 I will hope to close things out with some thoughts on what we can learn from grassroots organizing in and around the digital humanities. And it may be that the assessment that I'm here to offer you is simply what you get when you take a DH researcher, make a librarian and administrator out of her, and then steep her for four years in the nonprofit and community organizing sphere. So that's me, and I want to be as upfront about those aspects of my own perspective as I try to be about other ways that my personal identity and my experiences shape what is even possible for me to see. And now, just to lay some other cards on the table right away, I must confess that I'm not a big believer in dispassionate and disinterested neutrality, either for human beings or for the institutions that we create and continually either reinforce or reinvent based on how we interact with each other from our multiple layered subjective positions. My training as a humanities scholar has shown me all the ways that it is really, in fact, impossible for us to step wholly out of our interpretive frameworks and our embodied existence. And it's also taught me the dangers of assuming no matter how noble our intentions, and I think our intentions in libraries are usually quite noble. The dangers of assuming that socially constructed institutions can likewise escape their historical and contemporary positioning and somehow operate as neutral actors in neutral space. But there are models, obviously, for moving productively from independent points of view to shared understanding and collective action. And the ones that I will focus on today foreground the vulnerability, the subjectivity and the autonomy of the people who engage with them, the ways that their individual professional roles intersect with their personal lives as they come together around shared missions and goals. And unlike so many of our much smarter speakers this week, I will be talking about the digital humanities somewhat loosely in its cultural lineaments in the diffuse and socially constructed interpersonal way that DH is practiced on the ground. So that is I refer today to a digital humanities that's not narrowly methodological, technical and oriented toward objects of study so much as it is broadly organizational, positional and intersubjective. And I'll hope to encourage you to think about how our support for that kind of DH might drive our structural attunement to new ways of working in libraries. I do this here because I think that self-consciously expanding our attention in library leadership from the pragmatic provision of data, platform, skills teaching, research support for DH, that sort of thing outward to its larger organizational frame is one way of cracking open serious and highly opportune contributions by people who would not consider themselves to be digital humanists at all which likely includes many of you, your colleagues in university administration across areas and functions and most members of your library's personnel. Such change in focus invites all of us to be attentive to the deeper and fundamentally different kinds of engagement and transformation that we might foster through DH as a vector and with only simple re-inflections I think of the resources that we already placed behind the field. It could also open our organizations up to fruitful partnerships with groups who couldn't care less about academic disciplinary labels and whether or not they are doing DH. So I call here not for work to be done by individual scholars as researchers and teachers alone nor even by small teams of librarians laboring in support of the research and cultural heritage enterprise but rather by our fully engaged institutions as altered structures of power. So I therefore want to offer you a brief walk through some grassroots practices that I see as guiding us to new organizational modes ways of working and building collective strength knowledge and dare I say institutional and professional compassion that are coming to the academy not from academic DH but increasingly through it as a conduit from various communities of inspiration that function outside of or alongside the research library. And the collectives that I look to with deepest admiration in this sphere are focused on liberation resilience shared history and restorative justice for marginalized people and they are organized so that participants can bolster and support each other through frameworks of mutual aid and that's a philosophy that I'll define later on. But first I want to acknowledge that some of the groups and impulses that I will be describing function not just beyond and without the traditional structures of the academy but actively in spite of us. And so even as I look to them for inspiration, I want to speak strongly against doing so in the extractive kind of context that has too frequently governed academic labor so called town gown partnerships and other interactions where market power differentials exist. I think if we can use our common ground, our common needs, common humanity to foster more authentic and truly equitable partnerships with people doing the kind of work I'll be talking about We may yet realize the transformative potential of digital libraries and DH which is to bring fresh understandings, renewed passion and importantly new working structures to our libraries and scholarly disciplines. Structures that I see as necessary to the health of our heritage institutions in a changing world. But I'm coming to the end of this long preamble. That means that we must constantly be asking ourselves a couple of questions. What is possible and appropriate for us to give in return if we mean to learn 21st century problem solving from people who have historically found us to be a