Call for an Anti-Racist Approach in Librarianship

Lately I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how libraries and librarians can challenge racism in higher education. It is a tricky thing to talk to people about for a couple reasons. For one, a lot of people, especially White people, think of racism exclusively as something that is interpersonal, overt, and motivated by hate. It is not. While that kind of racist behavior is less socially acceptable now than it was in the past, less overt but equally harmful microaggressions are still perpetrated against people of color on a daily basis. Look no further than racist tweets, culturally appropriationist theme parties, or complaints against Affirmative Action.

Beyond these often unacknowledged slights, the institution of higher education in many ways still reflects and upholds the historic social and economic dominance of White people in America. In a thorough and insightful review, Diane Lynn Gusa describes a pervasive White institutional presence (WIP) at colleges and universities across the country. WIP manifests in a sense of superiority and entitlement among Whites, which goes hand-in-hand with monoculturalism of White culture, values, and beliefs. We see this in the curriculum where White authors and culture are the assumed normal, while other cultures are only addressed in separate courses. What do you think it feels like to be an American and a Latina majoring in English these days when authors of color are routinely excluded from “the canon”? Outside of the classroom, Whiteness is equally pervasive: the social activities, performers brought to campus, artwork, names on the buildings, and the faculty and administration. In one study by Mitzi Davis, et al. a student remarked: “A lot of time I feel out of place, because you see all White faces. You know I am the only fly in the buttermilk.” White members of these institutions often fail to recognize the pervasive markers of their identity and their privilege, while non-White members are distanced physically and socially from the community.

Another reason this conversation is difficult to have in the library community is that we see ourselves as being progressive and welcoming communities. Even if racism is taking place on our campuses, could we really be perpetuating in our libraries? Yes, I think we are. Though we may indeed be harboring a bunch of liberal malcontents, we are still a place that reflects the norms of our communities, both good and bad. Students can and do experience microaggressions, hostility, and negative stereotypes relating to their use of the library. A study by Daniel Solorzano and Miguel Ceja quotes a student:

Last time we went to the library ... to study ... obviously, it's finals time ... people are going to study. But when we walked in there looking for somewhere to sit down, it's like ... they've never seen Black people before in their lives, or they've never seen Black people study before!

Another example is the now defunct Asians Sleeping in the Library tumblr (don’t worry, Buzzfeed archived selections of it for posterity).

It is hard to say the extent of racism our students of color face because this is an issue that we have not sufficiently researched or addressed. However, the negative and alienating experiences of students of color on college campuses has been researched, and I think it is naïve and lazy to assume that the problems happening on our campuses are not happening in our libraries. As a community that prides is progressive and welcoming nature, it is time for us to address this head on.

Update on the Outrageous Costs of College Textbooks and a Useful Alternative

From the dp.la Women's Activism Exhibit

While none of this is shockingly new information, I was outraged afresh when a colleague emailed me this Huffington Post  article about the college textbook racket.  The article was written in response to an American Enterprise Institute post that showed college textbook prices rising faster than he Consumer Price Index, new home prices, and the average cost of medical care.  Cripes.

In happier news, last week saw the launch of an excellent open educational resource, the Digital Public Library of Amerca.  While the collection is still growing, some of the thoughtful features of the collection are already apparent: you can search material by era, geographical location, and theme.  I particularly like the Activism in the U.S. exhibit, which has already grown since I checked it out last week. 

Value and Values in Academic Publishing

This week, Alexander K. Brown, of Springer, published an op-ed in The Guardian pushing back against the open access movement by arguing that traditional academic publishers still add value. I want to respond to this, because in his piece he sets up a straw-man argument that misrepresents the arguments in the open access community as much as he claims that community has misrepresented the value of traditional publishing.

Brown paraphrases the whole of the open access argument thus: “the ill-conceived notion frequently advanced by commercial publishing's detractors is that all we do is polish a manuscript, put it online and then sit back and wait for the next sucker to submit an article.” Brown suggests that open access is about taking advantage of the cost savings associated with the move to online journal distribution.

He goes on to list the different ways that traditional publishers add value in the publication process. These include editing, recognizing emerging fields and creating new journals, managing editorial boards and peer review, developing new platforms, helping customers, facilitating access through description and metadata, among other things.

Brown lays out the time and labor that goes into journal publishing, and I don’t want to gloss over the fact that publishers do add value through their work and products. However, the premise of Brown’s argument is flawed. Open access proponents know and freely acknowledge that publishing online takes time and effort. So though open access arose partially in response to exorbitant journal prices, isn’t just about money.

