This article, by Kate DeMeester-Lane, was originally published in the Arizona Daily Star on August 18, 2024.
If you ask staff at the public library what brought them to this work, you get an incredibly wide variety of answers. For some, it is a love of reading and books. For others, it is the equality of access that the library offers and the standing welcome to all in our community. For many, it is the idea of helping people in one of the last free public spaces in our society. For me, it is providing and protecting the access to information that people use to make important decisions.
“Knowledge is power” is a familiar phrase. The recognition of how powerful knowledge can be has a deep history stretching back to ancient cultures around the world, and similar phrases can be found in the Hebrew, Latin and Persian languages. In our modern culture, we need look no further than the rampant attempts at mis- and dis-information to realize that the power of knowledge is not a dusty thing of the past but is still vibrantly alive and well today.
One of my earliest memories is the relief of learning how to read, because I knew that tool unlocked all the information in the world around me. I grew up during the waning days of card catalogs and long before we could all hop online for a quick answer to a question. Even casual research often required substantial effort and persistence. While the process of finding an answer via the computers we carry in our pockets is faster, sorting through the wealth of information online is now where we must be thorough and take our time to get it right. As the head of the library collections and technology for Pima County Public Library, my job is to ensure that we offer the information people seek out. It must be easily accessible in person and available online through equipment we provide. Sometimes information is facts and data, and sometimes it looks like stories and opinions about the world around us. Never in the history of libraries have we had to be so careful about the accuracy of the materials we add to our shelves.
It is no secret that libraries have recently become controversial because we offer stories that center BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people and experiences. We are being asked by some to become complicit in the disenfranchisement of these communities by withholding stories of their struggles and successes. We are being asked to erase knowledge of their resilience and even their very existence from our shelves. This is something that we have not done and will never do, regardless of whose story is being targeted. Each person in our community has a right to see themselves and their story reflected in the body of knowledge we offer at the library, and to be empowered by what they find here.
We know not every book in our collection is for every person; it would be impossible to find even a single book that fit that description, much less all of them. Our commitment is that every person will find what they need on our shelves and be able to freely access it without barriers. This is not new or radical within the profession, it stretches back to the Library Bill of Rights, first adopted by the American Library Association in 1939. Limiting access is an incredibly slippery slope, and once we start down it, there is no stopping the slide. Unless we protect the freedom of each person in our community to read materials they choose for themselves, we ultimately threaten our own capacity to make those choices. It’s not always easy to protect collections that contain opinions and perspectives that I disagree with personally, but I find it deeply fulfilling work to do because I know how transformational the power of knowledge can be for all of us.
Kate DeMeester-Lane graduated with her Master of Arts in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from University of Arizona in 2003 and has worked in libraries for over 20 years. She is currently the head of library collections and technology for Pima County Public Library.
