For the majority of the sites I visited data collection worked out as planned. A letter was sent in the mail in advance, e-mails and phone calls followed, interviews were scheduled, and site visits were arranged. Sometimes a given site did not respond immediately, usually under the impression that they would not qualify as a result of a lack of cutting-edge technology programs, but in most of these cases once I made it clear my interests were in the full scope of activities and perspectives they were willing to receive me.
Still, there were a few locations I could not visit. Rather than drop or dismiss these places as “outliers” I thought it more appropriate to consider them as an opportunity to discuss some of the gaps and drawbacks in my research and analysis. It would be too easy to let them be yet again skipped over and not turn a critical eye on myself as a biased investigator. It’s easy to talk about successes. It’s not easy to talk about challenges, but it’s still possible. What this section focuses on is neither: these are occasions when my framework or approach didn’t work, along with some valuable findings related to this.
HAZARDOUS ASSUMPTIONS
The first of the missed sites came up quickly, when I was declined by Glassbrook Public Library. My standard preliminary research on Glassbrook found a library located on the edge of a river in a town with a continually conflicted history. According to census data it fit most qualifications of what I had considered to be ‘underserved’ demographics: an ethnic minority community in a rural setting with high rates of poverty and unemployment and also troubled by crime and a declining population. A few months prior they had been assisted by the US Army Corps of Engineers, when the decision was made to destroy a set of levies to alleviate flooding, at the cost of destroying several nearby farms on the other side of the river. News coverage of the event suggests that the occurrence revealed tensions related to racism in the region. I later discovered a recent documentary about the town, read through a number of articles, and found additional evidence of severe poverty, racism, and, most pertinent to me, a distrust of outsiders. The community had been mistreated as a sort of spectacle by many writers, chronicled as a kind of abandoned town and preserved piece of history. A telling example was the Tired Pony, a Portland-style coffee shop, bookstore and co-op, pushed by Redditors,68 that had tried to establish itself in the town to help the locals but eventually failed due to a lack of support, theft and other economic challenges. What the people of Glassbrook wanted and needed, it seems, was not an indie coffee shop, but at the same time the majority of the material written about them online was from outsiders, not locals, so it was hard to tell.
To me, this didn’t seem like a fair evaluation. Who was I to walk in to the town with assumptions about the importance of the internet, digital tools, the needs of patrons and questions about the
68 Reddit is an online news website with a series of niche communities.
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roles of the library? It’s difficult to determine when inquiry about an institution as a collection of people, policies, activities and infrastructure becomes an unwarranted judgment from a privileged outsider culture. The ALA provides guidelines for global service objectives but the trouble with such sweeping standards is they may not adequately or appropriately address the conditions in every given local context. Let me be clear: I can’t surmise anything about Glassbrook Public Library’s reasons for declining participation in the study or make any significant statements about its services, but this does function as an important reminder of my position as a researcher as an outsider who may come from a dramatically different culture or background, a status that will impact me even before I set foot in a given library. It is also a demonstration of the sheer range of conditions in which public libraries operate. Any discussion about the service roles of the public library likely includes assumptions about what libraries should do and what libraries are capable of doing, but not all libraries may match these assumptions and we can likely learn a great deal from those who don’t.
DIFFERING CONDITIONS
I ran into similar circumstances during my work with public libraries in the Hopkinton county area. At one library, the director was changing over at the time of my contact. They were so hard to get in touch with over the phone and e-mail (presumably busy and understaffed) that I eventually had to give up trying to track down a good time for an interview, though I was approved for a visit. I did stop at the site over a year later just to make my regular observations: number of computers, layout, software, literature on computer classes and so on, which still contributed to the comparison in the next section. Upon walking in, before I could say anything, I was told that the event I was looking for was just down the hall. From what I could tell I was the only white person in the front of the library at the time; peering down the hallway to the meeting room, I saw a notice about some kind of political organizing meeting. Obviously I wasn’t a regular at the library, but I also believe I was at least partially identified as an outsider because of the color of my skin and because of the way I was dressed. I don’t feel this was any sort of negative prejudice, probably just an assumption of why a person like me might be in this library, but I found this was often the experience when I visited libraries in underserved communities—I was pretty obviously identified as an outsider right as I walked in. This underscores my prior point more poignantly: my ability to get robust or reliable
data from interviews and observations was in part influenced by my ascribed identities and cultural fluencies.
