Maryellen Trautman
The great government documents librarian Maryellen Trautman died on November 17, 2024. She was a pioneer and a protector of government documents as a regional depository librarian in Oklahoma and as a government documents librarian at the National Archives and Records Administration. She was one of the founders of the American Library Association Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) in 1972. Among her many other accomplishments, she served on the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing’s Serial Set Committee where she supported the preservation of the Serial Set.
Senators Markey and Hirono and Representative Adams introduce Public Archives Resiliency Act
This is an interesting development. Senators Markey and Hirono and Representative Adams have introduced the Public Archives Resiliency Act — S. 5531 and H.R. 10383. While this legislation will probably go nowhere under a GOP-majority House and Senate, it is significant that legislators are at least starting to think about the need to fund digital preservation efforts for born-digital government information. Efforts to do this work will need policies like this and long-term funding to sustain the efforts of libraries and archives. Please contact your elected officials and ask them to support this vital and necessary legislation!
Washington (December 12, 2024) – Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions Committee and Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Congresswoman Alma Adams, Ph.D. (NC-12) today introduced the Public Archives Resiliency Act, which would authorize grants to promote preservation, climate resilience, adaption, and continuity of vital government records and protect other records of historical or cultural significance. The legislation would provide funding for public archives, libraries, museums, institutions of higher education, or non-profits that protect these valuable records.
As the climate crisis worsens, the need to protect vital government records from damage and destruction is more urgent than ever. Government records are generated through birth, death, marriage, taxes, military service, education, immigration, property ownership and much more. Far too many institutions that manage these records are at risk of environmental damage and lack resources to protect themselves and their communities. When records are destroyed or become inaccessible, it can delay an individual’s ability to access key government benefits and services, as well as result in the loss of irreplaceable cultural artifacts.
Good Forbes piece on the End of Term crawl
Check out this recent piece in Forbes about the End of Term project (eotarchive.org). And if you’re so moved to help out, you can nominate any federal government url through our handy nomination tool. There’s still time to help us save democracy’s information!
Meet The Citizens Racing To Save Government Websites From Vanishing. Leslie Katz, Forbes, Oct 23, 2024
…With the Nov. 5 election just a week away, they’re harvesting vast amounts of government data before the White House welcomes new residents or former ones in January. The information will live on in the End of Term Web Archive, a giant repository of federal government websites preserved for the historical record as one administrative term ends and a new one begins. Librarians, archivists and technologists across the country join forces every four years to donate time, effort and resources to what they dub the end-of-term crawl, with the resulting datasets available to the public for free…
“Citizens have a right to access information about what their government is doing in their name,” says James Jacobs, a government information librarian at Stanford University, an End of Term Web Archive project partner. “That’s why libraries have long collected these materials to make sure they are organized, preserved and easily accessible for the long term.”
John Oliver on the federal judiciary and the importance of voting
I think John Oliver should run for Congress. He’d be a great public advocate and would do it in an extremely informative and funny way. Take this most recent segment regarding the federal court system and the right wing’s decades-long systematic takeover of the judiciary. Watch on and be sure to vote in November!
Reposting from Information Observatory: “Academic libraries in class society”
A shocking disparity defines the US system of information provision. At one extreme is the multi-trillion-dollar corporate wealth of the for-profit information industry. At the other end is the growing – and deliberately inflicted – poverty of our public information sector. During the past half-century, capital and class together have gravely worsened this disparity.
Scholars have analyzed the depredations visited by the for-profit information industry on the information sphere in general, and libraries in particular. Corporations have enclosed and raided governmental and other public information sites, while doing everything in their power to vilify the belief that information is, and should be, a social good.[1] A recent appellate court decision to ban the Internet Archive from lending out digital copies of half a million books to the public is only the latest troubling example.[2]
Concomitantly, libraries have faced declining budgets which have forced them to significantly hollow out collection development and other public services and relinquish their traditional functions to for-profit database providers and publishers – at the same time expanding and highlighting rare and precious special archival collections to prospective donors and possible political allies as if this is the sole function of libraries.
However, a closely related second factor has also been at work: a class logic. According to Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL),[3] between 2012 and 2021, 31% of full-time librarian positions, 54% of all other paid full-time staff, have been lost in community colleges. At colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, 34.2% of full-time librarian positions, 55.4% of all other full-time staff have disappeared. For universities that grant PhD degrees, by contrast, the number of full-time librarians has actually increased by 13.7% (while all other full-time staff has dropped 21.7%).
