The College Hill Independent

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Out of the Stacks, Into the Streets
. . . by Erica Sagrans
[Illustration by Changhi Yoon]

For a minute, forget what you know about librarians. Forget the crotchety lady who chastised you for running to the reference desk or shushed you for talking too loudly in the echoing halls. Forget that man at the John Hay who wouldn’t let you check out comics or ‘erotic literature,’ insisting you read it in a silent glass-enclosed room.

Instead imagine the radical potential that libraries and librarians possess to change the world. Radical librarians emphasize the political nature of access to information, busting out from behind stacks and reference desks to share knowledge, fight censorship, and connect people with the information they are looking for. Acts of guerilla DIY librarianship have included setting up mini-reference desks at WTO protests and the Burning Man festival, resisting corporatization of media by advocating for small independent publishers, pushing for bilingual materials, and bringing books to prisoners. Radical librarians are critiquing and restructuring the very methods by which libraries classify information, attempting to make these systems less biased and censored, and more user-friendly and accessible to all sorts of people.

Chris Dodge, street librarian
To tell the truth, I knew Chris Dodge as a friend long before I knew he was a guerrilla librarian. This fall I moved to Minneapolis, MN to intern for Utne Magazine, leaving school to live and work in a city where I knew hardly anyone. Chris, Utne’s librarian and manager of one of the largest contemporary alternative periodicals collections around, took me under his wing. If becoming friends with Chris says anything about what it is to be friends with a radical librarian, I recommend finding one, and fast.

Chris knows tons of semi-secrets, great information he’s bursting to share with anyone who’s interested. Right away he told me about the Minneapolis’ best vegetarian Indian restaurant, the women’s book collective, the queer library, the first Basilica cathedral in America, and the black squirrels in the park. He brought me exploring along the banks of the Mississippi to search for caves, to the Latin American marketplace to eat pupusas, and to the collective performance space where he once gave the keynote address for the Twin Cities Anarchist Book Fair. Chris taught me what a gift information can be—the day after I told him stories of my horrific food service jobs, I found an out of print ‘zine by angry waitresses called Eat and Get Out on my desk. After we chatted about religion and sex, (my two favorite topics of the fall,) I received an email directing me to www.datejesus.com.

Yet I soon learned that Chris’ expertise extends far beyond suggesting interesting activities for a lonely girl’s weekend—on a larger scale, he connects people with each other and the information they’re searching for. “I look at it as sowing seeds,” he says. Chris’ eyes light up when he sets out on an investigation, radiating a contagious brand of curiosity and passion.

Call number for a cultural standard
Though I was inspired by Chris’ energy and vast knowledge, I was still a bit skeptical about the political significance of librarianship. With the threat of war looming large, is it really important whether public libraries classify books about old people under ‘seniors’ or ‘aged’? While Chris’ passion isn’t confined to libraries—you can find him protesting the war, waving his “Prune the Shrub/Transplant Bush” sign—he makes a convincing point about how access to information is always central to the political landscape.

First, Chris says, consider the radical nature of public libraries themselves—they are public amidst the increasing privatization of common space, use tax dollars for education, and above all, remain free and open to everyone. Yet libraries have also functioned to set a certain standard for what is culturally acceptable, a standard decided by what they choose to exclude and include in their collections. Chris tells me of his boyhood in Dubuque, Iowa, where Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books weren’t held by the local library because they were considered to be too lowbrow. Most libraries don’t carry sexually explicit materials, and some shy away from sexual education information or books about non-straight sexualities. The default cataloger for the nation’s public libraries, the Library of Congress (LC), retains headings that clearly point at certain norms: Classical music is called simply ‘music’ and other forms are given extra labels such as ‘music, punk’ or ‘music, folk.’ ‘God’ and ‘prayer’ are automatically assumed to be of the Christian version unless specified otherwise. Libraries have traditionally viewed books as their main materials and often ignored emerging media genres—comics and ‘zines, to name a few. Chris points out that in years to come, people who want to research ‘zines will have an easy time finding books about ‘zines, but likely encounter difficulties finding the actual ‘zines as primary sources; because so far libraries have treated ‘zines as too non-traditional to warrant a place in their collections.

