Erin Jones – Intellectual Freedom Manual, 11th ed.

Steve Thomas: Erin, welcome to the podcast. 

Erin Jones: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here with you today. 

Steve Thomas: Before we get into the book too much, can you tell me what your path to librarianship is? How did you get into the profession, and where did you start getting interested, in particular, with intellectual freedom?

Erin Jones: Yeah, sure. So I think most of us have pretty circuitous paths into librarianship. There’s either the “I’ve worked in a library and that’s been my only job ever” or “I somehow stumbled into this career and I had no idea I would be there.” I definitely fall into the second category. So I actually have my undergraduate degree, I have a BFA in theater history and dramaturgy. And towards the end of my college career, I started to realize I actually don’t think I want to work in the theater which is a bad time to realize the degree you are about to get isn’t what you wanna do.

So I was talking to a professor and telling her this, and she said have you ever thought about becoming a librarian?” And I said, “No, why would I become a librarian?” She’s like, “Well, we have a master’s degree program here. It’s two more years.” And it had already taken me six years to get through my undergrad. I was in a lot of student loan debt. I was not ready to go and accumulate more. I had just gotten an internship in California. I’m from Arizona. I was at the University of Arizona for my undergrad, and I was like, “I’m gonna take this internship. I’m gonna go to California and see what it’s like.” And so I did that, and turns out, do not like working in the theater.

And so I was up late one night, and that conversation I had with this professor was weighing on me, and so I applied for San Jose State University. I initially thought I would do back end technical work, and so I started my degree with kind of that sort of angle. But I started volunteering at my local public library in the San Luis Obispo County Library System, and the second I started working in public libraries, I was like, “Oh, this is actually where I should be.”

I started with teen librarianship. That was my focus area, teen and children. I got promoted pretty quickly at San Jose Public Library to be their Innovations Manager. And one of the very first projects I undertook, we got a Knight Foundation grant to build a privacy literacy tool, so that kind of jump-started my whole foray into digging in deep into intellectual freedom and particularly privacy within libraries. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s very cool. What eventually led you to editing this new 11th edition of The Intellectual Freedom Manual?

Erin Jones: So I started getting involved with ALA, it’s now been 12 years. And after I got involved after I was through the Emerging Leaders Program and got involved in the round tables. And when I started doing privacy work with this with San Jose I started talking to more people within ALA, and was on the privacy subcommittee of the Intellectual Freedom Committee. Very quickly the chair was having to step down and asked if I would step in to become chair of that subcommittee. That was a great pleasure. I did that for four years.

And while I was chair, the editing work for the 10th edition was starting to take place. And I got invited to be part of that work. It turns out I’m a huge policy wonk and really enjoy policy, and I really truly discovered that when I got invited to go to Chicago for a working weekend with five or six other people to work on the 10th edition documents, I had told the person at the Office of Intellectual Freedom, I said, “It’s my birthday weekend. I really don’t wanna go. Thank you for the invite.” And she said, “It’s my birthday too, so you need to get on the plane and show up. And we can eat cake there.” So I spent my whole birthday weekend locked in a room basically with these other just incredibly brilliant library professionals, and I had just an absolute blast. And I realized, “Oh, this is something that can have a lot of impact.”

So when the call came up for editors for this next edition, I volunteered to do it. Also because while I think there is a ton of great content in previous editions, it was also not super accessible to a lot of people. I am a huge plain language advocate, and I saw an opportunity to step in and take some of the skills I had, really listen to membership, and maybe do things a little bit different for the 11th edition. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that was gonna be one of my first questions, when you’re looking at a book like this, that you’re doing the 11th edition, so obviously there have been 10 editions before, what are the challenges and opportunities that you face as an editor of something like that?

Erin Jones: So the interesting thing for this book is that there are a lot of different players involved. So it’s not just one single author or one person that you need to work with or just one set of texts that you need to work with. There’s a really complicated system at play. For me, one of the opportunities, like I said, was how do we make this something that’s accessible while building on all of the prior work that has been done.

