In some library land fuckery for early August 2021

It is not often I just open the blog to post something right away, but I had to jump in to share this post from Librarian Shipwreck: "All grievances do, in fact, remain connected."

 

Most of the time I do my best to tune out the drama in library land because more often than not it can be either champagne problems or just petty, but this week upped the ante. We are getting some serious drama and fuckery going on in #libraries and librarianship in the past week or so. So just read the thing. I was not aware of the assholery of the American Historical Society, but I am not surprised. Our Special Collections and Archives here I am sure gets their share of ungrateful and inconsiderate prima donnas who could not care less who keels over as long as they get their precious archival materials. As the writer states, they need to learn that "there is no such thing as a bibliographic emergency. . .". The second story story about the Temple librarian I've spoken of here and there on social media.  

 

The blog post has some very good quotes, but this one really caught my eye as it is something I have pondered often (and I may have written about it on this blog but I honestly do not feel like looking it up now): 

 

"Here’s the commonality: library workers are expendable and we are not trusted. We serve and serve and serve, and when we burn out or just up and die, that’s acceptable and there’s always more cannon fodder to replace us — or maybe the positional will be cut and our overburdened coworkers will have to pick up the slack, because they are expendable, too. Despite what should be seen as a miraculous collective track record of service, we are not trusted to do our work without close oversight from administration, whether the question is remote work or sick time. The fact of being largely a female profession double all these things down, even as they are the general neoliberal worklife condition, and Blackness, queerness, disability and other intersections multiply it more for some of us. Even those closest to us professionally, historians, value their research more than our lives. We are not considered the experts on our own profession, not trusted or allowed autonomy over our work, a resource to be burnt to fuel PR campaigns and university rankings."