Three Cheers for the Librarians–Lets Help Them Help Us

Three cheers for the librarians who look after us, whether we know it or not. As a student, teacher, researcher, and citizen I work with a wide range of information resources everyday. Whether I step into a library building or not, a large proportion of those resources are available to me because librarians work to make them available to me. Even when I use resources that come to me without the direct intervention of librarians and library staff, I am benefiting from the worlds of education, research, and democratic governance, including values of access and privacy, that librarians work hard to foster and defend everyday. I cannot say thank you enough for their work.

In his round up on “Anthropology and Open Access” (dealing with HR 3699 and SOPA), Jason Antrosio at Anthropology Report has kindly cited my comment on Ryan Anderson’s Savage Minds post on these themes. Under my own by-line, here is what I said in response to Ryan’s post. (Ryan is the Savage Mind who kindly interviewed me on OA issues in anthropology a while back.)

It is crucial that faculty and graduate students are part of the push back (against SOPA and HR 3699) for a number of reasons. One of which is that we need, in doing so, to give the librarians a morale boost. They have been fighting for us on this front for decades with too few of us knowing or caring about it. They have been getting tired, really tired. The way that, on this one, faculty and graduate students have been unusually vocal, has been encouraging to them. We need their help. Keep it up.

Thankfully tons of smart people have been explaining the problems with H.R. 3699 and SOPA. I could list links all day. If you do not yet know about these issues, dive in quickly and get them figured out.