Take back the stacks
Before landing a job at Utne, Chris worked at the Minneapolis metro area Hennepin County Library under then-head cataloger Sandy Berman, a legendary radical librarian who famously said, “I can’t have information I know would be of interest to someone and not share it.” During his 26 years at the Hennepin public library, Sandy mobilized a revolution in cataloging. Sandy and Chris’ group of radical librarians (also known as ‘The Sandynistas’) completely overhauled the Library of Congress’s cataloging system for use at Hennepin, replacing old words with more commonly used ones, attempting to get rid of vestigial prejudice in the catalog, and creating new subject headings when it seemed they were necessary for emerging fields. Their April/June 1998 report of new headings included over 200 terms, among them: Internet crime, anal fisting, bistro cookbooks, country music festivals, dental dams, dog astronauts, gay athletic coaches, Jewish-Canadian autobiographies, liquor industry executives, and Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Eventually the Library of Congress followed Hennepin’s pioneering work by adopting certain headings—it inaugurated “Afro-American Philosophers” in 1998, seven years after Hennepin originated the term, it instituted “Food Banks” a year after Hennepin, and adopted the category “Nude Beaches” seven years after Hennepin.

Hennepin soon became recognized nation-wide for its innovative practices, which also included providing subject headings for novels, which made fiction easier to find. This was a step further than the general genres such as ‘science fiction’ or ‘western stories’ used by the LC, and enabled users to search for fiction specifically about ‘girl detectives’ or set in ‘Chicago, Illinois.’

In the words of one former-Hennepin librarian, “Sandy’s work represented what cataloging could be: … an inspired and brilliant example of how cataloging can serve people rather than degrade and insult them. And one must not omit, he demonstrated that cataloging actually can help people find what they are looking for.”

The Sandynistas under attack
Despite the impressive and highly touted work done at the Hennepin County Library, many Hennepin employees simply wanted Sandy to stop being such “a major pain in the ass…an insufferable, self-righteous, unrealistic, naive, head-in-the-clouds idealist who knows nothing about the real world of grind-it-out bibliographic data,” in the words of one anonymous worker.

In 1999 Sandy was forced into retirement by Hennepin management, and just this March the revised library catalog—the updated and expanded headings, the subject access to fiction—was completely and deliberately erased from the Hennepin system when the library joined a large consortium of libraries and decided to standardize its catalog by returning to the old LC headings. As one saddened librarian wrote, “The list of user-centered original subject headings created by (Sandy) and his staff over two and a half decades at Hennepin County Library is now going to be replaced in the catalog by straight LC subject headings…”

Using phrases like “lilluputian thugs” to describe the bureaucracy and data-oriented workers who eliminated the work at Hennepin, radical librarians are angry, and it’s not hard to see why. To name just a few examples, Hennepin has replaced the subject heading ‘Anti-Cancer drugs’ with ‘Antineoplastic agents,’ ‘Menstrual cramps’ is now ‘Dysmenorrhea,’ and ‘Birth defects’ have once again become ‘Abnormalities, Human.’ Though most are not optimistic that Hennepin will reinstate the user-friendly catalog anytime soon, Sandy and others continue to publicize the devastation that occurred, and work to preserve a record of what the Hennepin cataloging system once was.

Catalog under: librarians, radical
Despite their struggles, radical librarians won’t be quieting down any time soon. If the calls and letters Chris receives indicate anything, it’s that there are tons of young activist librarians out there just getting started. Chris keeps me updated on the activities of his radical librarian friends—there’s Jim Danky building an impressive collection of self-published newsletters and ‘zines at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Katia Roberto who had to fight for permission to put up a display for GLBT Pride month at her Illinois library. And as for Chris, though he sometimes dreams of moving to a place with more flowers and lizards than Minneapolis, he’s still advocating for the independent press at Utne, keeping his eyes open for new material to bring into the magazine, and linking people with information through a constant stream of letters, emails, and phone calls.

Chris insists that for every person he connects with, something positive comes back his way in the future. “The expertise of being a librarian is not just knowing a lot of stuff or having a physical collection of books and magazines that are classified so you can go to the shelf and find them… but its about people… connecting books, magazines, films, music, ideas, and knowledge with the people who want (and even need) them. Librarianship of passion. Librarianship of love.”

For more information check out:

Anarchist Librarians
http://infoshop.org/librarians.html

The Renegade Librarian
www.renegadelibrarian.com

Revolting Librarians
http://owen.massey.net/libraries/revolting/index.html

Chris Dodge’s Street Librarian
http://www.geocities.com/soho/cafe/7423/

Good luck cataloging Erica Sagrans B’04.5.

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