Toward Liberation Bibliography: A Manifesto | Peer to Peer Review

Social justice is not just for theologians

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 02/11/2010

My last couple of columns here dealt with two things that matter a lot to me: the kind of freedoms embodied in the idea of a public library, and the plight of the book that cannot find its reader (whose dejected author has resigned himself to writing for himself alone).

What can librarians do to help readers and books find one another in a world where our money is going toward temporary access to corporate-controlled intellectual property? How can we intervene to repair an outdated scholarly system of authority control that doesn’t recognize that we can’t spread knowledge if it’s packaged in locked containers? How can we liberate knowledge and culture to support life-long liberal learning?

What we need is a movement: liberation bibliography.

A manifesto for the movement
My colleague at Gustavus, Mary Solberg, is a theologian who includes liberation theology in her introductory course on Christian thought because she finds it’s a way of “doing theology” that links core theological beliefs to the day-to-day ways that people choose to live their lives. She wrote an article about her teaching that has some “talking points” about why theory should be united with practice in this manner. (I would provide a link to an article she published about it in a 2008 issue of Dialogue, but it’s published by Wiley and so is behind a paywall; and I can’t link it to what’s in your library because that’s behind a wall, too. I obviously need to do a better job of spreading the good news about open access.) 

But If I were to write a manifesto for a liberation bibliography movement, it would probably have these points on it, inspired by those in Solberg’s article:

• Liberation bibliography would arise out of “outrage and protest against injustice,” not out of a desire to get more for less or a sense that things just aren’t organized as efficiently as they might be. It’s not about saving money, it’s about the empowering nature of knowledge and the belief that it shouldn’t be a luxury good for the few.
• It would emerge through the struggles of communities that are seeking and deserve liberation, not just from the perspective of a few academics and librarians tinkering under the hood of the scholarly communication system to improve conditions for scholars.
• It would recognize that the world can’t be divided cleanly between the scholarly and the ordinary. If knowledge matters, it must matter beyond the boundaries of our campuses. If it doesn’t, there’s a good chance it actually doesn’t matter and we could do something else with our time and resources.
• It would acknowledge that we are implicated in systems that often benefit us, even if we think they are unjust. (What other excuse is there for librarians to publish in journals that are not open access, or accede to nondisclosure agreements with vendors that are contrary to the transparency we supposedly espouse?)
• It would take seriously the slogan, so often inscribed on academic buildings of a certain age, that the truth shall set us free—and that should mean freedom for all of us, not just a select class of academics and currently-enrolled tuition-paying students.
• It would recognize that the liberal learning we promote must be beneficial to all people; that our libraries don’t merely serve our institutions’ immediate needs, but their higher ideals.

But . . . can we do that? 
I have been told often that this is sheer silliness, that our focus should be on the students we have in front of us, not on abstract life-long needs or on the needs of anyone who isn’t at our institution. After all, our students want degrees, not platitudes, and they paid good money; why should anyone else be given what should be treated as exclusive member benefits?  

Admittedly, open access is a complex issue, as are the ultimate goals of higher education. But if we only concentrate on serving the members of our institution while they are members, and are willing collaborators in locking out everyone else, we’ve betrayed our role in society and our cultural purpose. We may not like the fact that subscriptions to overpriced electronic content are consuming our financial resources, but let’s be clear about this: we willingly serve as the corrections officers for corporate information prisons. It should at least give us pause when we get a list of names from the finance office of students who need to have access cut off to library resources immediately because they couldn’t pay their tuition bill. Doesn’t that bug you, at least a little bit?

Welcome to Absurdistan
We all have anecdotes to illustrate the bizarre contradictions of 21st century librarianship. Here are a few that I encountered in the past week.

One of our faculty members had used the Patrologia Latina database for her research before she took a position at our Little College on the Prairie. Now she has no access to this useful electronic compendium of works originally written between 200AD and 1216, gathered together and indexed between 1844 and 1865—work to increase access to texts that are fundamental to the history of Christian thought. This database is too expensive for us. I can’t tell you what “too expensive” means, because that’s proprietary information, and besides the offer expired shortly after we asked.

