Stoking creative fires: Counting down to Public Domain Day 2026

Posted on November 12, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Until I saw it performed earlier this month, I had doubts that one could successfully adapt an unthemed magazine issue into a stage play. But that’s what the New Classics Collective did with the first and only issue of Fire!!, a literary magazine “devoted to younger Negro artists” published in Harlem in 1926. The play, which premiered at the Quintessence Theatre in my Philadelphia neighborhood, laid a light dramatic frame over a set of performances of plays, poems, stories, drawings and essays from the magazine’s sole issue, including early work by authors like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston who are still known to many readers today.

As a review in fhe Philadelphia Inquirer notes, the play, like the magazine issue that inspired it, is a bit of a hot mess as a whole, but has a lot of talent going into its various parts, and it impressed a sold-out multiracial audience the night I went. The magazine itself perished after its first issue, after a fire destroyed the publication’s office. But both the then-new magazine and the new play that’s just been created from it are bold creative experiments, and I’m confident that the people who produced and experienced the play will go on to create more and better work, whether it’s new versions of what I saw in the play’s premiere, or other work inspired by it, just as the authors and artists in the magazine did.

Along with the people who produced it, we have the public domain to thank for the experience. All 1926 publications joined the public domain in the United States just a few years ago. That makes it possible for anyone who’s found an unburnt copy of Fire!! to digitize it and put it online without needing permission from anyone, as several online book collections now have done. And it means that the New Classics Collective, or anyone else intrigued by the magazine’s content, can freely adapt and repurpose it as they like, without needing to work out deals with all of the creators whose works were adapted for the play. These new versions will have their own copyrights for a time, just as the original 1926 pieces did. But eventually, when they too join join the public domain, they will be free for all of us to remember, share, preserve, and renew as part of our common cultural heritage.

Fifty days from today, the public domain will grow further for many people around the world. In the United States, the last copyrights for 1920s publications (except for sound recordings) joined the public domain here last year. This coming January 1, a new wave of copyright expiration will reach the start of the 1930s, with all remaining publication copyrights from 1930 expiring (as well as 1925 sound recording copyrights). And starting tomorrow, I’ll be featuring selected works that will be joining the public domain here, in short daily posts that will appear on this blog, and also on some social media networks. On Mastodon and other services on the “fediverse“, you can follow this blog by following the user @everybodyslibraries.com, or the hashtag . I’ll also boost the posts from my own personal Mastodon account (https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom). That account uses the Bridgy Fed service to connect to Blue Sky, where I believe you should be able to follow the user @JMarkOckerbloom.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy. I’m not aware of any way to automatically get my posts on other large commercial social media, but folks relying on sites dependent on the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg may want to diversify their information sources in any case.

If you follow my posts, I hope you’ll hear about a number of works and creators you know and love, as well as ones you might not be familiar with. You can get an even more diverse and inclusive set of works and perspectives if you also check out other sources that will be promoting the public domain (which I expect to include Wikipedia, the Public Domain Review, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and the Internet Archive as we get closer to the new year). Enjoy the countdown!

Posted in online books, open access, publicdomain, sharing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Will universities let Trump dictate what their libraries can do?

Posted on October 3, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As has now been widely reported, the White House has sent a number of universities, including the one I work at, a set of terms it wants them to agree to, which indicate that not doing so may mean they “forego federal benefits”. It’s not entirely clear what criteria were used to select the universities, though I suspect in my university’s case it may have had something to do with its recent willingness to give in to earlier demands from the Trump regime when it looked like the only community members they’d have to sell out were their transgender student athletes.

Now, as Martin Niemöller’s readers could have predicted, they’re coming back for more. As I write this, I’ve heard no word from our university administration, either in response or acknowledgement, but we also didn’t hear a lot from them before they made their previous deal with the White House. (Another university’s board chair, though, suggested eagerness to comply.)

I am happy to see that a number of our faculty have been quick to call attention to the proposal’s threats to the academic freedom it claims to champion. Notable early responses include the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee’s statement (with its accompanying petition that Penn community members can sign) and Professor Jonathan Zimmerman’s op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which notes some of the traps the agreement would set for universities that sign on to it.