So a lot of that involved, like, how do we go and listen? I actually had a co-editor initially on the manual with me, John Spears. He unfortunately got cancer shortly after we started and passed away. And so the manual’s actually dedicated to John. But he and I both did surveys. We got a large number of respondents on surveys. We did focus groups at conferences and really, like, talking to different people and saying “Okay, how can we take all this great content that exists and how do we transform that into this next edition?” I saw that as an opportunity. We can rewrite things.

And also I looked at the list of contributors for the 10th edition, and they were all white people, so to me, I was like, okay, this is also an opportunity to invite in a diverse range of voices from people and center our LGBTQ, our BIPOC people. Like, how do we center those voices and uplift them and with intention? That also meant it’s a challenge. We have more contributors to this manual than we’ve ever had before. So now it’s not wrangling eight people, it’s wrangling 25 people and making sure that they get their chapters in, and editing those, and it’s just this huge process. So lots of challenges just within the ALA system and that process, and with all the individual contributors as well. 

Steve Thomas: And I know you also have something in there of making sure to make it open, inclusive to everybody, library workers rather than just using the term librarian, or when you say librarian, you mean library workers, making that plain. You mean people who work in a library is who this is for. 

Erin Jones: Yeah, exactly. I think especially in the public library realm, most of the staff are not credentialed librarians. You look at the broad wealth of our staff and we all contribute to making a library run. And wherever possible is really important to me to be able to use inclusive language, use language that doesn’t do harm to people where we can and just continuing to think about what that looks like. Now, you’ll see a caveat in that where we do call out school librarians in particular in one of the interpretations, and there was a lot of discussion with school librarians about the de-professionalization of school librarianship, and to make sure, like, actually we really wanna call out for school libraries how important it is to have someone who has a credential there to be in the school.

Steve Thomas: This is not, I don’t think, a book that’s intended to be read from page one and go forward there. I think you look and find what you need there. Are you thinking about that when you’re putting it together, that it’s gonna be designed as something that people will come to as a reference as needed throughout their career? 

Erin Jones: For sure. For me, I thought about it most of all as quick reference. That is part of why I really wanted everything to be in plain language. So it’s all in plain language. It’s no higher than a 12th grade reading level throughout the entire manual, because nobody should have to wade through dense academic text when there’s something happening. Now, ideally, you’ll go before anything happens, before there’s any kind of emergency, like you’re setting up something or you wanna know more about a particular topic, you’ll go and reference this. And also, we’re all very busy, and the reality is that some places don’t have the resources to be able to set aside to do that pre-work that’s so important, so it’s available for both sides.

So you’ll find policy templates in there for you to work through and actually build a policy and, like how do I respond to a law enforcement officer? If there’s a law enforcement officer in front of you, you could literally grab the guide, flip to that section, and follow each step that’s listed there. Trying to set that up for people to be the most useful as it can be.

One of the things that we added this time was personal stories. They’re short, easy to read, could be just something you can flip through and say, “Oh, I can see the impact of intellectual freedom and why it matters to our communities.”

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I’m surprised we don’t see more of that because that’s what we always say when we’re talking about our marketing of libraries, oh, we need good stories from our customers, our patrons, to tell what the library changed their life. But then we write our text and it’s oh, here’s just their textbook. No, stories can help us learn, too. 

Erin Jones: That to me is so important. Policy can feel so dry and boring to people unless you’re like me and wanna dig in. I’m the minority. I get that. And so what was really important to me is how can I put a face to intellectual freedom policy and show here’s what happened when a library director faced a meeting room challenge. Here’s what happens when an indigenous community in an academic library is digitizing their resources, and what does that mean in partnership with the community and access levels? What does it mean to be a drag queen doing story hour? What do these actually mean? Because our policies aren’t just pieces of paper that sit on our website, they impact our culture and the way that we build our libraries. And so we have to think about that aspect. We have to think about the human aspect of that when we’re building our policies and procedures.

Steve Thomas: And before readers really even get, I think it’s before the table of contents even, they’re greeted with five actions to protect intellectual freedom in your library. Why did you wanna put that right up front? 

