The Authority File

We often hail collaboration as the key to success in academic pursuits. But does higher education culture prevent collaborative relationships from developing? Has the pandemic opened up opportunities between departments that weren’t present before?

Susan Mizruchi, editor of Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, explains how academia can encourage specialization or “tending our own gardens,” which prevents exciting, fruitful collaboration between departments. Susan argues that engaging librarians in pedagogy and librarianship in academia can only produce more well-rounded, comprehensive results.

In the final episode of this series, Susan discusses the value of collaboration between departments and its increasing necessity in our multi-dimensional, complex digital age. Despite our collective “Zoom fatigue,” Susan points out potential opportunities for interdisciplinary partnerships thanks to our new reliance on virtual technology and lack of geographical constraints.

Our digital age has brought with it a mushrooming number of sources, articles, and perspectives to choose from. What should be preserved? How open should resources be? How do librarians and archivists navigate our complicated, ever-changing digital world?

Susan Mizruchi, editor of Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, discusses the concerns librarians hold as our digital footprint expands: how can we make information more accessible, and how do we teach new scholars around the world to sort, dissect, and apply this knowledge?

In this third episode, Susan discusses the duplicity of the digital age. What are some of the darker consequences of free, digital resources—overstimulation, the gatekeeping of information for profit—and how can we curb these negative growths? She also touches on how community archivists challenge traditional notions of what an archive should be through an activist agenda and aversion to institutional protocols.

Whether we like to admit it or not, politics surround our civic, professional, and personal lives. The media we choose, products we buy, and people we engage with reflect our own governance, political party, and position in society. So how do politics factor into the preservation, curation, and dissemination of digital materials?

Susan Mizruchi, director of the Center for Humanities at Boston University, discusses the politics that color the practice of preservation. What is the political urgency in protecting records? How do we ensure that archivists are being valued for their work? Does the compensation keep up with the ongoing pedagogical and technical roles that librarians are being asked to take on?

In this second episode, Susan talks the politics of protecting materials and the issues of status and pay that arise in librarianship. She also digs into the value of collaboration between librarians, archivists, and faculty, offering examples of mutually-beneficial partnerships that formed during the process of putting together her edited volume, Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age.

The digital age has brought an onslaught of changes to the practice of information preservation. With so much out there at a time, how can archivists keep up? How do librarians fit into the task of finding and safeguarding materials? How can archivists, curators, and librarians work together to collect, restore, and preserve information for years to come?

Susan Mizruchi, director of the Center for Humanities at Boston University, used the leverage of her administrative role to explore these questions. To her, the solution was within walking distance: connecting BU faculty and librarians with staff at the Boston Public Library. Inspired by a lively forum, Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age was born, bringing together experts from divergent fields in academia, as well as public libraries.

In this first episode, Susan explains her background as an academic and her longstanding involvement with public and academic libraries. She also speaks on the process of finding the text’s diverse contributors from across professional roles, countries, ethnicities, and subjects.

Against all odds, we’ve made it to the end of 2020. Moving into the new year, we need to make sure our pandemic solutions (raised wages, rent moratoriums, etc.) aren’t short term. How do we reshape our public health structures to address longstanding inequities?

This week is our final episode with the editors of Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19. Three of its editors, Jane Philpott, Sophie Thériault, and Sridhar Venkatapuram, discuss the inequities and vulnerabilities further revealed by the pandemic. Each takes a unique look at what steps Canada (and other countries) need to take to prevent a crisis like this from happening again.

In our final episode, Jane explains how we need to support our frontline workers—not only hospital staff, but those in retail, grocery, food service, and more—moving forward. Sridhar addresses the global approach we must to take to public health, instead of the highly individualistic perspective that nations like the US hold. Finally, Sophie and Sridhar tackle the big questions together: how does the way a government allocates its resources reflect its own structural inequities; and how can we ensure our leaders enact policies that help everyone, not just the “standard citizen”?

As health care workers and susceptible citizens receive the first COVID-19 vaccinations, many hope this will mark the beginning of the end of a dark, deadly period. But the vaccine rollout also deepens the same problems we’ve been facing all year: who are our most vulnerable, and how do we help them in an equitable way?

Last week, two of the editors of Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19, talked government response and accountability. The remaining three editors, Jane Philpott, Sophie Thériault, and Sridhar Venkatapuram, join us to continue the conversation. In these next two episodes, we shift gears into the equity and vulnerabilities of government response to COVID. What structural changes need to happen to prevent another public health crisis?

