Week 31: How do you make good change?
a bit of theory, a lot of "Community" gifs. I never even watched that show
Last time I left off with the premise that good change takes hard work. I’m returning to that idea by exploring Fobazi Ettarh’s 2018 article “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves” and Michael Suarez’s 2017 address “Historical Scholarship 2.0: The Way We (Could) Live Now.” The two pieces have fueled big conversations in librarianship in the last few years, and though the two arguments at first seem incongruous, they both progress visions of good change.
Early days in this newsletter, I wrote about Vocational Awe, drawing from Ettarh’s article, in which she argues that librarianship needs to come down from the service pedestal, lest all librarians continue to be underpaid, overworked, and burnt out. Moreover, Ettarh argues that the perception of librarianship as necessarily a moral vocation—that is, a spiritual calling and a bastion of democracy—obscures how libraries and librarians alike can reinforce white supremacy by assuming their service absolves them of bias or violence. It’s one of the most important articles in the world of librarianship in the last few years, and though it’s not specific to rare book librarianship, the article also articulates a useful spectrum for rare books practitioners: do you want to have something closer to a job or closer to a vocation?
Deciding where you land on the scale from job to vocation helps set expectations for how you are going to spend your professional life. Do you want to have a tight 9-5 that allows you to spend your time and joy elsewhere, either on hobbies or in community work or with your family? Or do you want a role that somewhat leaks into every corner of your life, often overlaps with your hobbies, orients your free time towards role-related service work, but elevates you into a different collegial level? This is the spectrum between lower-tier librarians (a system I can’t quite explain because I don’t really understand it) to the so-called librarian “superstar,” the nationally-known librarians who do all the things. My Rare Book Librarianship instructor pointed out in class that the unhappiest people in librarianship are often those who would like to have jobs—roles that do not require this sense of a “calling” in order to perform adequately—but find themselves in vocations instead. Understanding what we want for ourselves is a key aspect of our professional development.
In contrast, Suarez’s 2017 address “Historical Scholarship 2.0: The Way We (Could) Live Now,” is a 24-minute call-to-arms pep talk for librarians that asks we build bridges on our road of advocacy for our profession. Here are the SparkNotes:
Suarez, a history professor at UVA, the head of Rare Book School, and a Jesuit priest, makes a lot of sweeping statements in his address, beginning with, “We must understand the library not as a place to simply grab information…but a place where I go to situate my humanity.” He likens visiting the library to a sacred, communal-oriented process, one that is deserving of attention to ritual. And he also understands that many people who use libraries—in his argument, the professorate—do not appreciate the work that librarians do in order to make libraries functional (as I noted in the last issue). He thus argues that librarians need an equally high opinion of what we do as professors have of themselves.
To cultivate a mutual understanding with professors, he makes the following recommendations:
Publish more. Publishing papers is the currency of scholarship in the United States. So librarians must publish.
Cultivate a deeper understanding and empathy of the “absurd demands” of the professorate.
Build bridges through: advocacy and communication about the variety of resources we have; reduce our possessiveness over our materials by making things available in and outside of the library; create great metadata to help find stuff; understand our role as creating possibilities of wonder; and (this is my favorite) make clear the human presences in every text.
As I noted in my explanation of outreach, Suarez argues that librarians will have to meet our patrons more than half way in order to advocate for ourselves. These are big demands, and many librarians would argue that a) we’re already doing quite a lot of what he’s suggested and b) it’s impossible for any one person to do all of this on their own.
So at first glance, Suarez advocates for the kind of aspirational, sacred, awe-filled librarianship that Ettarh warns against at best and identifies as outright harmful at worst. He advocates for truckloads of work, all on the shoulders of librarians, without shifting any of the burden to anyone else. She argues that we must shuck the expectations of serving all needs that other institutions have failed to and refuse gratitude as our sole compensation, lest we run ourselves into the ground.
But I think we can reconcile Suarez’s suggestions and Ettarh’s boundaries.
Ettarh warns against taking on too much, of suffering burnout, of bearing the burden of both the perception and responsibility of a service profession that is treated as second class to “real” scholars. She advocates for changing the expectation of self-fulfillment as sustaining, because it’s not.
Suarez too advocates for librarians to see themselves as equals to the knowledge and discovery process. He aims to move librarians away from the servile perceptions that have been levied against our goodwill and to the detriment of our well-being. And, notably, Suarez concludes by advocating for the community of the book.
In our work as librarians, Suarez says, we have to establish an “ethics of reading” (that is, a perspective or a framework) that understands there is not one human being in the text, but whole communities.
We often perceive the written word as the product of a single mind. This is never the case. Authors draw from all sorts of strange, curious corners—friends, family, colleagues, experiences, memories, observations—to write and write well.
And beyond the intellectual content of a text, there are whole communities in the production of that text: today, we have editors, publishers, printers, distributors, bookshop owners, author-signings, coffee-house readings. A while ago, we had publishers, printers, paper-makers, compositors, type-setters, ink-makers, binders, and booksellers. There are whole communities in a book, and they are made invisible and visible depending on how hard we look and the questions we ask of the materials we encounter. Librarians are best equipped to make those communities visible in the way we describe, situate, and advocate for the books in our care.
That is Suarez’s ethics of reading. But it applies to Ettarh’s ethics of labor too: she advocates against librarians taking on too much and against a system of service that asks too much. She advocates against job creep, or the piling of responsibilities without commensurate compensation due to budget cuts and undervaluing librarians’ work. Here too lie whole communities. Librarians need each other to resist that job creep, to advocate for boundaries (e.g. we will not answer emails after 6pm, we will not make ourselves available without fair remuneration), to spread out the work, to allow each other to specialize, to collaborate, to vent, to commiserate, and to celebrate our successes. No one librarian can accomplish all that Suarez suggests in his bridge building sermon. We have to rely on one another, in community of librarianship, to accomplish those goals together.
Last time, I wrote a bit about the persisting perception of exclusivity and elitism in rare book librarianship. Both Suarez and Ettarh advocate against that elitism by making our materials more available and by reducing the barriers to entry to the field through fair labor practices. When we make the human presences visible—both in books themselves and in the work of librarianship— we strike down the pedestal effect of the “lone collector” or “lone genius” or “lone librarian.”
I will put it even more plainly: Combatting white supremacy is not just about collecting more widely and more diversely, of having material evidence of non-white people in our collections. Good, powerful, necessary change in librarianship requires changing the fundamental theories of collaboration and community that build and maintain our collections. This change is as simple as saying “here are all of the people and processes that contributed to this item.” It is as shameful as being asked to admit that “we have exploited our workers, and we owe them justice.”
The unifying theme I see in Ettarh and Suarez’s arguments is advocacy—for ourselves and for our profession. We are in service, but we are not servants. Librarians deserve dignity for our work, and we have a responsibility to imbue dignity into our workplace through reconciliation with and reparation of deep, scarring inequities.
Housekeeping and birdseeking
house
To the question of two issues ago, “Is a poptart a ravioli?” my friend Jeremy emailed me this curt but effective reminder:
To the issue of cutting down the white pine trees next to my parents’ house, a note from my mother:
On Trees: I still have terrible guilt over taking down those pines. Until I remember Hurricane Sandy, when it became abundantly clear that those trees would be like a hot knife through warm butter, slicing our house in two, right through your or our bedroom…or both. So down they came.
bird
also from my mother, identifying last week’s bird: “A Painted Bunting or Blue-winged warbler”
More later.