Using Library Space for Solidarity and Strength

The presidential election of 2016 shook the foundations of everything in our society from our discourse, politics, and democracy. For many librarians, the customary semesters filled with reference shifts, instruction sessions, and workshops were thrown for a loop. Fake news and alternative facts entered our lexicon. The change in political landscape had all of us questioning our knowledge and where we get information from. Librarians were looked upon to fill gaps in knowledge--that we’ve always been filling--but the circumstance made people more conscious about it.

While our roles in educating and leading people to truth & knowledge are crucial, there’s more we can do to facilitate discussions about democracy and social justice. This role isn’t quickly ascribed to us, but we must undertake it especially in this political climate, where corporate interests are ruling out over the interests of working people.

This climate calls into question the kinds of events we have and showcase at our libraries. As evidenced in articles, postings on the internet, and at ACRL 2017 in Baltimore, many chose to have workshops about fake news and evaluating information. Naturally, this is our forte. But we can provide spaces for other types of events.

This past semester seeing the need for broader discussions around race and information, I wanted to organize a gathering to discuss these issues. The Men of Color Event was by far one of the best activities I ever helped coordinate at the library. It was done in coordination with a diversity educator at Stevens. Initially, I was trying to have a film showing for The 13th, Ana Duvernay’s critically acclaimed document about the prison system in the United States, but our dates couldn't coordinate.  Then the diversity educator suggested a Men of Color event because she had previously organized a Women of Color event on campus.

Most of the events I have organized at my library have been workshops or instructional sessions about finding or being critical about the process of how to use, find, and evaluate information, technology, and media. I use bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Giroux to guide my teaching so students understand their roles in being active social agents in a world filled with injustice. The Men of Color event wasn’t about those issues. First and foremost it was about learning about allyship, that is, meeting people who have similar interests and understanding about the objective world and how it can affect our consciousness.

Fourteen people attended the event: 12 students and 3 staff members (including myself). We discussed the shared experience of the invisibility of people of color on our campus. By being gathered in one place, it was striking to the staff members the number of young African-American men present. The breakdown of Stevens demographics according to Forbes website is Black or African American 2.3%, Hispanic/Latino, 9.1%, Asian 9.6% and race-ethnicity Unknown is 10.3% percent and predominantly male by 71% to 29% female.  All the participants spoke about the importance of people of color finding spaces to speak openly and freely about issues that matter to them especially in today’s political atmosphere.

Beside the library being an active space for students to sit down, talk and feel “safe,” the library should be a place for them to feel strong by the unity and solidarity that they feel in the room. Just as when students use information to fortify an argument or expand their knowledge about a given subject, they should feel strength in numbers in order to continue the discourse and struggle beyond the library doors. These moments could make positive changes on our campus to confront racism, sexism, homophobia, etc and therefore, make our society a better place.

I also proposed that students from the African-American clubs come to the library and research the archives of the university so they could uncover who the people of color at Stevens have been in the past. Furthermore, the library could host an exhibition from the special collections and archives to showcase their research. Thus, the library would provide another space for people of color to express themselves and learn about shared history. Careful consideration about how these collections are used is important and a good model to follow is April Hathcock’s suggestion in her notes about 2016 Untold Histories Unconference. To paraphrase, it should be about the people and not the project.

The Men of Color event brought together the importance of the library and how it should be not only a community’s center for intellectual discourse but also a space for social justice discourse. So much of people of color’s history has either been ignored, obfuscated, or left on dusty shelves that there must be an active drive to shine a light on the total history of the community. Thus, while people of color may feel, and most likely are, a minority at colleges and universities, the library in collaboration with people of color can play a significant role in providing a space for people to engage and for people of color to tell their stories.

A Letter to My Fellow NJ Academic Librarians

I am very fortunate to work in a profession that values compassion, empathy, and education for our communities. I’m always pretty amazed by librarians’ tremendous dedication to help people access information and develop knowledge for a more informed society. Whenever I attend a conference, symposium, or workshop, any kind of cynicism that may have seeped in from our external political world, melts away by a true sense of humanity in our deeds, small or large.

It has been more than a full week of the administration of the 45th president. We’ve seen executive order after order signed and sealed that can have lasting impacts on our communities: from a woman’s right to reproductive health, affordable health care, to immigrant or refugee status in the United States.  We’ve also seen considerable resistance to the administration’s orders through massive rallies not just around the country but around the world. Truly, we are all concerned about our futures.

So the question for us is what do we in this time of fear and insecurity? What does it mean for our institutions and specifically for our libraries? Where do we stand? I believe we need to have a discussion in our state specifically about how we defend our values and members of our community who may come under attack from the new administration’s policies.

Soon after the election the American Library Association through several regretful press releases caught itself in hot water for complacently accepting the current administration without evaluating what kind of policies and values the 45th president’s administration’s policies would have on libraries and education in general. The alarming, and quite frankly abhorrent, choice of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary should have everyone in education shaking in their boots. We cannot follow the “business as usual policy” that the ALA was complying to. I'm glad they've recently released a new statement concerning the executive actions on refugees and bans on people from some Muslim countries.

I hope that this message opens up the discussion for us in the New Jersey academic library community to come together to meet and discuss, define and solidify our values in such an important time. Maybe we can get together this spring for a one-day unconference? I’m sure we can find in our collective powers to muster it up like the thousands who sprang up in airports to protest the ban on immigration from some Muslim countries and refugees.  Also of importance: sharing our stories about how our communities are being affected and how we’re resisting can build communities of solidarity which are essential.