But it isn’t just university faculty and research centers that would be muzzled by the agreement. The libraries would be too. That’s the implication of section 4 of the proposal, which mandates that “all of the university’s academic units, including all colleges, faculties, schools, departments, programs, centers, and institutes” comply with what the White House calls “institutional neutrality”. University libraries are among those centers, and the proposal says they would have to “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.”

Academic libraries are full of speech relating to societal and political events that don’t have.a “direct impact on the university”. It’s obviously in many of the books in our collection, which deal with societal and political events of all kinds. But it’s also in what we do to build our collections, put them in context, and invite our community to engage with them. It’s in the exhibits we create, the web pages we publish, the events we host, and the speakers we invite. Much of it is usually not particularly controversial; I’ve heard no protests about our Revolution at Penn? exhibit, for instance. But exhibits honestly dealing with revolution cannot avoid talking about political events, and while that might be welcome when they discuss how Revolutionary leaders fought for America’s freedom, we’ve seen how the White House reacts when they also discuss how they denied some Americans’ freedom. (I’ll note that a similar subject is also addressed in another exhibit our library hosts.)

The proposal also calls for “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully… belittle… conservative ideas”. Many of the recent calls to ban books in US libraries and schools are the ideas of self-proclaimed conservatives, and libraries of all kinds speak out against these “societal and political” events. To date, most American research libraries have not yet been directly impacted by these bans, which have largely been imposed on public and K-12 school libraries. But they still have every right to object to them, and this proposal could easily be used to chill such objections. Indeed, much to my chagrin, even without this agreement my university’s library has already taken down online statements championing other important library values, out of concern over government reaction. I hope the statements will return online before long, but agreeing to the White House’s new terms would increase, rather than reduce, an already unacceptable expressive chill.

Research libraries also cannot assume their own collections will be safe from censorship, should their universities sign on to the White House’s proposal. Recently a controversial Fifth Circuit court decision upheld a book ban in part by accepting an argument that “a library’s collection decisions are government speech”— which is to say, official speech. The White House could use this argument to interfere with collection decisions they also consider to be official institutional speech on societal and political events, should a library’s sponsoring institution sign on to this agreement.

A university might argue that some of these restraints on library activities and collections aren’t a reasonable interpretation of the terms of White House proposal. But the agreement takes the decision on what’s reasonable out of the university’s hands. Instead, “adherence to this agreement shall be subject to review by the Department of Justice”, which has the power to compel the return of “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation”, large or small, whether in the library or elsewhere. The Department of Justice is not an agency with particular expertise in education, librarianship, or research. And it’s also no longer an agency independent of the White House, and a number of commentators (including some former GOP-appointed officials) have noted that it is now carrying out “vindictive retribution” against Donald Trump’s enemies.

Academic libraries are often called “the heart of the university” because of how their collections, spaces, and people sustain the university’s intellectual life. As I’ve shown above, both the terms of the White House’s proposed agreement and its context threaten to cut off the free inquiry, dialogues, and innovation that our libraries sustain. Universities that accept its extreme demands even as a basis for negotiation, rather than completely rejecting them, risk being distracted about the shape of the noose they are asked to get into. They should refuse the noose outright.

Posted in censorship, crimes and misdemeanors, libraries | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Meet the people behind the books

Posted on August 19, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Today I’m introducing new pages for people and other authors on The Online Books Page. The new pages combine and augment information that’s been on author listings and subject pages. They let readers see in one place books both about and by particular people. They also let readers quickly see who the authors are and learn more about them. And they encourage readers to explore to find related authors and books online and in their local libraries. They draw on information resources created by librarians, Wikipedians, and other people online who care about spreading knowledge freely. I plan to improve on them over time, but I think they’re developed enough now to be useful to readers. Below I’ll briefly explain my intentions for these pages, and I hope to hear from you if you find them useful, or have suggestions for improvement.

Who is this person?

Readers often want to know more about the people who created the books they’re interested in. If they like an author, they might want to learn more about them and their works– for instance, finding out what Mark Twain did besides creating Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. For less familiar authors, it helps to know what background, expertise, and perspectives the author has to write about a particular subject. For instance, Irving Fisher, a famous economist in the early 20th century, wrote about various subjects, not just ones dealing with economics, but also with health and public policy. One might treat his writings on these various topics in different ways if one knows what areas he was trained in and in what areas he was an interested amateur. (And one might also reassess his predictive abilities even in economics after learning from his biography that he’d famously failed to anticipate the 1929 stock market crash just before it happened.)

The Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons communities have created many articles, and uploaded many images, of the authors mentioned in the Online Books collection, and they make them freely reusable. We’re happy to include their content on our pages, with attribution, when it helps readers better understand the people whose works they’re reading. Wikipedia is of course not the last word on any person, but it’s often a useful starting point, and many of its articles include links to more authoritative and in-depth sources. We also link to other useful free references in many cases. For example, our page on W. E. B. Du Bois includes links to articles on Du Bois from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, BlackPast, and the Archives and Records center at the University of Pennsylvania, each of which describes him from a different perspective. Our goal in including these links on the page is not to exhaustively present all the information we can about an author, but to give readers enough context and links to understand who they are reading, and to encourage them to find out more.

Find more books and authors

Part of encouraging readers to find out more is to give them ways of exploring books and authors beyond the ones they initially find. Our page on Rachel Carson, for example, includes a number of works she co-wrote as an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as a public domain booklet on her prepared by the US Department of State. But it doesn’t include her most famous works like Silent Spring and the Sea Around Us, which are still under copyright without authorized free online editions, as are many recent biographies and studies of Carson. But you can find many of these books in libraries near you. Links we have on the left of her page will search library catalogs for works about her, and links on the bottom right will search them for work by her, via our Forward to Libraries service.

Readers might also be interested in Carson’s colleagues. The “Associated authors” links on the left side of Carson’s page go to other pages about people that Carson collaborated with who are also represented in our collection, like Bob Hines and Shirley Briggs. Under the “Example of” heading, you can also follow links to other biologists and naturalists, doing similar work to Carson.

Metadata created with care by people, processed with care by code

I didn’t create, and couldn’t have created (let alone maintained) all of the links you see on these pages. They’re the work of many other people. Besides the people who wrote the linked books, collaborated on the linked reference articles, and created the catalog and authority metadata records for the books, there are lots of folks who created the linked data technology and data that I use to automatically pull together these resources on The Online Books Page. I owe a lot to the community that has created and populated Wikidata, which much of what you see on these pages depends on, and to the LD4 library linked data community, which has researched, developed, and discussed much of the technology used. (Some community members have themselves produced services and demonstrations similar to the ones I’ve put on Online Books.) Other crucial parts of my services’ data infrastructure come from the Library of Congress Linked Data Service and the people that create the records that go into that. The international VIAF collaboration has also been both a foundation and inspiration for some of this work.

These days, you might expect a new service like this to use or tout artificial intelligence somehow. I’m happy to say that the service does not use any generative AI to produce what readers see, either directly, or (as far as I’m aware) indirectly. There’s quite a bit of automation and coding behind the scenes, to be sure, but it’s all built by humans, using data produced in the main by humans, who I try to credit and cite appropriately. We don’t include statistically plausible generated text that hasn’t actually been checked for truth, or that appropriates other people’s work without permission or credit. We don’t have to worry about unknown and possibly unprecedented levels of power and water consumption to power our pages, or depend on crawlers for AI training so aggressive that they’re knocking library and other cultural sites offline. (I haven’t yet had to resort to the sorts of measures that some other libraries have taken to defend themselves against aggressive crawling, but I’ve noticed the new breed of crawlers seriously degrading my site’s performance, to the point of making it temporarily unusable, on more than one occasion.) With this and my other services, I aim to develop and use code that serves people (rather than selfishly or unthinkingly exploiting them), and that centers human readers and authors.

Work in progress

I hope readers find the new “people” pages on The Online Books Page useful in discovering and finding out more about books and authors of interest to them. I’ve thought of a number of ways we can potentially extend and build on what we’re providing with these new pages, and you’ll likely see some of them in future revisions of the service. I’ll be rolling the new pages out gradually, and plan to take some time to consider what features improve readers’ experience, and don’t excessively get in their way. The older-style “books by” and “books about” people pages will also continue to be available on the site for a while, though these new integrated views of people may eventually replace them.

If you enjoy the new pages, or have thoughts on how they could be improved, I’d enjoy hearing from you! And as always, I’m also interested in your suggestions for more books and serials — and people! — we can add to the Online Books collection.

