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.

Evaluating Information in the Age of "Fake News" vs "Real News"

I was all set to write and tweet about how students, and the public in general, should evaluate information sources in an attempt to be able to identify "fake news". This topic has become pretty hot since the November 8th election of Donald Trump with people trying to figure out what went wrong from the democratic side of things.

One of the excuses used was that there was a steady stream of "fake news" that people were being fed through their social media portals. All of us saw many of these articles, posts or memes declaring one thing or another like Hillary Clinton was taking medication for Parkinson's to Trump declaring that he saw thousands of people cheering the attack on 9/11 in Jersey City (no evidence). People reshared them and commented on them as proof to their already established ideology.

I found myself on a daily basis trying to expose the fake news by explaining and pointing out to my "friends" and how much of the information people were posting was either fake or just plain wrong. Remember that there are outlets out there on the internet (and many librarian teaching information literacy and research skills knows) who are just there to make money try to write as much clickable content to draw you into their ad sites.

So the mainstream media has exposed the weakness in people's ability to tell the difference between fake news and "real" news from traditional sources. However, what happens if the mainstream media is exposing this weakness to redefine the category of authority? Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone exposed how the Washington Post ran a bogus article about "fake news" sites which quoted ProporNot as its source. Their claim is that many of these fake news sources were promoting pro-Russian politics, included many reputable information sources on the left like Counterpunch, Truthdig, etc and clumping them with sites like Infowars (I will not give them traffic; fuck them). Jeffrey St. Clair sees this as a pattern of information manipulation from a long history of the CIA influencing news and information at the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami News, Chatanooga Times etc.

So how do we teach authority in this day in age where it's quite obvious that information is being manipulated by one side or the other? One thing for sure is that our discussions not just in the classroom should push for a more aggressive substantiation of facts and information. We can no longer take a person's word for it or "I heard from somewhere". It's obvious that the ruling elite are trying to win the hearts and minds of working class people through their media and are consolidating power for their capitalist interests, domestically and abroad. They want the media on board to promote their

Librarians must lead the way in the efforts to find truth wherever they may lie. Maybe now is a time to give more validation to news organizations outside the mainstream media especially if they are exposing lies, bias and manipulation.