While waiting for a computer guest pass at the same library I found myself in line behind an elderly lady who was asking the staff person at the desk for help to scan an advertisement for a choir. The staff person explained that they didn’t know how to help, and when I later asked them how many of the library staff were qualified to help patrons with computers they told me just one, and gave the name of the director. When I probed about activities I was told the director was responsible for all of the technology-related programming in the library. Meanwhile, I felt bad for the patron who wanted to scan the flyer, so I attempted to help them, but we found the power supply for it was missing and the computer it was next to didn’t boot. This story has at least two points of significance. First, it appears like it could be another example of a library where only one person has the skills to help with even just computer basics. This isn’t all that unusual, except this library served a much larger population and employed a much larger staff than most of those that are so limited by human-capital. Second, my ability to observe and inquire was often altered by my interest in actively helping to solve problems, even when I wasn’t asked to. This reflects a sense of privilege and agency, but also a potential blindness: I may be sometimes too interested in unpacking the problem to solve it, rather than see how they make sense of and otherwise deal (or not deal) with it. Had I asked the staff person who helps patrons before I went about trying to solve all of the issues I might have yielded a very different response. Similarly, if I had been more clearly from their community or shared other identities in common they might have presented other information.
Another library in the area made clear other kinds of issues that might make research difficult. While driving around looking for its location I became lost as a result of outdated Google Maps records. My car was rushed by a man who tried to open the door at an intersection and while driving in an adjacent neighborhood in what appeared to me to be a low-income housing project I was told “Go home white boy, you’re in the wrong part of town.” When I did finally get to the library, which I had never been able to reach through phone calls or e-mail, I found the door was guarded by an angry looking stray dog. I couldn’t find any hours on the door and it looked like it was closed, and had been so for some time.
I don’t write about these experiences to solicit pity or to provide fuel for negative judgments. I include them because many researchers would dismiss them as ‘outliers’ or scrap them on the basis of not being rich enough in data. These experiences help illustrate some of the sheer variance in conditions and opportunities present in Illinois for those seeking to gain access to library and computing resources. The state ranges from some of the richest communities in the nation, found in places like DuPage County, to the places like the urban prairie of Hopkinton County. Part of the reason locations like the Hopkinton area remain underserved is that they are not always fully included in research studies, like this one, that may inform policy makers and program developers. The last location in the area that I visited wasn’t an official library. Instead, it was a volunteer operation that had risen up in place of a library that had closed its doors a few years ago due to financial issues. It was housed in a converted church, adjacent to a youth outreach program tied to a larger non-profit, and was run by volunteers. A couple of years prior I had visited the operation to help update and install computers and to assist volunteers in organizing and cataloging their book collection. I couldn’t formally interview the library staff because there were none, officially, but I did talk to some of the people there and go through my usual process of computer observation, note-taking, photos, literature collection and map-making, with permission. Despite little funding or formal organization, this library had at least still managed to remain open and had even taken steps to better integrate the youth organization and the library service area over the years. The sign-in sheet was perhaps most-telling, however. Patrons were required to sign-in and indicate what they were doing during their visit, and a look down the sheet for the day revealed about a dozen names, all with the description of either ‘volunteer’ or ‘computers’ written next to their name. This isn’t to say that the book collection was going unused, as this was simply a one-time visit, but it does suggest that the computers were a pretty important part of the library’s service. A look-over of one of the workstations exposed they hadn’t had their software updated very much since my earlier involvement, and had numerous personal document and image files saved to them, but they clearly were still working and being used. My impression was that at least in the case of this volunteer library, even in its barest form with minimal support, the library provided three identifiable services: a place to hang out, books and magazines to read, and public internet access and computing.
INFRASTRUCTURE ALONE…
There was one other location outside of Hopkinton County that I would have liked to include stories from but was unable to. It was dropped due to incomplete data in the form of corrupted interview recording files, but is worth mentioning because the site still held a valuable lesson. This library was one of the few with ample space and also had a larger staff size and funding base. They faced significant challenges in terms of serving a sporadic and often low-income population, but the way they handled it seemed to account for some portion of their struggles.