Posted in data, discovery, libraries, metadata, online books, wikipedia | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Expanding access to current scholarship with JSTOR’s open access books

Posted on March 25, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

We’ve recently added more than ten thousand freely readable recent books from academic publishers to the extended shelves of The Online Books Page. These online titles are provided by JSTOR’s Open Access Books collection, and represent the first large-scale automated inclusion of new monographs to our catalog. We’ll be updating the listings from this collection on a regular basis. (Most of our extended shelves imports, which also include collections like HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, get refreshed about once a month.)

We’ll also continue to add individual recent academic books of interest, both from that collection and others, to our curated collection. (You’ll see individually-chosen additions in our new books listing.) Automated addition of JSTOR’s open access books will let us include many more new titles than we’d be able to do manually by ourselves. They’ll help our site’s readers find up to date information from experts on many subjects, complementing the historical sources and other older books also available in our catalog. (As always, I recommend that information seekers also consult their local libraries to get a fuller understanding of the subjects our collection covers, since local libraries have many copyrighted books we can’t offer for free reading on The Online Books Page. But we now also have a growing number of recent books you’re not likely to find, or obtain as easily, in your local library.)

A growing number of academic and peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes are now available through open access. The Directory of Open Access Books now lists over 90,000 of them, and the related OAPEN site offers direct downloads of many such books as well, as do many individual publisher sites. We may expand our automated listings in the future to cover a wider array of open access academic titles. But I consider JSTOR’s collection to be a good starting point for automated imports, both because it includes over 140 high-quality publishers, and because it provides high-quality metadata. That makes it relatively easy to integrate their offerings with the other books in our catalog, using similar author and subject headings, and avoiding redundant listings. As always, our “extended shelves” imports are subject to change and not guaranteed to be as persistent as the “curated collection” listings we catalog ourselves. But you can always request that we add specific titles you’re interested in to our curated collection, whether from JSTOR’s offerings or elsewhere.

JSTOR has a growing collection of information resources that are freely and openly available to all readers (as well as resources they offer by subscription or by registered access). Along with JSTOR’s open access books, we also link to issues of many of the serials JSTOR offers, sometimes via JSTOR’s own Early Journal Content offerings, sometimes via other online providers. We’re also continuing to document the public domain status of serials from JSTOR and other providers in our Deep Backfile knowledge base, (You can use the “Contact us” links in our Deep Backfile tables to let us know about particular serials you’re interested in, or for which you have information that we could use.)

My thanks to JSTOR, and to a growing number of publishers and authors, for making current scholarship freely available and discoverable!

Posted in metadata, online books, open access, serials, sharing, Uncategorized, university presses | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Support the IMLS

Posted on March 23, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

If you’ve found useful the many mid-20th century serials that are now freely readable online through The Online Books Page, you can thank the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The IMLS (as it’s generally known) funded the completion in 2018 of a survey of copyrights I led for serials published before 1950. The completed survey made it possible for the first time to quickly ascertain the public domain status of decades of serials. It also laid the groundwork for our bigger Deep Backfile project that now documents rights and free online availability for well over 10,000 serials. I’d say that’s a pretty good return on a $25,000 IMLS investment.

The IMLS has made that kind of investment many times over, with libraries and museums across all 50 states. The IMLS makes a lot of mostly modest grants for projects and programs that make a big difference in the communities libraries and museums serve. You can read about a sampling of them in Devon Akmon’s recent Conversation article. Or you can ask your local librarian or museum curator. They may tell you how the IMLS supports them providing access to information online, promoting literacy, preserving unique parts of our country’s cultural heritage, and many other functions. They do it with a budget that requires less than $1 per American per year. It’s hard to imagine a more efficient use of government funds.

Despite its efficiency, the IMLS has been a recurrent target for elimination. The first Trump administration proposed eliminating the IMLS starting with its first budget request. But Congress listened to its constituents and continued to fund it. This time, however, Trump has tried to shut it down on his own, without involving Congress. He issued an executive order for IMLS’s activities to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”, aiming to “effectuate an expected termination” of the agency. He also appointed a new acting director who’s pledged to act “in lockstep with this Administration” to carry out the president’s wishes.

