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A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narratives

Cover of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All

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1. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street Melville, Herman. 1853. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231 "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, with the words "I would prefer not to".
2. The League [Kyle Higgins Short film]. With the 1946 formation of "The League of Heroes" in Chicago, the country is introduced to the first ever Superhero Labor Union. Founded by The Grey Raven, his kid sidekick Sparrow, and the amazing Blue Blaze, The League of Heroes was a beacon of hope against evil and tyranny in Chicago. Now twenty years later, as The League is about to expand nationally, an old adversary makes a murderous comeback. Drawn by the rampage, the former sidekick Sparrow returns to the city--and The League--for the first time in years. Sparrow says: "Well" Gosh, I think it's great! I want to be a hero forever."
3. 1974 Equal Pay PSA with Batgirl
5. Beyond books: Librarians on front line of opioid crisis
6. The Starless Sea: A Novel "Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a rare book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues -- a bee, a key, and a sword -- that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to a subterranean library, hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians--it is a place of lost cities and seas of honey, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a beautiful barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly-soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose -- in both the rare book and in his own life"
7. Becoming Librarians, Becoming Teachers: Kairos and Professional Identity Using kairos as an analytic lens, this article examines debates around the professional role of librarians as teachers as an example of professionalizing discourse. Rather than inexorably leading librarians toward the best way to understand and teach information literacy, kairos surfaces the discourse as being productive instead of the profession itself. Cette étude s’appuie sur la notion de kairos comme outil d’analyse pour examiner le débat autour du rôle professionnel des bibliothécaires en tant qu’en-seignants, comme exemples de discours de professionnalisation. Plutôt que mener les bibliothécaires inexorablement à la meilleure façon de comprendre et d’enseigner la compétence informationnelle, le kairos émerge du discours comme productif en lieu et place de la profession elle-même.
9. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
11. Librarian Action Figure with cape
12. A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.
14. Black Study, Black Struggle
15. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
16. Feminist Data Manifest-No
17. YES MANIFESTO
18. All Systems Red A murderous android discovers itself in "All Systems Red", a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial intelligence. In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn't a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied 'droid -- a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as "Murderbot." Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.
19. Johnny Paycheck - Take This Job And Shove It (Audio)
20. 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University We can trace the histories of our schools, our beliefs and practices about teaching and learning, our disinvestment in public institutions, our investments in technological solutions to discover how and why we got here — to this moment where everything is falling apart and the solution (from certain quarters) is software that sounds like "panopticon." It's that last bit — the histories of our investment in technological solutions (and our faith in technological solutions even when they are obviously so utterly dystopian) — that is really the focus of my work.
21. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
22. Party Girl
23. Cover of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All
24. Gendered Expectations for Leadership in Libraries Despite significant gains in representation at the administration level, there is still a disparity between the percentage of women in our profession and women as library leaders. Additionally, even when women attain leadership roles, even top positions in libraries, there are still hurdles in the shape of gendered expectations. This article examines the history of gender representation in the field, discusses some recent trends, and then makes some recommendations for creating an environment in which women can succeed and how, more specifically, the profession could become more supportive of women in leadership roles.
25. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
27. Last Library Ward Shelley, Brooklyn NY The Last Library August 21 - October 16, 2015 The Last Library is 2 rooms full of about 4,000 (fake) books, books that have not been written. The rooms and the fake books are just supports for the text, but they are not neutral carriers. Apart from what they may individually be about, books and libraries are loaded with meaning in our culture just as symbols, and they represent many things to many people. As such, they add a certain kind of spin to the words we have written on them. You can say a lot with a few words. Where did the titles come from? There was a web page where people could submit titles; from there they were printed out on a book spine and put into the library. Like most creative projects, most of the titles came from a group of interested persons, the artist did a lot of them himself, but was not the most prolific.
28. Ssssshh Librarian
29. Big U First Edition Cover
30. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
31. Confronting the democratic discourse of librarianship : a Marxist approach
32. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
33. Nice White Lady
34. 'Punk Ass Book Jockeys’: Library Anxiety in Community and Parks & Recreation
36. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
37. Librarians of the World Unite!
38. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
39. Fictional Labor Unions in Science Fiction Organized labor makes science fiction writers nervous. They create far fewer fictional labor unions than fictional capitalist firms. Perhaps this is attributable to ideological indoctrination. As it has been constructed, American political culture is hostile to organized labor and enthusiatic about capitalism. Perhaps it is simply self-censorship. When science fiction writers create fictional unions they tend to describe them as "guilds," which suggests a proprietarian ideological disapproval of collection action by workers.
40. No more heroes : grassroots challenges to the savior mentality
41. Living a feminist life
42. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
43. Common Ground
44. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
46. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
47. Libraries, Librarians, and the Discourse of Fear This article presents examples of representations of libraries and librarians taken from modern popular culture, including popular film, television, and novels. Using Michel Foucault's approach to discourse, we assert that such representations are made possible by, and decoded within, the structures of a discourse of fear, a practice of speech and symbols that equates the control and fear of discourse in fundamental ways. The library as an institution falls squarely into the lived tensions of this discourse, and these tensions are made apparent in the themes of the threshold: the librarian as formidable gatekeeper between order and chaos, the other-worldliness of the library, the library as cathedral, the humiliation of the user, the power of surveillance, and the consequences of disrupting the sacred order of texts. The discourse of fear is a language and a vocabulary. It is a way of speaking about the library and the librarian that transcends any specific image or portrayal. Outside of the discourse of fear, such representations would not be recognizable as libraries or librarians at all.
48. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
49. Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias: The difference between utopia and dystopia isn't how well everything runs. It's about what happens when everything fails.
50. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
51. Librarian Action Figure from Archie McPhee
52. Canada Reads 2021: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
53. The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
55. Dismantling the public sphere : situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy This work presents a thorough examination of librarianship and the social and economic contexts in which the profession and its institutions operate. As a basis of analysis, Buschman employs critical education scholarship and the research of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, whose seminal work on the public sphere—the arena in which the public organizes itself and formulates public opinion—serves as a meta-framework for Buschman's study of librarianship. Buschman asserts that a significant shift has occurred from the library as a contributor to the public good to a model where economic rationality directs policy. He challenges much of the current thinking and assumptions guiding libraries, exploring the circumstances in which librarians and libraries operate and linking the profession back to democratic and public purposes as the core essence of the field. Chapters include: • Crisis Culture and the Need for a Defense of Librarianship in the Public Sphere • The New Public Philosophy and Critical Educational Analysis • The Public Sphere: Rounding Out the Context of Librarianship • Studies in Librarianship and the Dismantling of the Public Sphere • Follow the Money: Library Funding and Information Capitalism • Follow-the-Leader Library Management and the New Public Philosophy • On Customer Driven Librarianship • Drifting Toward the Corporate Model: ALA • Notes on Postmodern Technology, Technocracy, and Libraries • The Public Sphere and Democratic Possibility Highly recommended for courses in policy and librarianship, as well as for academic and public library directors, this work will also be of interest to theorists in the social sciences.