Erin Jones: I think that ultimately, the guide is about action, and this is actually something I took as a carryover from the 10th edition, although I tweaked the language just slightly to be like, no, these are things we need to go do. These aren’t things that it’s just important to know about. We are facing a generational challenge to libraries that hasn’t really been seen, I mean, the McCarthy era is probably the last time, but even now this is a more powerful coordinated attack, and it’s not an attack on libraries even necessarily, it’s an attack on the public good.

So we can’t actually just be passive. All of us have a little piece of something that we have to do, and that piece for you may just be talking to your friends and neighbors at dinner about why libraries are important. That may just be your advocacy piece. And some of us may be library directors who are needing to do much more, and some of us may be library advocates that are really creating systems.

 There’s just all these different levels but I wanna feel like we have this ecosystem together and it doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be a lot. But each of us plays a role in doing something so for me, that’s important to just say right up front, this is about action, this is about doing. It’s not passive.

If it takes you one year to do one policy, then it takes you one year to do one policy, but it’s better than not having anything at all. We use a phrase a lot here at our library, which is, “Go slow, go together. Go fast, go alone.” And so you can think of this book as like you’re together, even if you’re the only library, if you’re a library director and you’re just it by yourself at a small rural library, that’s okay. We’ve got your back. The Office for Intellectual Freedom has your back, so you’re not alone. Sometimes it is an emergency, right? But most of the time it’s not, so we just keep on chipping away at stuff and don’t beat yourself up if it can’t all happen all at once.

Steve Thomas: Other than having those policies, in place, on paper, what does creating a culture of intellectual freedom look like for you? 

Erin Jones: For me, it’s about continually having those conversations. To being open, transparent about stuff. When I was at San Jose Public Library, I knew that we had really flipped in that culture when I had staff coming to me after they had read the privacy policy of a vendor and they had their own concerns and like unprompted, just line staff coming to me and being like, “Hey, I read this thing in this privacy policy and I have a concern about it.” And I was like, “Oh, we did it.” Like privacy has become just like a thing people talk about and that we live true to our actions, and that means sometimes we have to complicate the narrative of things. It means when we make these decisions sometimes that staff are unhappy with or don’t agree with, that we talk to them about why that is and why it’s rooted in our ethics of intellectual freedom.

Those conversations can be really hard. Why did we allow this group to use our community room even though we disagree with their viewpoints? Why are we allowed to show this film or this thing, or why are we keeping this book on the shelf? And so the more we can just talk about it and continue to go back to our Library Bill of Rights, to our Code of Ethics, and just talk about, “Hey, we are different than anywhere else, and that makes us really special. And in order to keep that, we have to do things differently than what might seem at first glance, like the right thing to do.” 

Steve Thomas: Helping staff understand the difference between someone just coming up and saying, “I don’t like this book,” and “I am formally challenging this book.” Does the book talk about how to differentiate that? 

Erin Jones: Yeah, there’s definitely some guidance in there. Like, when somebody comes to you and says they don’t like a book or a program or something like that, a lot of times looking at that not as a scary moment but as an opportunity to educate our users about intellectual freedom and maybe not using that word, that phrase, but to let them know “Hey, actually, this is why we do things this way.” We just recently were undergoing a formal challenge here, and just communicating, like, it’s an additive. I wanna add more materials, and let me talk to you about why.

Sometimes people just wanna be heard. And once you talk to them about, “Oh, this is actually what the library does, and these are our values, and these are our ethics, and this is why we do this,” a lot of people don’t know that. So it’s an opportunity sometimes to flip that conversation. But then there is guidance in there of, like, how do you create a reconsideration form? How do you walk through the whole process with someone? How do I create that policy? And so there’s both things in there.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And when you’re creating policies, of course you always, as much as possible, wanna be able to involve your legal counsel that you can, because local laws are gonna be different depending on what state, county, wherever you are.

Erin Jones: Yeah. And you’re also gonna need to make sure, if you have a governing body, that they’re involved as well. I have generally found our lawyers don’t necessarily write the best policy, but they’re great at reviewing and talking us through policy. Although there is a great Plain Language for Lawyers book out there that maybe you could gift to your lawyer sometime, the lawyer in your life.