So far, Trump has been unable to completely shut down the organization, as he has managed with some other agencies. When IMLS remote staffers got word that the new acting director and some of Elon Musk’s DOGE workers were going to come to the IMLS office last Thursday, they reported to the office in person, many of them dressed in formal (or funereal) black. Faced with more people than DOGE expected, an anonymous staffer related that “instead of laying everybody off immediately they left the building, because they didn’t want to create a scene with us there. Otherwise, they would have locked the doors and taken over our systems and sent a mass notification out to everyone.”

As I write this, IMLS is still operating. But in the next week, the new acting director may try to cut off its funding to libraries and museums. Or, he could try to make libraries and museums receiving funds to change their programs and collection policies to conform to his preferences, or Trump’s. The acting director has already issued a press release expressing his intent to”restore focus on patriotism”. And the president has not been hesitant to cut funding to institutions to make them change their programs to his liking, as some have now agreed to.

But right now, there’s still time for us who value libraries and museums to make our voices heard. We can tell our lawmakers that the IMLS should continue to be fully supported, and should support all the libraries and museums whose diverse programs and collections help make our country great. If you want to participate, see the calls to action at EveryLibrary and the American Alliance of Museums.

Posted in copyright, libraries, preservation, serials | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Not by accident, but by action

Posted on March 2, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I didn’t mean to create a sexist library collection when I set out to build one. But in 1994, when I showed Mary the catalog of online books I’d started the previous year, one of her first questions was “Where are the women?”

It was a fair question. There weren’t that many listed. I’d been cataloging sites like Project Gutenberg, which had only 11 books by women in its first 100 releases, as well as other early ebook sites whose author gender ratio was similar, and sometimes worse. Many early producers of online books gave much of their attention to “canonical” works featured in sets like Great Books of the Western World, which in its first edition of 54 volumes featured no women writers at all.

The works featured in Great Books do indeed deserve to be remembered. But so do many other books, including books by people whose perspectives were left out of Great Books sets. It was clear that to build up a suitably diverse and inclusive set of books for people to read online, we’d need to go out of our way to find and provide more books by those people. Books by the more than half of the world’s population who aren’t men. Books not just by colonizers, conquerors, and enslavers, but by those who were colonized, conquered, and enslaved. Books by the poor in spirit, the mourners, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Books not just by those who recognize the imagery in that last sentence from their own religious traditions, but also by those who follow many other religious and philosophical traditions.

This isn’t simply a matter of fairness to those overlooked authors. As I described in my last post, including them makes my collection better for all readers, by widening the range of works readers can learn from, enjoy, and draw on as sources for their research and their original creations. Diverse, inclusive, equitable, and accessible libraries are better libraries for all.

Mary’s done a lot to improve the coverage of my collection. She created, and still edits, A Celebration of Women Writers, which highlights and links to information about women writers of all sorts, from many different times and places. Her work has encouraged people to put books online by those writers and others. She’s also herself put online more than 400 books by women writers, often in collaboration with transcribers and proofreaders from all over the Internet. And she’s not alone in this work. Not only have there been numerous other projects focusing on women writers, but many general collections have also added more books not just by women but also by other overlooked writers and groups. (Project Gutenberg, I should note, includes a notably larger proportion of books by women in its subsequent releases past their 100th etext. One can also find a few years into their listings a string of several books in a row by Indigenous American authors, another group overlooked in its early offerings, as well as an increasingly diverse set of Black authors beyond its initial focus only on Frederick Douglass.)

While I’ve incorporated the selections of these and other projects, I haven’t given fans of male authors, or white authors, reasonable cause for complaint. There are plenty of books by those authors in my collection, and I’m continuing to add many more of them. I don’t deny any reader’s request for a book on account of the authors’ genders or races. But I also don’t assume there’s no need to do any more work to improve the diversity and inclusiveness of the collection. The percentage of books in my curated collection credited to authors I know to be women, for instance, is now in the low 20s. That’s higher than it was when I started out, and better than it would be if we hadn’t proactively worked to improve its collection diversity, but it’s still well short of gender parity.