In this episode, we tackle policy measures, global response, and frontline workers. Sophie takes us through the First Nations’ roadmap on federal funding and measures to protect them from public health crises–how is this strategy relevant to safeguarding other underserved groups? Sridhar explains the dangers we’ve seen in officials treating populations as equally susceptible to the virus. Jane discusses the challenges of frontline workers that government officials fail to see, and how she hopes they’ll no longer be undervalued: “You can have all of the emergency departments and ICU beds ready that you’d like, but if you don’t actually have those frontline health workers, who are paid very little and put themselves at enormous risk … then people will die.”

As we look down the barrel of a COVID-19 winter, many of us would rather skip ahead to summer and what will hopefully be a (generally) vaccinated populace. Now facing the effects travel during the Thanksgiving holiday, many areas in the US are buckling under increased outbreaks on top of already staggering case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths. How have we not learned the lessons of the spring’s first wave?

This month we sat down with the editors of Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19, a volume rapidly assembled this past spring that covers Canada’s response to the pandemic as well as zooming out for a global perspective. Our first two episodes of the series are with Colleen Flood and Vanessa MacDonnell, both of the University of Ottawa, who looked at the nuances of Canadian federalism, accountability, and civil liberties in the face of COVID-19.

This first episode dives into the history of Canada’s Emergencies Act, and how it complicates the possibility of a united, national response to public health crises. Colleen and Vanessa also discuss the transparency needed in order to gain compliance over mask or travel mandates, and the positives and negatives of Canada’s swift—though closed-door—federal action taken in the early days of the pandemic.

This week in the US, Congress meets to hopefully pass a stimulus package in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The last stimulus bill, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which included cash payments, forgivable loans for small businesses, and expanded unemployment benefits, passed in late March. Almost 10 months later, with unemployment rates rising and provisions in the CARES Act soon expiring, pressure mounts in Washington. If nothing passes, who will be held accountable?

Colleen Flood and Vanessa MacDonnell tackle issues of Canadian and global accountability in the edited volume Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19. Vanessa explains how the courts and media play a role in holding the government responsible for pandemic-related legislation (or lack thereof). Colleen explains the successes and failures of Canada’s cooperative federalism approach to COVID. In some cases, the marble-cake technique might be a better option; First Nations in Canada used self-determination to enact policies better suited to their needs as a vulnerable population. However, Colleen argues, it has also led to disarray, confusion, and scrambled lines of communication across provincial lines.

In the second episode of this four-part series, Colleen and Vanessa highlight the significant difference between investments in public health and health care, which perhaps foretold the unprepared responses to the pandemic across the globe. “If you’ve done a good job investing in public health,” Colleen states, “people don’t even know that they should be thanking you.” They also look ahead and predict the future of vaccine deployment. Who will get it first? Is a national or provincial rollout more likely? And how will governments strengthen public trust in the vaccine?

As the fall semester and 2020 come to a close, what does the future look like for our libraries, colleges, and world? What new practices or workflows will we keep, and which will be abandoned come 2021 and beyond?

Sarah Copeland, director of desks and patron experience at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, voices her concerns over staff burnout once normal working functions return. Lauren Magnuson, head of collections, delivery and access at the California State University San Marcos, predicts that her library’s cost-per-use model will come in handy when the inevitable cuts to the collection come next fiscal year. “A cancellation in one area saves money, but then there’s costs in other areas, and so that’s really the challenge there, is that how do we make the cuts in a way that is totally sustainable?”

In the final episode of the series, Sarah and Lauren explain what pandemic-related policies they’ll be happy to say goodbye to, and their pie-in-the-sky hopes for next semester—expand contactless pickup, please! They chat about the sustainability of current staffing models, the empowerment their libraries have found on campus, and the tough decisions that must be faced next year.

When we sift through an author’s collection, we tend to think big-picture. What are the overarching themes, motifs, or morals? What will be their legacy? Luckily, Timothy Findley, the Canadian author and playwright, left behind a great number of books, plays, and memoirs for us to contemplate.

Sherrill Grace, author of Findley’s biography Tiff: A Life of Timothy Findley, believes Findley’s legacy will be found in the broader messages of his work—warnings against power, violence, and oppression. Sherrill notes, “If we fail at something, Findley would have said we’ve failed our imaginations. We’ve failed to imagine that things could be different, that we’ve failed to pay attention.”

In the final episode of this series, Sherrill discusses one of Findley’s most acclaimed novels, Famous Last Words, and the often overlooked, though potent, The Telling of Lies. Sherrill also shares her hopes for the biography. Whether returning to Findley’s work or discovering it for the first time, she wants the audience to not only read Findley’s words, but listen to his cautionary tales.