I’m sure it cost the vendor a lot of money to put this public domain material into a useful electronic form. But why is that product only available to libraries? This faculty member understands that it would be folly for the library to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a work that only she needs for her research, but the company that digitized it doesn’t allow individuals to subscribe at any price. Perhaps they fear it would erode the more lucrative library market, or they just don’t want to be bothered with being gatekeepers when libraries are so willing to do the job for them.

Act now for your free ebook!
I recently got word that if I acted right now, I could download a free copy of what sounds like a very interesting book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns. I half expected the University of Chicago Press to throw in a set of book darts and highlighters absolutely free if I called today!According to the catalog copy, this new books is “brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like,” revealing that “piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary.”

I downloaded the thing to take a look, but after 15 minutes of wrestling with the DRM, I gave up. Perhaps it’s a metaphysical message: I must illegally circumvent the shrink wrap to become a cogwheel in the engine of change. But in fact I had no more time to devote to opening the “free” book, legally or illegally, so if it exists somewhere on my computer, it’s going unread. Still, it’s a clever way to get some buzz going.

Reader, it worked. I ordered the danged thing in print and have now mentioned it in this column.

Keywords: “cui bono?” (not Sonny)
I will finally cite the case of Goliath v. Goliath in my brief for a liberation movement. On a recent Friday night, Amazon flipped a switch and made all the “buy” buttons disappear from all books, print and electronic, published by the Macmillan conglomerate, one of the “big six” book publishers. (Full disclosure: I am a Macmillan author; that doesn’t mean any of this makes sense to me.) Apparently, Amazon also removed sample chapters from customers’ Kindles and crossed books off people’s wish lists. They seem to not realize how deeply this creeps their customers out.

What was that battle of the titans all about? Macmillan objected to the way Amazon set its ebook prices, and Amazon objected to their objection. By Sunday night Amazon grudgingly conceded to Macmillan’s demands that it have control over its prices, and now other large publishers are following Macmillan’s lead.

What’s in it for readers? Though both companies claim they are acting on behalf of their customers, the answer is “nothing.” A New York Times story on how publishers are taking advantage of the moment, reports that Google, which had previously urged publishers to allow a little cutting and pasting of ebook texts, have had to give up on that idea. Publishers “basically viewed printing and cut-and-paste as deal breakers.” Whether or not disabling one thing makes a digital text more useful than a print text is a deal-breaker for the consumer doesn’t enter the equation. As Don Lucchesi said in The Godfather, “it’s business.”

But books and ideas are more than business. Bill Thompson wrote about the importance of open systems in the wake of MacAmazongate.

At the heart of this and many other fights lies an attempt to limit the ways in which the network and the computers connected to it can be used, and to do so in ways that serve the interests of corporations.

These interests may sometimes be aligned with those of the wider public, but that alignment is conditional and contingent and cannot be relied upon, which is why it must always be challenged.

Liberating libraries
John Bushman has used Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the “public sphere” to challenge the current idea of libraries as a resource that should only be exploited by those who hold a direct economic relationship with them. He points to ways that library policy and practices have been driven by economic ideas that have nothing to do with liberal learning and everything to do with hoarding resources—often on behalf of private companies, not the public good. In a discussion of his book, he puts the issue in a nutshell.

There has been a fundamental change in the purposes of libraries (and, I would argue, of an education too)—one that has come about almost "naturally" and without wide debate. . . . libraries embody and enact the democratic public sphere ideal in the form of rational organization of human cultural production. Our acceding to economic models as a public philosophy results in an active deconstructing of the public sphere discourse that libraries represent.

I'm not suggesting librarianship likes or wants this set of circumstances. But what I am suggesting is that our responses, particularly at the national level and among our leadership, have been inadequate. Aping business rhetoric and models doesn't save libraries, it transforms them into something else. We're a profession and an institution in crisis because we have a structural contradiction between our purposes and practices as they've historically evolved and our adaptation to the current environment.

The free public library was created as a public good. Academic libraries supposedly exist to further knowledge, not just for their home institutions, but for the benefit of the world.

Liberation bibliography rests on the idea that the role of libraries is not just to provide access to information, but to provide access that is liberating. And to be liberating, information at some level must be free, whether it wants to be or not.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.

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