This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  I sat between two young students, one from Kenya and one from Nigeria. Cara from San Diego and Jean from New Jersey mingled with priests from India and Ghana, four students from the Philippines, and a Cambodian. The Nigerian, Sister Bibiana, wore a simple cropped veil. “Now we’re going to open an Internet window,” Shaughnessy said, and her Think-Pad screen projected that page to the whole class. “When we opened our accounts last time, we got an error, remember?” Rioux jumped in, cheerleading: “And who’s afraid? None of us!” Shaughnessy entered the password, and an error message came up. “Remember I mentioned Saint Jerome, the patron saint of libraries? Add Jerome as a ‘trusted site’ during login, then you’re okay to enter.”

  It took twenty minutes to get everyone through the password and into the Refworks database. While Rioux worked on someone’s stubborn laptop, Shaughnessy guided the class through a search for information about rehabilitation in prison populations, Sister Bibiana’s special interest. Her search called up 7,699 resources. “I think you got some information here, Sister.” Shaughnessy showed the class how to refine and narrow the search by subject; then she whittled it down to just scholarly journals—and thousands of articles turned into seventeen.

  What seemed like a miracle from a distance was simply the librarian showing them how to find and save important information and organize it in a useful way. But nothing looked so magical as when she clicked to show all those sources lined up like rows of wheat or beans, in perfect Modern Language Association style: author’s name, then title, then publication, then all the other details; and then she clicked again, and instantly the format changed. Now the same sources appeared in American Psychological Association style, with the author’s name, then the date. The class gasped. Rioux told them: “This is the style you’ll use if you’re doing a scientific paper, because the date appears right after the author’s name. The date matters more to scientists.”

  There was joy in the missionaries’ classroom. “Wow, wow!” the students said, sending their folders full of the heartaches and miseries of the world zipping through cyberspace. Shaughnessy grinned at me. “Isn’t it great when people get as excited as we do about information resources?”

  “You all will use and reuse the UN Declaration of Human Rights, so put that in your folder now,” Rioux counseled them. “And look, if you lose something, it wouldn’t be tragic, because you can always generate it again.”

  “Hopefully, this makes you a little less anxious,” Shaughnessy said, and obviously it had; the students who streamed out of the classroom looked like the wrinkles had been ironed out of their foreheads, and Sister Bibiana was beaming. Afterward, Shaughnessy commiserated over their challenges: “I cannot even imagine how hard it is for them.” Rioux called out after the students, “I sent you all a BusinessWeek article about information services and restrictions on cybercafés in India. Read if you want, and we’ll chat at dinner.”

  The librarians’ organizing for the greater good had already had an impact. After class, Shaughnessy made me a copy of a homemade facebook one of the new American students had compiled on his own initiative. In addition to photos of each new student and each administrator, with addresses, e-mails, and birthdays, he had drawn up a list broken down by time zones. When it was noon in the Philippines and seven a.m. in Kenya, it was nine p.m. in San Diego and midnight at St. John’s in Queens.

  Another of Shaughnessy and Rioux’s students, a former detective from Brooklyn, has already announced what she wants to do when she finishes this program and her thesis on the use of information systems in the Congo. She will soon begin studies for a St. John’s master’s in Library and Information Science, and follow in Shaughnessy and Rioux’s footsteps. “Being a researcher is no different than being a detective,” Evelyn Cruz told me.

  A friendly, burly man in shorts and sneakers, Kevin Rioux wrote his master’s thesis on inhalant abuse on the Mexican border; he managed to discuss the horrors of the world without delusion while maintaining a cheerful, upbeat face. “I grew up in New Orleans, but I was born in Maine. I’m French-Canadian, not Cajun.” His mother was on the last plane out of New Orleans before Katrina hit, and found herself in Houston, among people who had no sympathy for those who didn’t evacuate. “Some people have no idea what it’s like to live without a credit card,” Rioux said, shaking his head. He was passionate about social justice, and had written a number of scholarly papers that link everyday library and information practice with human rights goals. He mentioned Shaughnessy’s education in philosophy, and said, “We’re trying to find a philosophical framework for this work. The Vincentians are conservative, but they’re humane, and that’s important to us; and we have our intellectual freedom.” The we is personal: Kathy Shaughnessy and Kevin Rioux planned to marry between the time the first class graduated in late July and the beginning of the first semester in late August—not in Rome, which would have been lovely, but in Shaughnessy’s hometown, Baltimore; her family is too large to travel, and marrying without their presence was unthinkable. “I know, Baltimore in August,” Shaughnessy said with a laugh. Her mother suggested several alternative dates, but, “No, it pretty much has to be the sixteenth,” she told her.

  So, between the impending graduation and the marriage of the professors their students called “the special K’s,” jubilation was what I expected to find the next day. Instead I discovered Shaughnessy sitting at a table in the open lounge, stricken. While the librarians and other faculty members had been toiling in Rome, and university administrators were on their way to Italy to celebrate the first graduating class in this program, the library on the St. John’s home campus in Queens was losing some of its space. Now workmen on the upper floors had damaged pipes, flooding the librarians’ offices and soaking some of the stacks and the computer lab and archives downstairs. While she’d been teaching students how to stay wired and connected in a disaster-fraught world, an apparently preventable disaster had devastated the library back home.