It’s a partnership. I’ve seen some great work coming out of some public libraries too of doing their policy work with the community, as well. And so there’s some opportunities there to have those discussions, to talk with the community and maybe even build library advocates through that process as well.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s always nice when you get those of some conversations with patrons of where they don’t like something in your collection, and you can explain your policy, but then even flip it around to “Let’s find something that does resonate. Can we find something that does match your sensibilities?” And that this is for maybe a different part of the community, not everything is for everybody. Not everything is for me in my own library. Let’s find the area of the library , works for you.

Erin Jones: And find whatever moments you can to agree with someone. It’s very hard to stay upset with somebody when they’re agreeing with you. I’ve talked to some protesters for drag queen story hour, and they started talking about parental rights and I was like, “I totally agree with you. I agree with parental rights and that you should have the right for your family.” And it was just like having that, “Oh, it sounds like you really care about the First Amendment. I also really care about the First Amendment. Let’s talk about these things that we have in common.”

Our society and our media and everything tries to divide us so much, but we actually have a lot more in common than we do division. And so where can we find those points? And I think, having those conversations, and you talked about the culture of intellectual freedom, I think that goes further than just staff. How do we educate our users as well? And so finding little moments. I said this when I did a lot of privacy work, a lot of times people don’t wanna come to a privacy workshop. It may not be the most exciting sounding thing. But you can educate and inform and give little bits. When you’re helping somebody at the reference desk and they try to give you their password, what a great opportunity to talk to them about privacy and why privacy matters.

And we can do this with intellectual freedom topics just broadly. It’s just finding little moments. Let’s educate our users about what that means. And if you’re at a school library, what a great opportunity to build that into your curriculum and what freedom of expression means and how we get there. Whenever that’s possible. I know that’s hard for some places right now to do.

Steve Thomas: When you talked about the drag queen story time thing, I would be appalled if children were being forced to go to a drag queen story time, if the parents didn’t want them to and every child that walks in is gonna be forced to go into this thing. No, you shouldn’t force anybody to go to anything. I don’t want ’em to be forced and go into a evangelical Christian story time, a whatever other story time, whatever the viewpoint is, you can bring it back to the point of, yes, parental choice is exactly right and parental rights. You have the right to decide what your child sees. And so at the library, there’s all these books available, but you have responsibility and rights to filter that as you see fit. You’re teaching them their morals. We’re not teaching them whatever morals you want them to have. That’s not the business we’re in. 

Erin Jones: I wish our society was not leaning more towards the, “I want my government to decide what morals and I don’t wanna teach my kids. I don’t wanna have this conversation.” And again, I just wanna acknowledge I work in the Bay Area in one of the most liberal areas. The book challenges I get are, “This is too racist,” or, “too sexist.” I get the opposite challenges. I don’t get very many of them, and I’m in a right to read state. I come from this extremely privileged position.

I just wanna acknowledge some of the things that are in this manual may not be possible for everybody right now. Part of the goal was to really look at How to make it as simple and clear of what our aspirations are as libraries, the royal library, I’ll say, that covers all this, what might these aspirations be, knowing that we’re working within constrained environments in some places? I hope that because it is easy to access, easy to read, that you can go in and find what those pieces are that you can do and that you can push on, and that you can use this manual then to go to your governing board, to go to your lawmakers, to show and point out what the kind of expertise is, which I also acknowledge is hard for some places because it has American Library Association attached to it.

We do our best. Again, it’s like you do what you can do. And you keep on chipping away where we can. We’ll get back, it may be a long time, but I do think we will get back to a place where we have the freedoms that have been taken away from us. 

Steve Thomas: Unfortunately, the pendulum swings sometimes, but it then does come back. Ultimately, I think, I try to be as optimistic as I can for things like that.

Erin Jones: You know, It’s interesting. One of the chapters that we were unsuccessful in getting someone to write for was, let me just back up a little bit. So John primarily worked in conservative library systems or had worked a lot there. He worked in a place that had a Focus on the Family-sponsored community room. He and I had a lot of conversations just around what does that look like and the tension that sometimes comes from what is delivered from the American Library Association versus what’s actually happening on the ground. And especially in the public libraries, like most of our libraries are rural libraries, if we’re just going like number of libraries so it was important to us to try and think about those perspectives.

