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

I'm a librarian not a member of the National Guard or FEMA

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1. Common Ground
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. 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".
5. Beyond books: Librarians on front line of opioid crisis
8. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
9. 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.
11. The Starless Sea
13. Compassion: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville”
15. Editorial: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
16. Feminist Data Manifest-No
17. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
18. It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers "success risks jealousy, bullying, or being undermined within a competitive workforce, and that deferring to those higher up the ladder is part of the everyday emotional labour performed to manage the emotions of those with more power than ourselves. "an individualistic workplace can be isolating, controlling, and abusive. How can we advise workers to be vulnerable and authentic, if institutions replicating whiteness may in fact end up harming workers who express themselves with trust or authenticity?" "workplace policies can directly contribute to a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and internalized blame within their employees. The onus is on the worker to become resilient and less sensitive, gracefully absorbing harm for the comfort of the institution."
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. '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.
23. Black Study, Black Struggle
25. Essential, Yet Disposable: How the Career Faculty FTE Cuts Impact Librarians
26. The No Manifesto, Rainer's declaration in opposition to the dominant forms of dance
27. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
28. Distant Reading for Quick Insights
29. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
30. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
31. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
32. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
33. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
35. Bartleby Compendium Entry
37. Living a feminist life
39. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
40. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
41. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
42. Big U First Edition Cover
44. Hench "Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. As a temp, she's just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called 'hero' leaves her badly injured. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks. Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it."
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. Fictional Labor Unions in Science Fiction
49. 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.
50. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic

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When Expectations Cross the line During the COVID-19 pandemic, the risk to librarians correlates to a variety of factors, including how frequently trafficked their spaces are, whether all occupants use face masks, how librarians in the space interact with patrons, how long people occupy space in the library, how air circulation functions in the space, and whether those who use the space have access to coronavirus testing and can self-isolate promptly if they test positive for the virus. If these factors aren't controlled for and libraries remain open without necessary mitigations, they put their occupants and broader communities at risk.

Academic libraries on campuses large and small advocated for closing their libraries to fight the virus. Librarians recognized and argued that we had been growing online service for more than two decades and could close the doors to our libraries' physical spaces and instead focus on provision of e-content that could be delivered virtually (Flaherty 2020).

The majority of libraries closed, but sometimes libraries remained open even though staff didn't have PPE or even if community infection rates were climbing or already high. In others, even if the library building was closed to patrons, some or all staff were still expected to show up for their position with minimal safety measures in place. They continued to provide access to library materials through digitization and curbside service or simply turned up to work because if they didn't they wouldn't be paid and they needed the income (Moynihan 2020).

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how slippery the slope can get when expectations cross the line. But the tensions librarians navigate have a long history told through stories of sacrifice, heroism, rescue, and saviour behaviour. Before the pandemic library workers, especially in public libraries, were already serving as de facto social workers, daycare providers, and even paramedics. Some clasp the hero's mantle tightly about their shoulders, others wear the title lightly, others don't take it up at all.

Librarians began administering naloxone during the opioid epidemic (Barton 2017, Correal 2018, King et al. 2020, Kowalski 2017, Rosales 2018, Simon 2017, TEDMED Staff 2018) and their stories, like Chera Kowlaski's below exemplify the librarian as hero, underscoring how in a service profession your place of work often becomes a locus of care and intervention for the community you serve.
In a crisis like the opioid epidemic, scarcity can become our fallback position but there is a domino effect every time we go there in the face of need. An under-resourced community battling against opiod-involved deaths needs way more than just two doses of injectable naloxone locked up in the public library.

One person at a time in the bathroom? Get there and find out you need to go back to the desk for a key? What do you do if you're accompanying a child or elder who needs help? Or if you feel nauseous and need to use the bathroom quickly and don't have time to dash for a key and back to the bathroom? Or what if you need to spend more than 3-5 minutes in there because it is the only private place you have to pump breast milk, or change clothes between jobs, or even cry? If you're a patron, forget about it, you'll queue up and politely ask the librarian, because there's nothing they'd rather do than be the keeper of the keys to everything while policing the 3-5 minute rule for the bathroom?
About the Authors
Natalie

has recently stepped away from librarianship to work in a managerial role at the Lucy Institute for Data and Society. Previously an E-Research Librarian, she provided research data consulting services, focused on in-depth services in support of grant-funded research. A strong advocate for equality in the workplace, she's unafraid to reject the bullshit that comes at her, and offers a hand, help, and ear to younger colleagues. She greets the day with coffee & The Nib: “rise and shine the world is doomed” & delays sleep with SciFi . 0000-0001-6441-6716

Anna Michelle

is a recovering instructional design super hero librarian capable of teaching back to back library instruction sessions with no end in sight, who now cracks her electric Lucy Lawless whip as a user experience and assessment librarian. In her current role, Anna leads efforts to design user-focused, accessible and data-informed digital services. Anna brings a critical lens to her work -- and inspires everyone around her to be thoughtful in their work. She is a fierce and loyal friend, a staunch ally for student privacy, and a firm believer in a healthy work-life divide. 0000-0003-3487-6302

Mikala

is Product Owner for way too many library systems that need more than just cosmetic work, but for that she’ll need to take them to the medi-spa. She spends probably too much time at work-- both working on her 'real' job, and publishing/presenting research-- and often wakes up at 2am with a solution to the problem that plagued her all day. Like all of us, she is still learning how to say "No," in her professional life and to say "Yes" to more things in her personal life-- like spending more time as an active dog mom. 0000-0002-2730-7542

Kim

is an academic Archibrarian (Archivist / Librarian) who also serves a large regional community. In her role, Kim wears a wide variety of hats-- from archivist to technologist, preserver to maintainer, educator to learner, and other duties as assigned. Kim uses her Librarian superhero powers to blast the GLAM community forward through ESP [& projects like these]. 0000-0002-0781-4571