Community college libraries serving mostly working-class students, in other words, have been gutted. Eliminating more than 30% of librarian positions and 50% of staff over a decade means that these libraries find it difficult to remain open.[4] And within colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, there is a comparable disparity. For instance, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), has only 9 full-time librarians including cataloging and special collections librarians serving about 16,500 overwhelmingly working-class students[5] – among them 48% are first-generation college students.[6] Since 2019, the library has lost 10 full-time librarian positions to retirement and departure. These positions remain unfilled. Thus, the library is struggling to provide adequate public services like reference and instruction, and is only able to cover the bare minimum of collection development for many subject areas – 30 out of the 58 subjects defined by the library as needed to support dozens of majors, minors, and programs have no subject specialist assigned.[7]
These conditions echo across the country. California State University (CSU), Bakersfield, a 4-year institution with a little over 9000 students – over 50% of them first-generation college students[8] and many hailing from the lower fifth of the income distribution[9] — is served by 10 librarians and a total of 29 library staff.[10] So much for the informational needs and aspirations of first-generation and working-class college students.
The situation at elite private colleges and universities could hardly be more different. Dartmouth College (NH), with an endowment of $7.9 billion,[11] is attended by approximately 6000 students – and sports no fewer than 134 staff including 23 subject specialists.[12] With about 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students[13]and an endowment of $50.7 billion,[14] Harvard has a system of 28 libraries operated by 700 librarians and staff.[15]
It’s not subtle: the starvation of academic libraries that serve working-class students is counterposed to relatively generous support for institutions that cater to the children of the rich – and that sustain high-tech research.
In a radical democratic vision – one that has existed for centuries – the library helps to ground an emancipatory future as an active place for democratic living and learning, where everyday people have equal access to knowledge, and can dream of a different world by equipping themselves with it. To pursue this vision of the library, we need a great array of library workers who acquire, curate, catalog, maintain and preserve, provide instruction about, and circulate knowledge to and for all.
There are enough resources to reverse the current crisis of the library, but this will necessitate reorienting the US government’s priorities away from military spending and corporate subsidies toward social needs. It will also require economic redistribution. The obscene levels of wealth that disfigure today’s society[16] will need to be reduced, via adequate taxation – in order that the bottom half may be elevated, and granted resources sufficient for adequate housing, food, medical care, education, and libraries and public information. An urgent priority within this encompassing program is, once more, the need to democratize our system of information provision.
Special Thanks to James Jacobs from Free Government Information for his insightful comments and feedback.
[1] Anita R. Schiller and Herbert I. Schiller, “Who Can Own What America Knows?” The Nation, April 17, 1982, 461-63; Herbert I. Schiller and Anita R. Schiller, “Libraries, Public Access to Information, and Commerce,” in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, Eds., The Political Economy of Information (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988),146-166; Herbert I. Schiller, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500 (Norwood: Ablex, 1982), 47-77.
[2] David Moscrop, “Copyright Keepers Just Destroyed a Huge Digital Library,” Jacobin, September 20, 2024.
[3] Joshua Kim, “3 Questions on Academic Library Staffing for ACRL’s Mary Jane Petrowski,” Inside Higer Education, February 21, 2023.
[4] These changes are significant even if we take into account there are fewer post-secondary schools compared to 9 years ago, and overall enrollments are down. Worse, hiring temporary part-time and contract workers to manage extremely understaffed libraries is a normalized practice, reflecting the casualization of academic labor across the board.
[5] Queens College at a Glance (2023).
[6] Self-Study Design, Queens College.
[7] Queens College Library Subject Specialists.
[8] California State University, Bakersfield (2024).
[9] David LeonHardt, “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges,” New York Times, January 18, 2017.
[10] Walter W. Stiern Library Directory, California State University (CSU) Bakersfield.
[11] Dartmouth Endowment Report 2023.
[12] Dartmouth University Staff Directory.
[14] Harvard Fact Book: Endowment.
[15] Harvard University Libraries.
[16] Jake Johnson, “’Global Oligarchy’ Reigns as Top 1% Controls More Wealth Than Bottom 95% of Humanity,” September 23, 2024; Oxfam Media Briefing, “Multilateralism in an Era of Global Oligarchy,” September 23, 2024.
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