problem? And how can we repair what's wounded in our often settler colonialist libraries when we're the ones who owe reparations? For the past four years until quite recently, I served as director of the Digital Library Federation which is a consortium of college, university and public libraries, museums and galleries, labs and archives, state and federal cultural heritage agencies and also of like minded nonprofit organizations. DLF grew pretty rapidly during my tenure to include nearly 200 institutions largely though not exclusively from North America. And they've come together through a shared dedication as our mission statement now has it to advancing research, learning, social justice and the public good through the creative design and the wise application of digital library technologies. And the first thing that I did as a director there was to expand the organization's scope to ready it for engagement with the kinds of projects and ideas that I'll be talking about today. And that meant expanding our mission which had over DLF's first two decades strongly emphasized R&D or technology innovations. Instead in this phase we were to focus on the hoped for consequences and shared motives of our work explicitly prioritizing social justice and the common good. So in other words the redrafting of our mission statement urged the DLF community to address not just the creation of digital library tools and platforms but their thoughtful application in the world. And we in fact you I think see up there went so far as to challenge ourselves to wisdom. This both codified and accelerated an expansion that was already starting within DLF's membership. And I'm pausing here to tell a little story about our evolution as an organization because I think it helps to get at the ways in which a new generation of librarians, archivists, technologists and scholars is applying community organizing methods adopted from other aspects of their lived experience to the professional environment of the DH-inflected library. And also because it sort of tells the story of how one organization adapted itself to suit their preferred working patterns, their goals and their strong collectivist assumptions. So basically in a nutshell within a very short amount of time the Digital Library Federation went from a small organization dominated by large research libraries to a big one with a much more diverse membership. Small liberal arts colleges joined DLF and the closeness among their librarians, faculty and students particularly I noticed among those who were engaging in approaches to digital scholarship that were informed by critical race theory. Rapidly changed the conversations that were even possible to have at our annual conference which like our membership shortly doubled in size. And we invested heavily in fellowship programs to bring new voices to our shared work. I invited amazing women of color to serve as our annual keynote conference speakers. So people like Sophia Noble, Stacy Williams, Rashida Phillips, Anasuyas and Gupta, they brought their crucial perspectives to the communities. We suddenly had museums and arts institutions joining us and we became the low red tape organizational home for some self-governing external groups like the U.S.-based National Digital Stewardship Alliance and the library software developers of Code for Lib. And most importantly DLF began a partnership that was grounded really self-consciously in principles of equity and authenticity with the HBCU Library Alliance. The Alliance is a vital organization representing the libraries of historically black colleges and universities in the United States. Places largely established between the 1860s and the 1960s that is between the U.S. Civil War and the Civil Rights Act as a bulwark of learning hope and intellectual power for the descendants of people that our country had enslaved. And so all of this growth and change and influx of ideas at DLF was also happening in the context of the Trump era. Our 2016 DLF forum, which was our largest to date and the first to be shaped by a committee on inclusivity, was held during the week of the U.S. presidential election. Pro tip, don't do that. I had the daunting task and in retrospect the privilege of addressing a considerably shell-shocked crowd at our closing plenary in the morning that those surprise election results were announced. And thanks to the work of Monday's keynote speaker Charles Creel, among others we now understand a lot better why many of us were so surprised. My primary urging to the DLF community in that moment was simply that they use us and that they use the strong and caring connections with each other that they were so plainly creating through us. That they use the DLF as a platform for organizing, for imagining and co-creating the world that they wanted to live in and straightforwardly for resisting any forces that worked against that shared developing vision. So one result of the DLF as platform offer was our organizers toolkit. And this was in fact something we were edging toward already as an overarching way of working for the Digital Library Federation. That's just a sort of flyer. Based simply on the reality of how lightly staffed we were in comparison with the tremendous grassroots energy that we were attempting to channel and support. So our organizers toolkit outlined the basic principles of group formation and gave light and non-restrictive guidance for working together through DLF. It was basically a guide to starting new cross-institutional projects and thematic collaborations or discussions with the least amount of bureaucratic friction and the maximum amount of community ownership and control possible. Some of its sections were quite pedestrian, so you had the administrative of