Understand global perspectives on effective information practices that are supportive of cultural, economic, educational, or social well-being.

Introduction

The American Library Association’s (ALA) Library Bill of Rights’ first clause states library resources created by anyone, from anywhere, or for anything should be made available to serve any patron’s interest, information need, or understanding (ALA, 2019). Due to advancing information and communications technologies bringing previously inaccessible knowledge across cultural, national, and linguistic divides, each of us are evolving into or maturing as global citizens. This gives library and information science professionals (LISP) many new roles and responsibilities to fulfill for their users.

Three new roles and responsibilities I have identified are teaching where and how gender discrimination still persists, what it has taken to tell a story throughout history, and how healing it can be interpreting traumas and triumphs together.

Gender discrimination pervading international information communities

It has been my lifelong pleasure to discuss and teach the big and little details of the international publishing worlds.

For decades we have been celebrating across various media how monumental J.K. Rowling, a single mother, was able to publish her stories about a young wizard that became a supporting column of the 21^st century zeitgeist. Harry Potter had even changed the business model on publishing children’s books (Grady & Romano, 2018). However, little is spoken of how titles by female writers are still less likely to be released by top publishers, and that an analysis of 10,000 New York Times book reviews showed two-thirds of them were written by men and reviewed books that, more often than not, reflected gender stereotypes (Hu, 2017).

The culinary world has been chafing under a similar deceit for much longer.

As LISPs, it is imperative that we do not shy away from retrieving any resource that fits into a user’s query, regardless of where we feel their information needs or acceptance of harsh social truths lie. We must keep the way to any level of knowledge open so inequity cannot continue by simply hiding where people are comfortable with tucking it away.

Storytelling difficulties

As we must keep the way to knowledge open, it is also a LISPs responsibility to fight the cultural and political barriers that violate their communities’ right to share and consume fictional content. Fiction, though made up, seems to have similar agency as fact-checked news to rub tyranny the wrong way. This is often why stories are censored.

My go-to censored fiction example is Columbia Pictures’ hysterical response to North Korean hackers threatening more leakage of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s, their parent company, internal documents. After the first hack, Sony/Columbia announced a delay to the October 2014 release of The Interview, a comedy about dismantling Kim Jong-un’s oppressive regime in North Korea, in order to edit the film to be less offensive. The following month, Sony pulled the release, letting it go straight to on-demand and allowing only select theaters to screen it. Many were disappointed, including the film’s creators, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and the U.S. President at the time, Barack Obama (Weinstein, 2015).

As LISPs, it is our responsibility to not only teach diverse perspectives and opinions but also embolden people to embrace them. We must provide tools for users to appreciate how global cultures have been developing their voices through the ages. This would promote understanding and compassion, instead of fear and censorship.

The power of stories

Social media has made it easy to ship the traumas and triumphs of one’s life on a world tour. But often the audience, safe in the anonymity and distance provided by the internet, will forget that those photos, videos, and words were shared by real people. It is shocking how cruel some of their comments can be.

A recent example were the reply-tweets at a young woman who had shared her and her husband’s daily morning routine on Twitter (Schocket, 2022). Her story of enjoying yoga then coffee in a garden they had built together angered some into trying to shame them for their happiness and ability to find peace, accusing them of bragging, flaunting their “cute” life to the faces of people who were struggling.

Though it is not a LISPs job to police online behavior, we can build programs to help users remember those other voices on the internet are real people, and thus it is much better to be kind.

Evidence

INFO 200 – Information Communities – Foodie and publishing community’s international issue

For INFO 200, Information Communities, I wrote this blog post on how the international foodie and publishing communities had a gender discrimination problem. I discussed how the culinary and writing/publishing-related work done by those who identify as female are often dismissed as inferior.

Food tourists are more likely to be educated and wealthier females (Robinson & Getz, 2014), meaning those shaping and developing the foodie community are intelligent and capable women. However, they are still expected to only be capable of care work, feeding the family and providing nutrition education to the children (Cairns et al, 2010), while men take the credit for advancing the foodie community (Shire, 2013). In Japan, though women have been gravitating towards male-themed graphic novels, men are resistant to accepting female-themed titles (Baseel, 2017). In a way, while pursuing women Japanese men hold on to their values, unwilling to entertain those of a woman’s (Matsuda, 2007). In both information communities, work and exploration done by women are being exploited instead of celebrated.

