Almost ten years ago, they published "Wake Up the Nation: Public Libraries, Policy Making, and Political Discourse" in Library Quarterly.
This article was a call to arms for library and information science (LIS) researchers to more seriously focus "on the impacts of policies and politics on public libraries" and for library professionals to "wake up the nation on the impacts of these policy and political choices related to public libraries." In light of escalating current efforts to ban materials featuring marginalized voices (some of which are calling for criminal prosecution of librarians), the arguments made in that article are more relevant today than ever before.
In this session, these authors will discuss their decade old arguments and recommendations against the backdrop of current events - what has changed since then and what has remained the same? - and share their thoughts about what (LIS researchers and library professionals) can do now to wake up the nation to this most recent round of threats to intellectual freedom.
Paul Jaeger, John Bertot, and Ursula Gorham
Paul Jaeger is a Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland (the iSchool) and Co-Director of the Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC), John Bertot is a Professor in the iSchool and the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, and Ursula Gorham is a Senior Lecturer in iSchool and the director of the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program.