Open access is about the values of academia and who controls the scholarly production of knowledge. Scholars do research in order to create new knowledge and benefit society through advances in science, technology, culture, and theory. Scholarly publishing has its roots in the Republic of Letters, where ideas were freely exchanged in order to further our understanding of the world, and those values are still central to the academy today. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between the values of the scholarly community and those of the for-profit publishing industry. The crisis of journal pricing was merely a wake-up call about the degree to which we had let publishers take control over our scholarship. Open access is about the academic community taking back the ability to decide how we will share and build knowledge.

On Brown’s implicit argument that open access cannot financially sustain a comparable system of publishing, I say: we don’t have to. As Peter Suber discusses in his book Open Access, many of the costs of traditional publishing are eliminated when you are no longer selling subscriptions. The costs of marketing, branding, and customer service evaporate when you no longer have customers. 

Open Access across the Disciplines

I’m currently organizing a series of events at my university for Open Access Week (Oct 22-28), so my head is full of open access right now. It is my sense that there isn’t a very high level of awareness about open access or the many related issues in scholarly publishing at my institution, so I’m creating a workshop for faculty that will be, I hope, both informative and persuasive.

Luckily, fellow Bookaneer Althea, alerted me to a piece by Marisa Ramírez in the most recent issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Ramírez relates a true story about a doctor who wanted to distribute to other doctors an emergency room checklist developed by researchers at another institution, but because the original authors had signed away their copyrights when publishing the checklist it took months and many emails and phone calls to receive permission to distribute it. The doctor, when he finally received permission, was glad, but wondered how many lives could’ve been saved if he had been able to distribute the checklist sooner.

It is a great and obviously compelling story about the real-life impact of “locked” content, and the potential value of open access. How can you argue with this? Open access saves lives! However, these stories always leave me feeling bad for the other disciplines. The impact of open access is not always (actually, rarely) about life and death. In most cases, the effects of access to scholarship are less immediate, but I believe still essential and life-changing (if not always life-saving).

The promise of open access is the same as the promise of education. Research and scholarship are transformative because they expose us to new ideas and change the way we think about the world. I still remember certain transformative readings when I was in college: reading Tocqueville and Rousseau changed the way I thought about citizenship and democracy; Amartya Sen haunted my study of Political Science; and two radical feminists bookended my undergraduate career, first an essay by Andrea Dworkin and finally a commencement address by Angela Davis. These are just a few scholars, critics, and theorists that have transformed or impacted the way I see the world, how I interact with it, and really, who I am today. Now I have no idea how I accessed these readers, through books or articles, in print or online. But, does it matter? The point is, access to scholarship is transformative. Knowledge shared and circulated is powerful. Knowledge kept under lock and key isn’t knowledge, it is a secret. This is what open access is about, it is about sharing ideas freely and the belief that more thought, more information, more knowledge make the world better.

I bring this up, because while open access is much more prevalent and less controversial in the sciences, there are still many misunderstandings and reservations in other disciplines. Earlier this week, the American Historical Association issued a statement acknowledging the inequities of the current scholarly publishing system, but also expressing concern over their perceptions of the open access model. Others have addressed the AHA’s statement (here, and here), but it points to a real need for open access advocates to address the value of OA in the social sciences and the humanities as well in the sciences.

As I write this I am very aware of the many elements of and obstacles to changing the systems of scholarly publishing. The AHA is concerned chiefly about the mechanics of open access publishing, and less about the potential value. I have further thoughts about the diffusion of publishing in the open access model, and the return of publishing to the purview of universities and scholarly societies, but these are for a different blog post. For now, I would like to reiterate that sharing scholarship freely and widely can have a profound and lasting impact on our society, be it in the sciences or other fields. I second Ramírez’s call:

As the 6th annual Open Access Week approaches, think about how you can tell your story so others understand “why OA?”.

I personally am thinking of stories in library science, in women’s studies, in history, in political science, and in the many fields where knowledge and scholarship have transformed my life.

What the GSU E-Reserves Case Means for Libraries Now and in the Future

There has been a lot of insightful and thorough discussion of the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by publishers against Georgia State University, notably by Kevin Smith at Duke, at Library Journal, and at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the post below I recap the events for those who have not be following, discuss the purpose and value of reserves, and examine the implications of the GSU ruling for librarians and others who support fair use in higher education.