Gender and race also aren’t the only things I’m thinking about when I’m working to fill in gaps in my collection. For example, if someone suggests a book that was written in response to another one, I often try to include the book being responded to, if I don’t already list it. Doing so not only often increases the diversity of viewpoints on the topic the books discuss, but it also often helps readers better understand the originally-suggested book. Or, if someone asks for an older book on a topic I don’t have much coverage for, I’ll often also look for newer books on the same topic that might have more up to date or accurate information, or provide a broader set of ideas and perspectives. I also will sometimes try to include different copies of works I already list that are more accessible than the editions I first listed, such as those that have a proofread transcription of a text (and not just images and hard-to-read OCR), or that are more easily downloadable across the Internet.

The Online Books Page is a project staffed by less than 1 FTE, and there’s only so much I can do to improve its diversity, inclusiveness, equity, and accessibility. But what I do manage to do makes it a better library for its readers than it would be if I followed the path of least resistance in maintaining it. Full-service libraries with more FTEs can do more than I can. And they should, because as I’ve said previously, both their words and actions supporting diversity, inclusiveness, equity, and accessibility make their libraries better fulfill their missions to their entire communities.

Posted in libraries, online books, people, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Some important library values

Posted on February 11, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In challenging times, it’s good for organizations to remember what they exist to do, and what values drive what they do. They may be expressed in a variety of ways, but there are often common threads going through them. There are lots of library mission statements, for instance, including the one for the university library where I work, the public library for the city where I live, and the library that Congress funds for the American people. Their three statements are all worded differently, but they all involve engaging with the communities they serve to provide access to knowledge and promote learning and creativity.

Carrying out that mission is easier said than done. In my last post, I linked to a page the American Library Association posted with core values that help us keep focused on our missions. In this post, I’d like to draw attention to an overlapping but slightly different set of values, values that some have recently called into question but that are crucially important to what libraries do.

Good libraries are diverse. We have to be, to do our jobs well. Our communities are diverse, with all sorts of ages, backgrounds, education levels, ethnicities, language and expressive skills, genders, faiths, interests, and needs for knowledge. To serve them all, we need to have collections that reflect and serve the diversities in our communities, and in those who come into our communities. We need to have staff that have the knowledge and rapport to effectively serve our diverse communities. And we need them to create and support programming that meets our communities’ needs.

Good libraries are inclusive. We can’t serve our communities well in their full diversities if we don’t make a conscious effort to ensure we’re including everyone in those communities as best we can. A town’s public library might have a rich and diverse collection of English-language books for preschoolers and their parents, for instance, but if there’s little in its collections or programs for school-age children, young adults, retirees, or readers of non-English languages, for example, it’s not doing its job as well as it should.

Good libraries are accessible. Libraries won’t be inclusive just by our saying they are. When we invite everyone to use our libraries, we have to make that invitation meaningful by ensuring everyone can reasonably and fairly access them. If we really mean to be inclusive for seniors, for example, we need to make sure that the many seniors who have problems with stairs or small type can use the facilities, websites, and books that our library provides. We need to make sure that our community members who don’t read English well have access to books that they can read, in the languages they know, as well as books that will help people learn English and the other languages used in our communities. When we fail at accessibility, we fail at inclusion.

Good libraries are equitable. Equity is important in its own right as a standard of fairness, and also for ensuring and balancing the other values noted above. Not every specific part of a diverse and inclusive library will be for everybody, or should be for everybody. A book about how to work with the Medicare system will generally not be of use to a preschooler, for instance. Nor should it be if it’s going to effectively serve the needs of the retirees the book is meant for. Likewise, an alphabet rhyming book is unlikely to be of interest to a doctor with no particular interest in children. Similarly, some of the specific programs and initiatives that libraries undertake will be of more use and interest to some parts of their communities than others.

An equitable library ensures that its collections and programs, taken as a whole, fairly balance the needs of the various constituencies in its community. As part of that fair balance, an equitable library also takes into account existing inequities and other deficiencies present in its community, and do its part to alleviate them. A library serving a community with higher than usual unemployment, for example, might devote more resources than other libraries might towards materials and programs that help people get jobs. It might also give special attention to parts of the community that have particularly high unemployment rates.

Good libraries reaffirm and clarify their values when challenged. This can be hard to do sometimes. Some people claim that programs involving diversity, inclusion, accessibility, or equity (or various rearrangements or acronyms of those words) are unjustly discriminatory or illegal. If one of our community members comes to us with a concern like that, it may well be worth listening to. It’s certainly possible to imagine illegal or discriminatory actions being taken under the cover of “DEIA”. It’s also certainly possible to imagine illegal or discriminatory actions being taken under the cover of “combating DEIA”. In either case, we need to make sure that our libraries act in a way that serves our communities fairly, and in line with our values (including the four that I explain above). Putting the word “equity”, say, in big letters on our website does not in itself make us equitable. Nor does removing the word from our website. But explaining what we mean by equity, and putting what we explain into action, can.