available communications and publications platforms, things like that. But we also included resources for building momentum, fostering leadership and undertaking consensus building in newly formed and geographically distributed communities. Throughout, we placed a strong emphasis on care for the self and for each other. We not only acknowledged but we foregrounded the volunteer nature of the activities that participants were undertaking above and beyond their day jobs and sometimes outside of their cultural comfort zones with sections on things like facilitating for diversity and inclusion and preventing and managing burnout. And our offer of DLF as platforms seemed to kind of catch fire in that particular social and political moment, provoking the creation of a lot of new working groups that would slide on down and a deepening of work that was already being done by existing teams. So, for instance, some members of our digital library assessment group started working to devise more humanistic measures of the use and reuse of digital objects and others turned to thoughtful ways of undertaking what they called cultural assessment. That is, of diversity measures for the content of digital collections and measures of inclusion for personnel. And the toolkit also sparked the creation of some quite politically pointed groups. One on government records transparency and accountability. And another on protecting library users from technologies of surveillance. And a third on better articulating and addressing pressing labor issues in libraries, museums and archives. And soon people were not just doing community building and learning through these groups, but they were undertaking active inter-institutional projects. So they were like establishing digital library workflows based on shared ethics and principles. They were convening focus groups, writing white papers, data gathering efforts. There were tools and widgets coming out. They were publishing explainer documents and big fully articulated research agendas. And all this was done, all this was really self-motivated and done with only light facilitation. And just as one example, members of our labor group recently received IMLS funding for a national forum called Collective Responsibility on how funding agencies, library and museum administrators and workers all need to band together to address the rise of contingent precarious labor or short-term soft money jobs in our fields. And as a side note, I just want to mention that some of the workers who are fighting hardest against the adjunctification of archival labor are also the ones who are putting themselves on the line in supporting intellectual freedom protections for librarians. And in both cases, those are causes that connect the micro and the macro. They connect lived experience and personal working conditions to broad systemic issues in the academy. Some of the strongest work that I saw after our open invitation happened when members of DLF groups collaborated with or drew inspiration from their own distributed networks, often inspiration in terms of structures and practices. And that allowed them to activate and turn the networks of those networks. And so we kind of watched this network palooza with admiration and not a little bit of awe. And in truth, DLF and Digital Humanities community members were working in very similar rapid response modes everywhere. And examples included the Data Rescue Data Refuge Project, which began at the University of Pennsylvania's Environmental Humanities Lab and undertook guerrilla archiving, largely of climate change records thought to be newly or especially imperiled under the current administration. There was awareness raising work of Endangered Data Week, which soon connected with our records transparency group and got some support from the Open Leadership Program at the Mozilla Foundation. And more recently, and that's the, yeah, you see it, the big one. The DLF community has been inspired by Torn Apart Separados, which is a powerful project based at Columbia University's Experimental Methods Lab, applying investigative data journalism techniques to the Trump administration's policy of separating asylum-seeking children from their parents at our southern border. Separados itself was built on lessons learned by DH scholars who scrambled to apply their GIS skills to disaster relief in self-organized community mapping projects after hurricanes and earthquakes in the Caribbean. And that was all part of the organizational how-to of Alex Heels' nimble tins. Groups like these seem to gravitate less toward ways of working that they've been disciplined to practice in school and in the academic workplace and more to methods learned in non-academic contexts and in their private lives, from participation in industry and government watchdog groups, direct action, protest hackathons, volunteer community service projects, and from labor organizing. And in terms that resonated for us, figuring out as we were what DLF is an organization was and could be at that particular moment, these practices were more akin to activism than sober committee and task force work, the well-trodden paths of professional associations and technical standards bodies, which were the digital library community's prior basic points of reference. One of the highest compliments I think we were ever paid came from Dr. Bukhle Mumbambo Tata, the distinguished former university librarian at the universities of Zimbabwe and of South Africa, now with AFLIA, the African Librarian Information Association. She was explaining what drew her to join the DLF advisory board, and she said it was because we reminded her of the activist librarians of her Zimbabwean youth. So I liked that. The taking of stances, at least active