GSU Recap

In 2008 three academic publishers (Cambridge, Oxford, and Sage) filed a lawsuit against GSU claiming that their e-reserves policy amounted to widespread copyright infringement. The lawsuit was bankrolled by the Association of Academic Publishers and Copyright Clearance Center; CCC is a for-profit company that contracts with publishers to license the use of electronic excerpts of copyrighted works. (See Educase summary). The publishers submitted a list of 99 instances where they felt that GSU was violating their copyright.

In May of this year (so, four years after the lawsuit was first filed), the U.S. District Court for northern Georgia released its 350 page opinion on the case, written by Judge Orinda Evans. The upshot? The Court found that in 94 of the 99 cases fair use applied and GSU had not violated the publishers’ copyrights. Generally people see this as good news for GSU and for universities in general, though the case is not definitely settled and may well be appealed.

The bulk of the opinion is an instance-by-instance examination for 74 of the 99 cases, but Judge Evans also gives general thoughts on when and how a non-profit educational institution can claim fair use of copyrights materials. Before I get into the implications of the ruling, though, I think it is important to step back and think about the purpose and value of the e-reserves in higher education.

What is the purpose of (e)reserves?

Whenever I get to know a new library, I always ask about reserves. As a student in grad school, my professors saved me hundreds of dollars and provided lively, interdisciplinary courses through the use of e-reserves. No other institution where I’ve worked or studied has used e-reserves as heavily as the iSchool (indeed, my non-LIS graduate program made much less frequent use of reserves). I can see how a publisher reading this might blanch at the lost licensing income, but in reality the culture at the iSchool was to use e-reserves as a convenient place to store all of the course readings. Many of the readings were articles accessible (and properly licensed) through the library’s databases. Nonetheless my pocketbook and I greatly appreciate the terms when I was able to spend a mere $20 or $30 on “textbooks.”

In general it seems the use of reserves (electronic or otherwise) varies by institution, department, and even instructor, based on culture, expectations, and preferences. Likewise, the purpose and value of reserves is not the same everywhere. Some instructors don’t use reserves because there are good textbooks available for a course (also, sometimes, because it is just easier), while others need to use reserves because the course draws on a wide and interdisciplinary set of works (and also perhaps to save students money). To be clear, I think it is perfectly valid for an instructor to make use of reserves in order to save students money. I do not think that doing so is necessarily or even likely to be a violation of copyright, and I think that the recent GSU ruling upholds this view.

Practical Implications of GSU Ruling

The ruling is ultimately about fair use of copyrighted works. Fair use is a notoriously (and purposefully) vague portion of copyright law that allows some unlicensed use of copyrighted materials in some instances. At many institutions, libraries craft guidelines or policies for what materials can be considered fair use, but leave it up to professors to determine what they select for fair use. For those who haven’t been pouring over copyright laws recently, the four factors that are weighed in determining fair use are:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In her opinion, Judge Evans determined that in the majority of cases, GSU’s e-reserves were covered by fair use. Specifically, Evans found that the first factor weighed heavily in favor of GSU because it is a non-profit education institution. The second factor also weighed in favor of GSU, because the works in question were all factual in nature.

The question gets more complicated in the third factor. Publishers would like there to be a hard and fast rule about how much of a work can be used under fair use, and they would like that amount to be very little. Evans considered rulings from other key copyright trials and ultimately suggested these guidelines for acceptable fair use: for works with 9 chapters or fewer, 10% of the total pages; for works with 10 or more chapters, 1 chapter may be used. Notably, the Judge deemed that it was “impractical, unnecessary” to prohibit the use of the same excerpt from one term to the next (p. 71), which is a guideline that many institutions follow. Thus, though many librarians and professors are disappointed that the Judge set out a “bright line” rule, she rejected the narrow, limited guidelines that the publishers called for.

The fourth factor for fair use also resulted in a complicated ruling. The Judge rightly pointed out that income from licensing is a very small percentage of the publishers’ overall income. However, she again drew on existing case precedents to determine that when “permissions are readily available from CCC [Copyright Clearance Center] or the publisher for a copy of a small excerpt of a copyrighted book, at a reasonable price, and in a convenient format” (88-89) then unpaid use of that material is not considered fair use.

This ruling is not binding for other libraries or higher education institutions, though as Educase points out it is likely that the opinion could be used in future copyright disputes. 