We did try to find an author who could write from the pro-censorship perspective on things. We talked to many people and couldn’t quite get that one in there. But I think, if I did another edition in the future, it would be something I would still strive to do, ’cause I think, again, it gets back to us not listening to people. We may not agree, we may vehemently disagree with their position. It’s still important to understand where it’s coming from if we’re ever going to be able to change someone’s perspective on it, or at least to even just get to see each other as human beings.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s a problem we’re having culture-wide, it feels like at the moment. But again, libraries are a good venue for helping to fix those kind of things, hopefully.

Advocacy is one thing that can be difficult sometimes, especially in times like the current ones, like you said, it’s, there was a surge of these kind of things, and it’s much more, thanks to the internet, much more organized and it’s just all interconnected and it’s easier for people to share bad book lists, quote, unquote, and things like that. What advice does the manual offer about how to advocate for intellectual freedom in this kind of environment?

Erin Jones: So there’s actually a great chapter in the manual, not on just advocating, but advocating and lobbying for intellectual freedom. Megan Cusack wrote a great chapter on advocating. And so just like we were talking about before, what can you do before a challenge happens? How do you make sure that people know what the library is? What do we do? How do we build allies and support? Because if you have those people ready for you, because oftentimes, especially in a public library setting or a school library setting, you actually can’t be the one to go out and talk. I can’t go to Washington, DC, and advocate, unless I’m on my own personal time. And so how do you do that? How do you create those allies so that if something does happen, you’re ready to hit go, and they’re ready to go and fight the fight for you and on your behalf? So it talks a little bit about how you can build those relationships before anything happens.

And then also after something happens, what are some of the things that you can do? How can you get your message out? And even she talks about what you can do if there is negative publicity that comes your way. So what are the kind of different things that you can do in order to support yourself, support the library? And then I’ll always add, as far as advocacy goes and supporting yourself, the Office for Intellectual Freedom is always there. I highly recommend to reach out to the amazing staff there if you ever do find yourself questioning things, if you’ve gone to the manual and it doesn’t answer your question or you can’t afford the manual and you need a question answered. They’re here. You don’t have to be an ALA member. Please reach out to them.

And Max Prime who’s a lobbyist in New York for libraries, wrote an excellent chapter about how do you lobby and work with your public officials as well. He really gives this step-by-step of, like, how do you get into lobbying? What tools do you follow? How do you put it into practice? And so I think these two chapters combined can really give people the fundamentals to get started in that advocacy and lobbying work. 

Steve Thomas: Great. So I know there’s not one thing, but what is something that you hope someone coming to this manual leaves with?

Erin Jones: I think, I want people to feel supported and not alone is, I think really the biggest takeaway. And like I said, again, I, we have a lot of library workers out there in very small libraries or school libraries and it can feel daunting and overwhelming. I hope that this shows and is a tool to be able to say “I know how to do this. I can feel confident in doing it, and I can see the voices of other people who have gone through things too. And that I know who to reach out and how to reach out for help.” As much as you might feel alone, that you’re not actually alone, and there’s support for you to get to whatever you need for your library system around intellectual freedom.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I think that focus on plain language is really important. I think that was a great thing to focus on, so congratulations on that.

Erin Jones: Thank you, Steve. Yeah, and I hope people who may have had the guide in the past and maybe found it complicated to use or only used pieces of it, I’d really highly encourage you, pick up a copy. If you can purchase it, please do, or get it through ILL or whatever it is to take a look, ’cause I think you’ll find it’s a quite big transformation from what you’ve seen in the past. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Okay. And like you said, it has lots more viewpoints now, and those personal stories really are good reinforcers of the topics of each of the chapters.

It’s available now for people, so you can pick it up from the ALA store or wherever you get your books, or ILL like Erin said. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about the book. 

Erin Jones: Thank you so much, Steve.