ones, if activism goes a bit too far, seems to resonate with a growing understanding in American libraries, and the understanding is that to claim neutrality is far too often to side tacitly with whatever systems and forces are historically dominant. That is too often to side with the oppressor, and this is clearly a topic that's been thoughtfully considered and contested here this week. There's actually not too much debate about it, or at least I don't hear too much anymore, in my community. Instead, there seems to be a widespread recognition that a DH and digital library practice that's divorced from deeply motivated work from taking stances that protect the vulnerable from collectively defining an ethic of care that works against cold neutrality has lost the horizon. It's really maybe just a cluster of methods that lacks purchase on the most crucial structures and challenges of our day. So my own learning on such matters has been greatly supported by contact with community archives and with HBCUs, and the ways that they're using digital humanities platforms and critical theory and activist principles to advance their work. HBCUs, again, are those historically black colleges and universities in the states, and community archivists, if you're not familiar with the term. Those are the people who act independently, often on a shoestring budget at great personal sacrifice and without professional training but with deep content expertise to undertake the work of archiving and exhibiting materials of cultural value to groups that have been perhaps neglected or misinterpreted by established collecting institutions. There's been an explosion of this work in North America over the past couple of decades, just now really coming to the strong attention of academic libraries. And I'll speak to just two common factors that I've seen as key in community archives in library labor, advocacy groups, in grassroots DH collectives, HBCU partnerships, this whole soup of things, and which I think need to be accounted for in any organizational transformation that would poise a library to work more fruitfully with grassroots energy. And those are authenticity and mutual aid. So authenticity has been the chief theme of this growing collaboration between the HBCU Library Alliance and the DLF through a joint conference and now a three-year co-hosted fellowship program for HBCU librarians. We've been emphasizing getting real with each other, interpersonally, interinstitutionally, and as two library associations working together. And Executive Director Sandra Phoenix and I came to see the kind of honesty and authentic engagement that individual participants in our programs were calling for from each other as they worked to overcome structures that kept them apart as the basis from which all the organizational work that we might do together could extend. So it's our view that starting from authenticity rather than from assumed or even aspirational neutral ground ultimately gets you to a better, more meaningful place. Similarly, mutual aid is a philosophy for getting much farther starting from the grassroots than we've been able to perhaps through top-down resourcing frameworks. And it's based on collaborative principles for social and material support in which people try to help each other while resisting, as the big door brigade puts it, the control dynamics, I'm quoting here, hierarchies and system-affirming oppressive arrangements of charity and social services. So in a nutshell, top-down approaches that this theory has it to social problem solving through philanthropy have been increasingly codified, privatized and kind of contracted out to what critics call the non-profit industrial complex. That was like, which means that decision-making and autonomy is kept pretty far from the people who are meant to benefit from programs. And on this subject, I came into a book published by the Duke University Press called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Its essays describe how the non-profit industrial complex functions, either wittingly or unwittingly, to manage dissent. It's a deeply illuminating and uncomfortable read. And just to give you a concrete example of what they're talking about. At a recent meeting of community archivists, some of us affiliated with Clear's Hidden Collections Program were shocked to hear how often struggling independent archives who are approached to collaborate with large museums and libraries on our grant-funded digitization projects were never even allowed by their more powerful partners to see their own grant budgets. So transparency, shared governance, solidarity, consensus and dignity are the basic tenets of the alternative community-based ways of working that are put forth in frameworks of mutual aid. Here I'm excited about efforts coming out of the American office of the UK design firm Shift Inc. Specifically worked by their new director of equity initiatives, Burgess Jules, to draw under-resourced community archives together into a mutual aid framework that he's calling the Cultural Heritage Collective. And I've been in on those conversations a little bit to help explore ways to connect academic library staff with community archives leaders for respectful reciprocal learning, including about how DH is practiced in non-academic communities. So before I make some quick concluding remarks, I just want to offer a few more little signposts from the grassroots that we might look to. So the first is the InfoMaintainers. This is a quiet expansion of the Maintainers Research Collective, a group that works against the overwhelming privileging of tech innovation to bring attention to infrastructure repair and the forms of labor and expertise and maintenance that sustain so many systems. And