I also noted when this imbalance was redressed or addressed. In Somebody Feed Phil, a popular food travel show on Netflix, production highlights restaurants directed by women in equal measure to those by men. For publishing/writing, there are non-profit organizations, like VIDA (VIDA, n.d.), who work for more transparency surrounding gender imbalances in the literary world.

This blog post is evidence I have experience researching on gender discrimination throughout various cultures and information communities, and can recognize the LISPs working to change it. I can expand this post into a program to teach how and where to give more weight to female voices.

INFO 240 – Information Technology Tools and Applications – Website on storytelling

I built this webpage on Storytelling as part of my final project for INFO 240, Information Technology Tools and Applications.

This was one part of five where I chatted about my opinions concerning art. For this Storytelling page, I outlined a history of stories through the ages, and the types of characters featured. I devoted a section to the graphic novel, then concluded with movies featuring characters born normal but found opportunities to be extraordinary. The page is studded with hyperlinks to outside sources for further explanation or description. The stories discussed spanned multiple cultures, languages, and media.

This webpage is evidence I have studied and recognize how storytelling has evolved through history. I can extrapolate from this content a lesson on why telling stories makes us human, and how censoring that can damage communities.

INFO 287 – The Hyperlinked Library – The Power of Stories

I created this library program on the Power of Stories for INFO 287, the Hyperlinked Library.

The Objective was to bring patrons closure over collective traumas endured during the height of the COVID-19 quarantine. This community support service would ask participants to write their stories, or responses to a list of library staff selected world events, and post them to a board. This procedure can help patrons feel safe in the anonymity, and remind themselves, with others’ stories written on a physical piece of paper in front of them, that we are all here experiencing the highs and lows together; there is no need for one-upsmanship or put-downs.

This library program is evidence I know how to bring users a global perspective through a humanistic worldview. The Power of Stories can be scaled down to a single afternoon or up to a year for any age group, like one for elementary school-aged children to reflect on a holiday or over a class-wide difficulty.

Conclusion

Advancing information and communications technologies are giving the average person in developed countries previously incredible access to content created in multiple languages by diverse global cultures. This opens the floodgates to all the new perspectives LISPs can expect users will partake in to evolve their information needs. The ALA’s Bill of Rights first clause spoke of making resources available, and alongside this LISPs now have new responsibilities to teach our users how to navigate this digital bounty in kindness as humans.

Whether I find myself serving in a corporate office or a public library, I plan on writing a bi-monthly blog on interesting LIS-related news from abroad, and how readers and I might leverage the idea into a program or event for our organization.

References

American Library Association. (2019). Bill of Rights. Retrieved November 12, 2022, from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill

Baseel, C. (2017, January 7). Manga artist says she’s found the reason why men won’t read comics written for women. Sora News 24. https://soranews24.com/2017/01/07/manga-artist-says-shes-found-the-reason-why-men-wont-read-comics-written-for-women/

Cairns, K., Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2010). Caring about food: Doing gender in the foodie kitchen. Gender & Society, 24(5), 591–615. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243210383419

Grady, C. & Romano, A. (September 1, 2018). How Harry Potter changed the world. Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/26/15856668/harry-potter-20th-anniversary-explained

Hu, J. C. (2017, August 29). The overwhelming gender bias in New York Times book reviews. Pacific Standard. https://psmag.com/social-justice/gender-bias-in-book-reviews

Matsuda, N. (2007). Shoujo Manga. Shueisha.

Robinson, N.S.R., & Getz, D. (2014). Profiling potential food tourists: an Australian study. British Food Journal (1966), 116(4), 690–706. https://doi.org/10.1108/bfj-02-2012-0030

Schocket, R. (October 24, 2022). This woman tweeted about having coffee every day with her husband- The internet tore her apart. Buzzfeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/woman-backlash-for-coffee-husband-tweet

Shire, E. (2013, November 14). Why sexism persists in the culinary world. The Week. https://theweek.com/articles/456436/why-sexism-persists-culinary-world

VIDA. (n.d.). https://www.vidaweb.org/

Weinstein, S. (February 4, 2015). Seth Rogen: Censoring North Korea in ‘The Interview’ seemed wrong. Variety. https://variety.com/2015/film/news/seth-rogen-censoring-north-korea-in-the-interview-seemed-wrong-1201424038/

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