Actions mean more than words themselves, but words themselves can be important actions. The keepers of libraries have particular reason to be aware of the power of words, since we’re stewards of so many of them. Words can be promises, both explicit and implicit, and when we speak, others hear what we say, and what we don’t say, and expect us to live up to what they hear. We may shy away from some words when we’re worried about what people who give us funds or support may think about them. But when we do, the people in the communities we serve may also hear our new words and draw their own conclusions about them. In our words and actions, we can decide to protect our institutions with the powerful as best we can. Or we can decide to serve our communities in accordance with our missions and values as best we can. Sometimes those aren’t the same choice.

Posted in libraries, people | 1 Comment

Readings for people working for the government

Posted on January 21, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

A key reason I got involved in digital libraries years ago was the promise of reliable information empowering people to be more knowledgeable and responsible in their actions. One of the oldest digital library sites on the Web is Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, which has had the mission since 1992 to make legal information free for all.

Here is some of the information provided on the site that I was recently reminded of:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[US Constitution, Amendment XIV, Section 1]

An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” This section does not affect other oaths required by law.

[5 U.S. Code § 3331 – Oath of office]

Any employee who has authority to take, direct others to take, recommend, or approve any personnel action, shall not, with respect to such authority…. take or fail to take, or threaten to take or fail to take, any personnel action against any employee or applicant for employment because of… refusing to obey an order that would require the individual to violate a law, rule, or regulation.

[5 U.S. Code § 2302 – Prohibited personnel practices, traced through increasingly specific subsections (b), (9), and (D)]

In summary: Most people working for the government have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which supersedes any requirement to follow the orders of any particular person, up to and including the President, when that person’s orders contradict the Constitution. They have the right to refuse to obey an order that violates the law. Furthermore, if the order also violates the Constitution, their oath makes that right a duty.

The Legal Information Institute, and other free digital libraries, also include lots of rulings of the Supreme Court and lower courts. These courts have the last word under American rule of law about the meaning of the Constitution. If the President, or any other individual, claims the Constitution means something it doesn’t say, such as that many people the Fourteenth Amendment says are born citizens aren’t really citizens, and doesn’t have the courts backing up his claim, that claim does not merit any more credence than his claims, say, that some people aren’t really people. Any orders he makes based on those claims do not override the duty of government officials to follow the Constitution, which in the Fourteenth Amendment quoted above guarantees birthright privileges and immunities to citizens, as well as due process and equal protection to “any person”, whether citizen or not.

If you know people who work for the government, or witness people in their work for the government, you have the power, and often the duty, to remind them of their duties and rights regarding the Constitution and the guarantees and obligations it sets.

As former government officials like Jeff Neal point out, even though government officials know about their oaths of office and know that orders can be unlawful, it can still be a challenge to recognize and respond appropriately to unlawful orders. If you’re in need of information to help you determine, and decide what to do about, orders that may violate the law, the Constitution, or your conscience, consider reaching out to a librarian near you for guidance. That’s what we’re here for.

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Let us sing a song of cheer again

Posted on December 31, 2024 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The depths of the Depression would seem an unpromising time to revive the 1929 song “Happy Days Are Here Again”. But after it was played at the 1932 Democratic convention, it caught on as a song of hope for better things to come. And after years of work and struggle, prosperity returned.

Tomorrow this song and the rest of our works join the public domain. And while tough times may still threaten, with work, struggle, and hope we too may bring happy days here again.

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It’s a dead man’s party

Posted on December 30, 2024 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The Disney studio had a productive year in 1929. Along with releasing 12 new Mickey Mouse cartoons, it began a series of one-shot musical cartoons with animation designed to fit the music, instead of the other away around. The “Silly Symphony” series began with “The Skeleton Dance”, a creepy graveyard cartoon set to music Carl Stalling wrote after Disney couldn’t get rights to Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre. Watchable online now, it rises to the public domain in 2 days.

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