Though this may seem to help clarify fair use, this opinion will not be legally binding for other institutions. Indeed, the ALA is urging libraries not to change their fair use policies quite yet. Additionally, this case is part of a long-term trend that has important implications for libraries everywhere. 

Long-term implications

As a said earlier I think the laudable purposes of e-reserves include making course readings free and easily accessible to students and enabling professors to design courses that draw on diverse and interdisciplinary resources. Though libraries do not have to be involved in providing e-reserves, many of them are for obvious reasons, and I think the purpose of e-reserves dovetails with the spirit and values of academic libraries. I think it is important to note that many items put on e-reserves are items that the library has already paid for, it simply makes access easier for students in that course when it is on e-reserve. (I’m not sure if this was the case for the instances addressed in the GSU lawsuit.)

Given that e-reserves are pretty innocuous, and that fair use does not substantially cut into the profits of publishers, I find the fact that the lawsuit was filed worrisome. I see this as part of a larger trend in academic publishing in which publishers claim that the digital environment is enabling copyright abuses, while in fact they use these same digital advances to control and limit access to scholarship and research. Consider how publishers have imposed restrictions on the number of times libraries can lend an ebook or how some publishers prohibit ILL distribution of journal articles. While the digital environment theoretically makes access easier for users (those who have the financial and technological means), publishers limit the way that we can use these works to even narrower parameters than we were able to with their print counterparts. By and large, libraries use e-reserves in much the same way they used paper reserves, but now students can access these works from their home. In response, publishers filed an extensive and sweeping lawsuit, claiming that these practices threated their profits and their livelihoods. Judge Evans called these claims “glib”, but I suspect this is just one of many ways publishers are seeking to use technological advances to lock down their content and extract payment for every conceivable use.

Though in many ways this opinion was good news for GSU, I think it is unfortunate that in 2009, after the lawsuit, was filed GSU changed its-reserves policy. The threat of such legislation makes many universities scared and unwilling to assert their full rights as non-profit educational institutions to use copyrighted materially under fair use. By being overly cautious and acquiescing to the unreasonable demands of publishers we risk giving these rights away entirely.

Where does the Library Fit?

Graduation is approaching much too quickly for comfort, and this impending end, of course, implies new beginnings. To put it more succinctly, I've started to apply for jobs. As part of a job application that I was just filling out, I was asked to write a statement on where I think the library fits into the larger academic institution. What a great question! I thought I'd share what I wrote, largely to hear what you all think about this. How have you seen the library fit into the wider institution OR if your imagination held sway over your world, how would you want it to fit in?

Ok, here are my thoughts:

There is a reason, I think, that great pieces of literature, like The Name of the Rose, or Borges’s short stories, or Something Wicked This Way Comes, have been written about the library. It is a place where minds can meet, across time, across language, and across geography, through pages (be they paper or electronic), without regard to income, or education. Libraries are beguiling precisely because they are so free—of prejudice and of cost. Libraries are mysterious because there are so many words, images, people, and potential secrets in them—but they are a mystery that anyone is welcome to solve.

While the experience of higher education is all about the meeting of minds in classrooms, and on group projects, the library gives the learner a chance to discover ideas entirely on her own terms. That is why I see the library as a perfect, and necessary, compliment to classroom learning. While we sometimes want to be guided in our learning: given a reading list, assigned a topic, asked a guiding question; sometimes we want to be able to develop our own reading list, research our own topic, and ask our own questions (of an interesting book, or of a very helpful and eager librarian!).

In my work at Seattle Central Community College, I see the library filling myriad roles in students’ lives that would not be filled in its absence. The library is bursting with students, but it is also a place of quiet study and contemplation. The library is a place with big tables and small study rooms where students can tutor each other or work together on projects. The reference desk is a first point of contact for students looking for help—help finding research, help finding the tutoring center, help using a computer or printing out a paper. It is a place, outside of the short minutes in the classroom, where students can think, work, see each other, and get assurance and guidance.

For this reason, I think that the library is a logical place to situate information technologies like computers, DVD players, and assistive devices, because they are a continuation of older information technologies (like books). It is often a logical place to house other support services like tutoring and writing centers, because students naturally think of the library as a place to turn when they need help.

Admittedly, I am library-centric, but I do believe that, just as we gather like things together on the shelves, so should we gather like things together in (or through) the library. As part of an institution of higher education, I see the library as a hub of enrichment for students, faculty, and staff, where all are welcome to inform themselves—and get help doing it. It is a place where the walls between disciplines can dissolve, and where we can all get something done.