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Superhero Librarians It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a librarian! The eponymous purveyor of popular culture, Archie McPhee sells the Librarian Action Figure.
She's "an homage to those warriors of the printed (and electronic) word that keep fighting for literacy in the face of dwindling budgets and the decline of the printed word... This hard vinyl 3-3/4" action figure has a removable cape that symbolizes how heroic librarians really are" (Archie McPhee).
The Nancy Pearl action figure didn't start out as a caped crusader. In fact the first-gen librarian action figure in 2003 was depicted as a kitschy cardigan wearing stereotype, complete with a button on her back that makes her arm move with "amazing shushing action!" She sold 28,000 in a week and then went deluxe gen2 in a red outfit complete with a "library diorama with a reference desk, computer, book cart, multiple book stacks (Archie McPhee).

Laila El Mugammar evocatively writes "An ode to campus libraries", describing the way academic academic librarians inherit the superhero moniker, writing:
The first thing you must know before entering is that every librarian is a superhero: one you deserve and one you need right now. Librarians teach you to find reliable and credible academic sources. They help you find peer-reviewed sources for your papers, perfect your bibliography and connect you with faculty. They illuminate the dark jungle of post-secondary education (El Mugammar 2020).
These are not "Shhh" librarians or Morgenstern's elinguated librarians. El Mugammar writes about the opposite--librarians as advocates and mentors who pass the torch:
All librarians become mouthpieces. They speak for those who have been lost to time and advocate for those who struggle to find their voices now. I only hope that if I am lucky enough to become a librarian myself, I can supervise a nervous undergrad as she discovers the magic of her first medieval manuscript, and watch as the light spreads across her face like gold (El Mugammar 2020).
The [super]hero narrative is nothing new in librarianship--it's an inheritance of vocational awe reinforced with kitschy dolls, ALA PR campaign materials, and celebratory accolades that take it up and perpetuate it.

Librarians like Dawn Amsberry, above, engage in valuable and meaningful work. They create a pipeline for knowledge, enabling library skills to be passed along to future generations. El Mugammar likewise sees something admirable--something she wants to become--in the librarians she praises; enough so that she imagines entering the profession herself. This inheritance narrative is part of the way generations of librarians uncomfortably pass on the mantle of our benignant profession and by doing so perpetuate a genre of hero narratives all our own. It also manifests in sincere reporting like El Mugammar's which depicts libraries in a positive light. She writes under a bold headline that proposes libraries as an elixir with the potential to keep us safer:
Libraries have your back during a crisis
The University of Toronto Library has over one million digitized texts in their collection and recently made an anti-Black racism reading list available to its community. The University of Ottawa Library has been providing online “care packages,” which include podcasts, art, films and even virtual pet therapy. The University of Waterloo set up a library-themed virtual escape room. The Dalhousie University Library offers curbside pickup for all its materials and a “research bootcamp” workshop for all its eager learners. University of Saskatchewan students can contact a librarian who specializes in their area of study with the click of a button. The University of British Columbia Library offers its students free workshops on how to understand local government. Yukon University empowers its students with collections on frontier life as well as a bibliography of the Nunavik and Inuvialuit settlement regions. These are just a few examples of the meaningful work libraries do to illuminate their communities (El Mugammar 2020).
These are positive stories of resilience. They are often read alongside stories in which librarians as hero first responders step into the wake of natural disasters, sift through toppled stacks after earthquakes, salvage materials after floods, or as in This Book is Overdue, deal with poop in the stacks all under the moniker of "hero" (Johnson 2010).

It is a slippery professional slope from hero or rockstar librarian, to martyr librarian, to burn-out. A hero mentality that relies on a vocational identity of self-sacrifice may manifest in library staff endangering themselves and their communities when they should not be or when they cannot effectively say “No”. These are the librarians with inadequate PPE working in libraries that remained open during a pandemic and risked their lives so unmasked patrons could have access to library materials, or who used their own cars and time to deliver books to quarantined students stepping out of pandemic isolation wards. This mindset is not sustainable, especially when library staff find themselves thinking of their work as a matter of life and death (a notion reinforced and celebrated by other colleagues, administrators or local politicians).