite is probably not going to answer your question. I'm really sick of the brave cancer patient narrative because when you're a cancer patient, you're not brave, you're trying to survive. And yes, you're facing a lot of stuff, but it's not like you have this great choice. It's not like you're like, oh, I have cancer. I will bravely go and do chemo. It's more like, good Lord, I have cancer. What are we going to do to make it go away? Chemo, okay, yes. And there is bravery in there and there is response in there, but it's an extraordinarily human process. And by, I got through cancer because I wasn't, not because I was brave, but because I was willing and I had amazing support throughout doing it and I had amazing doctors. And I guess part of what gives me that sense because that was a personal issue, right? But I run through many of them where you come to this point of, sorry, a stupid story because that's all I tell. I took my son who's six, skiing. And we used to go to this little place called Four Seasons where pretty much if you drove by in the summer, you would see maybe a little hill, right? So I had mastered that hill and I thought, oh, I can do this. So my son and I went to a real ski lodge where you have to get up on a chair and it takes you all the way to the top of this mountain. And if you ski well, it takes you 15 minutes to get to the bottom. I turned out I did not ski well. I skied so poorly that I had to do a group, they had to do a group instruction. They left me because I just couldn't come down the hill. And I took off my, I said, all right, at this point I'm just gonna take off the skis and walk down the hill to which you then discovered that the snow on these hills are about five feet deep. And so you go to take your first step and you end up up to your belly button snow and you're stuck. And I remember sitting on that hill and going, all right, Dave, you have no choice. You know what you have to do. You know that you probably can't do it, but you have no choice. And you get up and you put the skis and you move forward. And there are times when I hear about book banning and when I hear about new laws that are gonna criminalize the American Library Association and when I hear about all these things, where I just go back to sitting on that hill and I'm like, all right, Dave, you know you got to get down this hill. You know you're gonna make it one, you're gonna fall a lot, but at the end of it, you got to get down the hill. That's where your kid is. That's where your car is. That's where your life is. And so I guess rather than thinking about how do I make these things, I guess it's sort of like an analytical resolve in the sense that it's more like analytical resignation that when I see problems and I know that they're problematic, I can either sit on the hill and get nowhere or I can stand up and do something. And at the end of the day, it's not really a choice. So you took me a weird spot, Paul. I'm sorry about that. What we've just done is we've taken your fifth corollary, a library should be a safe space to explore dangerous ideas. The idea of exploring what I just asked you is not for many of us an emotionally safe thing. And yet you made this podcast a place where you played with us and you did it. You've created a podcast within the library by your own definition. Thank you. Well, interestingly, I just came from a pulmonologist this morning about a CT scan looking at my lymph nodes and they're fine. But, you know, yeah, I know it's good. It's interesting. It's like PTSD that you're like, are they not fine? Why would they not be fine? The meaning of the word is define fine for me. Fine. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So far, so far. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up today. Oh, you're going to. No, no, no. We are not going to stop on Cancer Story and my ass sitting on a hill in deep snow. No. I like that image. We are going to end with the idea that I love libraries. We're powerful. We're going to have a little domination and we're going after it. Let's go. David, you are the guest. So I'm going to ask you sort of some more cleansing palette questions. OK. All right. What is one of your favorite meals? One of my favorite meals is jupino. Every time my wife who does not like seafood goes out of town, I go to the store and buy lots of different seafood, throw it in the pot with tomatoes, and I just love my jupino. Next time she's out of town, call me. Yeah. And what do you do to maintain your own health and wellness? What do I do? You know, I tinker. Someone once asked me what hobbies I have and I'm like, I'm pathetic. I don't have hobbies. But the truth is I do. I like playing with technology. Like, right now I'm currently obsessed with AI-generated images and dealing a little bit with the ethical side of it, but really enjoying the production side of it. So I have a gig worth of images of owls surfing on Cadillacs in midnight, right? Just the ability to go play. And so right now, it's AI. It's my current obsession. And before that, it was WordPress. And before maybe back in the day, that's how we began building websites back then. So I'm a computer geek that likes to tinker. OK, is that a better way to end, David? Does that make you feel better? It does. It absolutely. Thank you very much for being such a gracious host. You're quite welcome. And thank you for being such a gracious guest. All right, David Lankies has been our guest on the very first episode of Information Going Wild, Conversations with the Field. My name is Maurice Coleman. I am a co-host along with Paul Signorelli. Up in the producer's skybox, keeping us straight, is our wonderful student assistant, Caitlin Price. You can find us on YouTube currently. And this show has been a production of the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science. Thanks to our benefactor, the head of the school, Anthony Chow, for giving us this time, this space, et cetera. In order to do this, thank you, David, for coming on. Thank you, everybody out there who's listening. We will see you next month with another episode of Information Going Wild. Till then, take care. And in the comments, please let us know what you thought about the show today and if there is a guest or a subject you'd like to see us tackle in the future. Till then, have a great day. Bye-bye.