INTERVIEW
Front line of library advocacy is close to home
A library-focused advocacy organisation, launched in the US just two years ago, already has ebook legislation waiting to be voted on in two states with six more in the pipeline. Jennie Rose Halperin, Executive Director, explains how Library Futures, a project of New York University’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, has achieved so much so quickly.
THE reasons for defending access to information can sound abstract: “There’s a lot of abstraction when you’re doing policy at a global scale,” Jennie says, “There’s a lot of concep- tualisation – that things need to scale, or they need to be big, or they need to hit with wide-ranging impact. This makes the policy work abstract, but even more crucial that it shows its value for real people.”
The practical solutions to some of the problems that Library Futures is dealing with can feel distant and convoluted – like developing legislation to stop publishers side-stepping existing laws that protect libraries. This includes the ebook bills that have been recently amended to follow Library Futures’ suggestions and which are now making their way through the state legislatures of Hawaii and Massachusetts (with more states in the pipeline). Like their predecessor bills in New York and Maryland, the publishing industry will try and stop them. But the form of these bills has been able to evolve due the stamina of the US library advocacy ecosystem which, as well as being proactive, has carried on despite setbacks.
Fundamental not abstract
Jennie has personal experience that keeps the abstractions and complexities of the work tethered to reality.
“My mother was sick for 26 years before she passed. In 2018 she had her fi nal health
28 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Senior Reporter, Information Professional.
scare. I had doctors calling me asking questions that I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t gain access to many of the materials on her disease.
“Loving someone and caring for someone with a very rare disease while knowing there is research out there that I can’t access didn’t feel right at all. Some of the things we went through were things that we shouldn’t have had to go through, and I do think that’s at least partially because of the way that research and knowledge information are not accessible.
“Heather Joseph, one of our board mem- bers, says it best – ‘access to information is increasingly available to people, not through a library card or a student ID, but instead through a credit card’. What we’re seeing is that quality information is increas- ingly economically inequitable.”
March 2023
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