  “It will take us years to recover,” Rioux said later, with typical pragmatic directness. “We’ve been told we’ll have to work from home next semester. You can’t have a university of fifteen thousand students without a library. If we didn’t have our online resources, we’d have to shut the university.” The anthropology professor was keeping them posted; his wife, the university’s archivist, was picking through the damaged collections and e-mailing details of the bad news.

  The faculty members worked hard to master their emotions in front of the students. They refused to let the wreckage of their stateside library dim the celebration. The carafe of red wine on the dining table usually sat untouched, but on the last day of classes, wine found its way into the students’ glasses, as a feeling of giddiness began to filter into the halls.

  There were so many priests at the altar of St. Peter’s Pontifical Oratorio Chapel, I felt like I was in a seminary. Everyone wanted to take part in this graduation. In the airy, modern chapel tucked in a fragrant hillside a few miles from the Idente residence, an impressive procession of priests, monsignors, and even a cardinal coming down the aisle opened the ceremonies. They would celebrate Mass, and then we’d all move to the plusher auditorium for the graduation ceremony, first in English, then Italian. The only priest I recognized was Father John-Pierre Ruiz, the director of the Social Justice program; during lunch he had kindly and articulately explained some of the Church’s policies to me.

  Unlike the splendid baroque churches I had visited in Rome, this one was modern polished brick, with a stark crucifix on the altar and a modern metal sculpture running along the walls to indicate the Stations of the Cross—it looked like barbed wire. The interior was no competition for the glory of the suits and saris and academic robes of the graduates and their people. Here they were, in Rome, in a place and time they had struggled to get to, and they were beaming. Parnel’s baby, fussing, was gathered up by one of the new students, who took him to the vestibule and rocked him. In an alcove near the altar, a group
from the Philippines sang the Alleluia joyously and energetically. They ended with multiple harmonies that echoed through the chapel.

  I had sat through a long childhood of Masses, and long ago swore I’d never sit through another, but there I was, believing, if not in the risen Savior, then something. I murmured bits of the old familiar prayers. Jeff Olson sat respectfully, head bowed, while the others knelt or walked up to take Communion; but when one of the priests announced it was time to wish each other peace, I grasped Olson’s hand, and Shaughnessy’s, and Rioux’s, and sought out Saccá’s and the woman who was responsible for the program’s summer home in the Idente residence. “Peace, sister; peace, brother.” I waved to the students across the aisle and they waved back. It was impossible for me not to feel an emotional stake in their struggles and their future peace.

  The frocked men in the front of the chapel had decided beforehand who would give the benediction, who would pass out Communion, and who would deliver the sermon; they had split up the duties, so all could participate. The sermon was assigned to a priest who wasn’t part of the Social Justice group and perhaps didn’t quite understand how it worked. “Our obsession with and dependence on technology is frightening,” he intoned. “BlackBerries, cell phones, the Internet, navigation systems, and remote controls—we are addicted to them. How many hours slip by? Do they make our lives easier? Simpler? Have they freed us for more quality moments, or simply made us busier?” I looked sideways as Shaughnessy sighed beside me. The students listened with deference. Olson’s face betrayed nothing. The librarians had constructed a cyber-network full of those very things that missionaries and human rights workers were using to further their work. Against all odds, and in spite of typhoons, figurative and real, they would stop long enough to celebrate a graduation and a marriage. But they had some work to do with their own people. They had to explain to at least one old-fashioned priest that it was all that technology that made this particular mission possible.

  7.

  TO THE RAMPARTS!

  “There’s a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.”

  The most visible change to librarianship in the past generation is maybe the simplest: librarians have left the building. Waiting behind the reference desk for patrons to approach is old-fashioned. Passive is passé. If people who needed library services are in the streets, that’s where some librarians vowed to be—at any rate, that was the impetus behind Radical Reference. Librarians to the ramparts!

  Spotted in the street at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2008 were several young women carrying signs that read “Street Librarian.” Members of the Minneapolis chapter of Radical Reference, they were armed with iPhones bookmarked to a wiki loaded with information about political candidates and schedules, the Twin Cities, public toilets, fast food, and legal aid. And they were linked on Twitter. “Twitter really saved us a couple of times from dangerous situations,” librarian Wanda Marsolek wrote me. Twitter alerted them to street closings, as well as “where the police were arresting people, and where the police were using force…. Despite the fear of being arrested, tear gassed, having concussion grenades thrown at us and being trampled by horses, I am really glad I was there, to see it firsthand and provide information for those out in the streets.” Her colleague, Lacey Prpic Hedtke, said the decision to take such risks wasn’t difficult. “I’m a librarian…why shouldn’t I do something?” They could help, so they would.