A restructuring in years prior had resulted in the closure of one or more branch locations, and the echoes of this decision were still evident. The tone of the interview with the director (the only data that wasn’t corrupted) was unusual, as the central issue with this library is that it seemed to situate itself as in direct competition with other social institutions in the area. It went beyond just the fear of competition with other organizations, but actually included direct acknowledgment of and participation in rivalry itself. As a result, the school system and even nearby bookstores chose to independently run their own reading programs and local political disputes disrupted literacy initiatives involving the library. An informal “local” library had cropped up on the edge of town and other people were willing to drive to alternative library locations out of protest. Evidence from the interviews strongly suggested the library was struggling with community relations.
The director identified the purpose of library programs as primarily a way to drive circulation counts, their main chosen measure of success, which generally overall resulted in less programming. They explained their library had been positioned differently in previous years, as another director before her had put it, as a “cultural center,” which they had intentionally moved away from. When I asked about the conception of the library as a production space or place of education, I was told that it was to be a “school of the people” but not a social services center, and that they were not in the business of actively teaching but instead providing a kind of self-service location. There were small sets of isolated computer carrels scattered about, but no dedicated instruction space, save for a small appointment-based career center, which was matched by minimal digital literacy related programming. They had a teen space filled with magazines, but noted that it generally went unused, as it also wasn’t a significant place for programming. The director felt that “kids these days” just were not able to sit down and read like they used to. She further explained that people who did not attend their location often did so because they were 152
looking for a smaller, “local” feeling atmosphere where they could feel at home and connect to people they knew. The director then went on to speculate about the poor qualifications of the people volunteering at other informal library locations, suggesting that their backgrounds were questionable and that they might cause people to receive a bad impression of librarianship. It might be possible to condemn this library as a “straw man” of sorts, but we should think about it in the same way other challenged locations have been considered: in terms of its context. The difference is that in this case the library itself was not subject to severely limited infrastructure or human resources, but instead the philosophy and policies embedded in it as an institution made it less compatible with my set of questions and assumptions about digital literacy. Their emphasis was fundamentally on the storage and circulation of traditional library materials.
WHAT THIS ALL MEANS
This gathering of missed data-collection locations is itself a source of information. In order to foster digital literacies libraries must have regular open hours, operational equipment, staff with time, skills and resources to enable activities to happen, and, most of all, an acceptance of the importance of emerging norms of technological, educational and civic participation. It is not a coincidence that some of the most low-income communities with the largest proportions of African American populations were those with libraries not well represented in my study. Their views and understandings of digital literacy, their strategies and programs related to digital tools and their efforts towards community engagement are not accounted for as dedicated sections in the site findings, and as a result this research suffers. I cannot claim to tell a comprehensive story of these underserved communities, by any means.
My identities and perspectives as a researcher are notable in part because they limit my chosen method of research. I’m a resident of Illinois, but not of most of these individual communities, and I most certainly have biases and privileges. For many research sites I could visit and assume a regularized level of professionalization amongst LIS-educated individuals, but not all sites had people with MLIS degrees, and many of them had earned their degrees three or even four decades ago and had not kept in touch with the academic culture or network. In the case of Aquarin, this de-sync was good, as it allowed them to break institutional and service boundaries, but in the case of most of the libraries that were “incompatible” with the assumptions beneath my method, it
seemed to be more of a problem. This affected my ability to walk in and “talk the talk” in a significant way, about as much as being white, male, relatively affluent or young might have. Ultimately, I think this all demonstrates the importance of context and culture in determining library service roles. Many of the patrons in these communities did not choose to—or were unable to—spend limited financial resources on internet service at home, though some may have had it through cell phone service. A few years prior I went door-to-door collecting survey responses for a broadband grant proposal targeting a nearby region and about half of the respondents I spoke to indicated they simply didn’t use the internet on a regular basis, either by lack of need, interest or access. It seems absurd to talk about ideas of helping patrons like this build their own personal website, program an Arduino,69 or use internet databases or e-books in place of visiting a library in search of physical materials. This is not to say they couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to ever do these things, it’s instead to stress that all of my exciting talk about digital literacies is housed within certain assumptions of culture that may preclude those in less-privileged areas. The gap is illustrated through my personal identity as a researcher and LIS professional, in terms of socio- analytic categories such as race, class, age and other possible identifiers, and also through policies, expectations and structural conditions that determine life for those facing structural oppression in this part of our state. It serves as a reminder that the role of the public library, in fostering digital literacies or doing anything else, needs to be determined by the context of the community. On the one hand we can look at a library’s ability and willingness to conduct community engagement, but on the other we can look at a community’s capacity or opportunity to have a functional library and