I hope that we can come together as soon as possible to unite across the state!

In Struggle,
Romel Espinel


PS. Please comment below on how we can get started or email me at respinel[at]stevens.edu and I will send you a link to a google doc so we can brainstorm some ideas.

Are Academic Libraries’ Websites Ready for the Smart Phone Generation?

Lately at my college I’ve noticed students who need quick access to college information quickly dig into their pockets and pull out their smart phones and read their course information from their Blackboard page (utilizing a web browser or Blackboard’s own mobile app). They no longer plant themselves in front of a computer in the library or their laptops; a process that had them jumping through hoops of several log-ins and dancing around a web page until they find the information they need.

Many in the library field have felt the tremors of a mobile earthquake coming. The rumblings have come with the dispersal of e-readers, lap tops and iPads. In April of last year, Lori Barile wrote an article in College and Research Libraries News about the options that libraries have to develop the myriad of mobile services useful to library users. In October 2010, Lisa Carlucci Thomas in Library Journal surveyed over 400 librarians in public and academic libraries that confirmed that librarians were gearing up or expecting changes to library services that took mobile computing seriously with mobile library websites, SMS services, QR codes, etc. But, Carlucci also noted librarian cynicism for developing mobile-ready services. Some want to see proof before developing.

Proof is here. This past December, NielsonWire reported that while the U.S. mobile customers of smart phones was at 43 percent (and rising), of that number, the age group between 18-24 made up 54% of that market. Recently a researcher in Ireland observed that many students are starting to “replace their laptops with smart phones for many functions”.[1]

To compound the importance of these devices many secondary schools are seriously considering changing years-old rules of cell phones in schools. The New York Times SchoolBook section even claimed that “Across the globe, schools are moving from banning and fighting to empowering students in taking their texting talents to a whole new level by using them for learning, as well as using the devices to strengthen relationships with students and their parents or guardians”. A majority of students in a Jersey City, New Jersey English Honors classes are using their smart phones to access Engrade for their grades and to communicate with their teachers. Thus by the time many of these youth get to college, they will be expecting to use their mobile smart phones for educational purposes.

Manufacturers have answered the call too. Samsung is marketing a first generation Galaxy smart phone for a younger audience and is more affordable called the Galaxy Y. With the release of the iPhone 4S and now on multiple carriers like Verizon and Sprint, Apple now sells cheaper versions of the iPhone for as low as $99 dollars for a two year plan. The UK’s Daily Telegraph in January 2012 reported that in Q1, Apple sold, 37 million iPhones!

So have Academic libraries’ websites adjusted for these smart phone agile students and researchers? Change is coming but very slowly. Surely libraries have welcomed hardware platforms (iPads and netboooks for mobility) or even mobile applications for search ability. Where Academic libraries have been slow to change is developing a web site that can be viewed and easily read on a smart phone. Architecture constructed for a mobile device.

I recently researched 122 academic library websites using an iPhone to see if these institutions had developed mobile library websites. I compiled my list of colleges and universities mostly from U.S. News and World Reports listing of the Best Colleges in the country. From the 122, 50 were public four-year universities or colleges, 11 were public two-year community colleges and 61 were private. From all of these, only 32 (26%) academic libraries had developed mobile-ready websites. Several schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania while have an option of a mobile-ready sites but were not automatically visible by the smart phone. Libraries that did not have mobile-ready websites were taken to the regular library websites that are designed for bigger screens.[4]

Why is a mobile-interface important? Without having to pinch and zoom-in and out, swipe across, up and down on a regular website viewed on a smartphone, I was able to click instantly on links to get in touch with the library, find out hours and location times, search the catalog, etc. If our students are primarily using their smart phones as information seeking machines, as research and practice show, we should develop mobile website sites that are about 2 clicks away.

A Quick Review of Some Mobile-Ready Library Home Pages

Out of the 32 mobile interfaces, 20 were a basic text-based buttons for easy navigation [FIG 1]. The 12 other library mobile home pages combined text and images [FIG 2]. Three of these actually make the image predominate over the text like the North Carolina State Universities Libraries [FIG. 3]. Of all the websites, only 8 integrated a mobile OPAC to its home page like Boston College who incorporates a federated search for items [FIG 4]. All are quite easy to use and most gave basic information about hours and location, how to contact a librarian, a link to catalog search and news and events at the library.

The best of the best? Duke and Drexel University’s combined all attributes of the above mobile ready websites into a compete user interface that mirrored in many ways a regular website adding functions like the OPAC that can differentiate a search for books, articles or databases. Both of these sites include in the interface a link to chat directly with a librarian and well as other features.[FIG 5].

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Is your library be ready?

These academic libraries have taken the lead in creating mobile experiences as opposed to creating an alternate experience from the desktop websites that we have come familiar with. There is a lot to consider in changing to a mobile ready website (cost, in house development versus outsourcing, etc.) but the audience for these mobile websites is ready and coming in full steam in the coming years especially when we’ll see the smartphone users blow by the 50% usage in the United States in the next year and the majority (quite possible more than 70%) of these users being between the ages of 18-25. The time has, quite literally, come.

[1] Research and markets adds report: The use of smart phones among students in their Education/Social life. edition no. 1. (2011). Wireless News, , n/a. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/896496253?accountid=38129

[2] From November 2011 to February of 2012, seven schools had developed a mobile ready sites during that time. My data can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/8x6koqc.