  Radical Reference, the organization that inspired them, was born in the days before the previous Republican convention, when Jenna Freedman, who earned notice in 2003 as one of Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers—young librarians already having an impact on the profession—came up with the idea to provide reference support to the demonstrators. “I was sitting in a No Republican National Convention Clearinghouse meeting and feeling out of it,” said Freedman. “There I was in my thirties, in this room full of twenty-something crusty punks and people who already had their affinity groups—and especially in an activist community, you can’t just say, ‘Hey, I want to help.’ They’ll think you’re a cop, or just weird. So, I thought, ‘What can I do as a librarian?’”

  Freedman has blue hair, or usually she has blue hair, when she gets around to coloring it. She doesn’t do fashion otherwise—“I’m not a panty-hose librarian”—though a feathery boa-like scarf lent a jaunty touch to her black pants and shirt the day I visited her at the Barnard College Library, where she has the eminently respectable job of coordinator of reference services. She’s an academic librarian who has been called an anarchist librarian, not in the sense of bombing the stacks or even causing mischief there—in the sense of sharing information freely, serving people instead of rules (or rulers), and continually questioning authority. Alternate sources of information and culture were her passion. Freedman shared an office, so she found a quiet room where we could talk privately: a supply closet. The librarian who helped propel her colleagues to the streets climbed into the closet behind me and together we relived the largest protest at a convention in U.S. history.

  “People were not excited about the Republicans having their convention in New York City and exploiting the memory of 9/11. There was a lot of anger in libraryland. I had the idea of supporting the demonstration, but I won’t take credit for inventing or coming up with Radical Reference. There were five or six of us at first. As soon as we started putting the word out, people were really excited and rushed in to help.”

  It was clear from the beginning that New York City would be hosting, along with the Republicans, hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators, AIDS activists, militant bicyclists, abortion activists (prochoice and antiabortion), and others. The atmosphere was not expected to be friendly; police would be out in force, not to protect the protesters and their right to free expression, but to arrest them. And since rumors are the engines of mobs, these protesters would need information they could trust.

  Eric Goldhagen, an open-source software designer who later married Freedman, and his colleagues at the Inter-Activist Network helped the core group fashion a website, RadicalReference.info, with the banner “Answers for Those Who Question Authority.” It was classy enough to have its own logo, a lowercase i (the international symbol for information) against a background of six orange bars, the I Ching symbol for “Strong action will be supremely blessed. Keep on.” Activists and independent journalists were encouraged to post questions that this pool of librarians would answer. The librarians’ enticements were wonderfully librarian-like: “We’ve got access to hundreds of expensive subscription databases, and we know how to use them.” From the start, Radical Reference tried to serve activists across the spectrum; the website stated unequivocally that “we provide services regardless of political leaning.” The librarians compiled reference links for the site, with information about alternative libraries, bicycling resources, voting, and the USA Patriot Act, and had the site ready to launch by convention time. After helping fact-check The People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention and running a workshop on fact-checking for independent journalists, the Radical Reference librarians suited up and joined the waves of protesters who swarmed New York late that summer.

  “Librarians by nature are not really confrontational people,” Freedman said. “It’s kind of weird to stand in the street with our little cap or T-shirt, handing things out. And we carried Ready Reference Kits, which were binders that had information like the day’s events and the schedule. We had a map that showed where the bathrooms were. We had the phone number for central booking. We had a little handout on the Patriot Act….”

  They had numbers for emergency legal services, details on area restaurants, copies of laws governing assembly and protest. So they could alert one another to trouble spots and police cordons, they used a mass text-messaging service designed especially for activists, called TXTmob, which inspired Twitter. And they had backup: on-call librarians with computers and access to reliable databases a
nd reference materials. They circulated among and served not just the 500,000 people marching in the United for Peace and Justice protest, but the thousands of other protesters in multiple other actions. (The famous protest at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, by contrast, drew 10,000.) Freedman detailed the experience in her zine. The librarian wrote: “Demonstrators at the RNC outnumbered delegates by some outrageous ratio, and I’m not talking about the half million that were at the big United for Peace demo. I’m talking about the thousands of outside agitators that came into town to tell the Republicans to fuck off…. I’m proud to have been a part of it.”

  Over the next three years, hundreds of librarians, library students, and library clerks joined Radical Reference, and local collectives formed in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Tucson, Austin, and Milwaukee. The idea of librarians serving ad hoc populations like crowds of demonstrators has spread across the country and beyond—there’s even a RadRef chapter in Bangalore, India.

  I was hearing about all this in a badly lit supply closet, among buckets and broken chairs and reams of copy paper, in the neighborhood where student protests had brought Barnard’s brother college, Columbia, grinding to a halt in 1968. Our conversation had a conspiratorial feel, heightened by the fact that we were keeping our voices low in deference to the students and librarians on the other side of the door. “Death to ignorance!” Freedman might have been whispering. “Power to the people! Pssst! Catalog the revolution!”