Blog

This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. There are only five links (the others are easter eggs for hardcore tea sippers) and I promise they’re usually more interesting than just being excuses for my own ranting.

NOTE: I usually don’t know what’s going in this “newsletter” until I start putting it together every other Wednesday evening. I have a “Newsletter Consideration” folder in Inoreader where I keep articles that catch my interest in the moment; sometimes they’ll stay there for weeks before I use them, and sometimes they never make the cut. Sometimes an underlying theme reveals itself as I’m writing my commentary on each article, but most times I’m just winging it. aka, Blogging? ¯\_ (?)_/¯

_ONE

Trump Executive Order Targets IMLS for Closure | Andrew Albanese

Unlike Trump’s previous proposals to shutter IMLS through the budget process, this effort to slash the agency by executive order represents a new and serious threat, coming amid a sweeping effort to gut the federal workforce, led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

No one paying attention should be surprised by this because Trump tried to kill the Institute of Museum and Library Services the old-fashioned way during his first term by defunding it in all four of his proposed budgets, but he’s found a more effective approach this time around, via his unelected hitman, Elon Musk. Targeting libraries aligns with his supporters’ general disdain for public services that potentially benefit anyone they don’t like — even if it means also hurting themselves — and is the inevitable next step in their carefully manufactured “culture war” that’s still actively driving book banning efforts across the country.

I’m thrilled to see Albanese back on the beat so soon after leaving Publishers Weekly, teaming up with Erin Cox to launch Words & Money, a new media venture that will “center the role of libraries in the 21st Century publishing business.” He’s the Jane Friedman of libraries in my book — one of a handful of journalists I trust to dig in and get the real story rather than just rewriting press releases, and his independence should ultimately be a good thing for libraries. Partnering with an industry veteran like Cox gives me confidence that they can build a sustainable business, so I’ve already signed up for a subscription and, if you care about libraries, you should, too.

PS: I don’t know how effective online petitions really are, but EveryLibrary does invaluable work on behalf of libraries, so I’ve signed this one and, if you’re concerned about libraries, I encourage you to check it out, too.

__TWO

Library Futures Investigates Content Bans in Research Databases | Nathalie op de Beeck

According to Library Futures, false or unsubstantiated accusations of obscenity leveled at libraries foment fears of legal risk, sometimes resulting in the so-called soft censorship of e-resources, in which digital content providers or libraries apply system-wide filters and “stopwords” that block results from a user’s search. The report also claims that content banners have become emboldened and better organized with each lawsuit they file, and that their legislative agenda ultimately harms educational institutions and communities.

[Disclosure: As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m on Library Futures’ advisory board, but I had no involvement in this particular project.]

I attended the Unpacking Digital Censorship in Schools and Libraries webinar last month, an insightful conversation that served as a prologue for Library Futures’ latest research effort, and while I’m still working my way through the full report, op de Beeck offers a useful overview if you want the tldr.

Two things that stood out for me from the webinar were, 1) the emotional toll the various attacks are taking on individual librarians, many of whom aren’t being supported by their library boards, local politicians, and/or communities; and 2) the idea of “database hopping,” using content that’s only available to adult patrons to claim kids have access to it. The latter is a common tactic for stirring up controversy about physical collections, claiming there’s pornography being made available to children (spoiler: there isn’t), and then cherry-picking juicy passages or images from books that aren’t actually offered to younger readers.

Sadly, this has led to proactive “soft censorship” by some librarians who want to avoid the possibility of controversy, especially when they justifiably believe they’re not going to be supported in defending their library’s collection development policy. Meanwhile, on the digital side, you have some vendors doing their own soft censorship (as noted in the report), and others who’ve willingly added AI slop to their collections, a lot of which includes purposeful misinformation. Sometimes they’re even the same vendors!

___THREE

Library Staff Are Not Superheroes | Robin Bradford

Not all library staff believe in the intellectual freedom espoused by the profession. Not all library staff believe people should be able to see themselves on the shelves. Not all library staff believe in promoting books by authors, or featuring characters, that look, act, think, worship, or love differently than what the library staff member is familiar and/or comfortable with. You think this is inherent in the profession and it comes with the job, but it does not.

I was roughly two years into my stint at Library Journal / School Library Journal when I had an important revelation: librarians are humans, too. I’d unknowingly fallen victim to vocational awe shortly before joining LJS in 2011, partly thanks to my own experiences with some notable librarians, and partly because I’d just recently read Marilyn Johnson’s excellent, This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.

There wasn’t a specific instance that caused the epiphany, just a couple of years of frequently engaging with hundreds of librarians from different backgrounds and communities, all with different interests, concerns, and priorities. That said, there was the clarifying moment when I realized public libraries were still segregated when my mother was a pre-teen (less than a decade before I was born), and the understanding that desegregation didn’t mean everyone immediately got to enjoy the benefits of intellectual freedom that are a core tenet of the profession.

Bradford has been one of my favorite librarians for years, smart and outspoken, and seeing this reminder that sometimes the killer is in the house was an invaluable way to start what is shaping up to be the shitshow of a year many of us thought it would be. Hopefully, your local librarian believes in intellectual freedom and has the support of their board. If you’re not sure, this would be a good time to check in on them, because no community is safe from what’s happening right now, no matter how “blue” you think it is.

____FOUR

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) | Mike Masnick

It’s difficult to explain how much it matters that we’ve seen this movie before. (Well, technically, we’ve seen the beta version — what’s happening now is way more troubling.) When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.

I’ve been a fan of Masnick’s for many years, even if I don’t always agree with him on some of the details. Taking a public stance like this is noteworthy because, a) he didn’t necessarily need to, and b) it’s effectively the opposite stance so many other media outlets have chosen to take. From years of lazy coverage everywhere about online advertising, social media, and now AI, to a firehose of “both sides” nonsense from the likes of the NY Times and Washington Post — it’s no wonder so many people don’t trust “expertise” anymore.

We have a dizzying array of news sources that range from experienced journalists with deep understandings of their respective beats to “influencers” who value access more than facts and clicks more than credibility, all competing for attention on unscrupulous platforms that have no interest in differentiating them in any useful way — it’s no wonder everything’s on fire!

It’s just another signal that the traditional ways of getting news and information have completely broken down, as so many individual journalists and news organizations have quickly pivoted to “regime media” (a new-to-me term via Brian Morrissey), and we’ve doubled down on the world Neil Postman warned us about in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

_____FIVE

Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia’s Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits | Jules Roscoe

This portrait problem stems from Wikipedia’s mission to provide free reliable information. All media on the site must be openly licensed, so that anyone can use it free of charge. That, in turn, means that most photos of notable people on the site are of notably poor quality.

This was fascinating because I’d always thought it was weird how some Wikipedia pages for famous people had no pictures at all but hadn’t thought much about the quality or recency of those who did. It’s also interesting that we now live in a world where Wikipedia has become one of the most (relatively) trustworthy sources of online information we can rely on, at the same time traditional media, social media, and search engines are all becoming increasingly useless.

______BONUS

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