I've been part of a little group of librarians, archivists, and data scientists who are digging into feminist ethics of care as a kind of structuring mechanism for understanding how and why we work in information maintenance and its vital role in the here and now. So look for a framing paper on that that will be coming out later this spring. That'll be a sort of invitation to a wider community to join us as well as a dedicated track in the third annual Maintainers conference that's happening this October in Washington, D.C. I also think we should take note of archivists who are at the forefront of so many of these issues asking really concrete practical questions. And just as a little example, here's one by Jessica Farrell. She's musing on what collective action distributed appraisal workflows for special collections might look like. So power could be distributed and decision-making would rather slest in the hands of any one appraiser. And that just shows one little way that acknowledging positionality can provoke us to rethink organizational practice. I think we should note moves and personal investments being made by individual scholars. Like, for example, here's Umi Su, who is a PhD-trained digital ethnomusicologist who stepped away from the academy to become a public servant in the city of Los Angeles' Municipal Arts Agency. And that's a little small for you to read, but she writes, I made a decision to take five years to explore professional practices outside of academia. This journey of going from academic ethnomusicology to public sector research and design strategy has taught me to be a humbler listener, to be listening compassionately and reflexively to bodies of people in various positions of power. And here's one last quick example, which may resonate with folks who were in the AI workshop before lunch. So this, let's just point here to observations coming from researchers like Sarah Tabor. So people who are doing the work of digital culture and labor analysis outside the academy and sharing it in social media. She's an agricultural scientist. And here she's looking at technology and its pragmatic applications, specifically the takeover of American agriculture and food safety systems by Silicon Valley software companies. She's doing that from a highly positional working class perspective. So she observes that a lot of the knowledge that it takes to run a company safely is working class knowledge. And tech does real things companies as a new food delivery networks and stuff like that tend to operate on a really strong class system so that working class folks are unlikely to rise through the ranks to positions of power. So I just think, I recommend looking up that whole thread and think that it's a great example of what people can see when they're looking in these ways, what they can see about structures in organizations. So what's the upshot of all this messy grassroots activity and theorization? Well, it's made me feel hopeful. Despite all the challenges that lie before us and sometimes in spite of ourselves, it feels as if libraries and digital humanities labs are entering a new era of collective power building, of political action, of thoughtful resistance, a scene of deep civic engagement and creative flourishing. So how can models for mutual aid and frameworks for community organizing challenge established relationships, economies, and understandings in and around the research library? Well, I think it starts with us, with the willingness of library leadership to listen and respond and that's what I'm talking about this year today. We should take seriously the inclination of our students, faculty, staff, and community members, the inclination that they show, sort of the way that they gravitate toward these kinds of approaches. And we should resource them appropriately, despite their riskiness, despite the fact that they're rough around the edges and because of all the ways in which they break our existing disciplinary and service molds. We should do this, I think, lest our institutions succumb to the illusion that they can be apolitical, shining effectively from nowhere and everywhere like some kind of ambient light, that they can do this without simply illuminating more paths out of dark corners for the forces of white supremacy or failing to address what's already ambient everywhere, like ecocide. So I urge you to take these examples of new collectives and governing principles for grassroots work as an opportunity for some reflection. Reflection on the suitability of our current library and association structures to grand challenges and wicked problems that we have. Let's reflect maybe most of all on whose voices may be heard least in decision-making in our organizations and whose material conditions may be most affected by the way that our libraries presently do their business. I think we should be reflecting on what constitutes authenticity and equity, both with our own staffs and with the communities that they represent and that they serve. I want to see us reflecting on what's possible now in communication and investigation that our digital tools and methods did not support even a decade ago and how we can protect those who want to use DH platforms to make meaningful change. I hope that we will all be reflecting on what our own identities and experiences well equip us to understand and what they obscure from us. And I urge you to reflect on what you as a library leader might be willing to give up or to lose. And that's it for me. I've really welcomed this opportunity to reflect on models and practices at DLF as I depart that organization. And I hope that I've offered some useful or at least productively vexing ideas for you. And I'll be happy to take questions if we have time.