Callan Bignoli

In February, after being alerted to the issue by a group of Massachusetts librarians, Library Freedom Project and Library Futures released a joint statement demanding accountability from Midwest Tape President and Hoopla founder Jeff Jankowski about hateful content and disinformation regarding COVID-19, the Holocaust, LGBTQIA+ people, and other topics on his company’s massively popular electronic content platform for public libraries. Six months later, there is still a great deal of disinformation to be found in Hoopla’s collection on topics ranging from LGBTQIA+ experiences to reproductive health to vaccines.

There’s been a trend in articles coming out in major publications about how excited people are to get back to their libraries and how resilient libraries are. While they pay important attention to the needs libraries are still striving to meet in their communities, these narratives do nothing to expose the miserable realities that library workers are experiencing, or incite any kind of action to be taken in their defense.