On [Not] Being Helpful.
At this moment, it is ten am. I sit, my back resting against the armrest. My legs are extended in front of me, reaching across the seats of the dove gray second-hand West Elm pull-out couch that lives in the small guest bedroom of my apartment. I am wearing slippers.
In another universe, it is also ten am. I am in a basement, slouched over a height-adjustable desk, sitting in a very serviceable office chair under mediocre florescent lighting, my back to a window that faces into a room with windows that face outside. I am wearing shoes.
Or maybe, I am standing next to a long black desk made of out some perpetually cold stone, looking into the face of a person I’ve never met. Their laptop is clutched in their arms, pressed against their chest. I am smiling as I greet them, or nodding as I listen to their questions. I am gesturing like a flight attendant as I describe the hand washing station around the corner and how to navigate the overly complicated security door that leads to the light-drenched reading room. I am wearing shoes.
At this moment, in my slippers, I have just crafted what feels like the hundred-thousandth message that basically boils down to “sorry, can’t help you right now, hopefully I can soon, please try again later.”
I do not have access to our materials. I do not have access to our digital studio. I can help you search our finding aid portal, but I cannot check if, indeed, the letter you are looking for is in that folder of correspondence labeled “Miscellaneous - M”. Even if it is there or you are just interested in the whole folder, I cannot process your request to have our staff digitize it for you. If you want to come see it yourself, I can send you instructions on how to do that on a regular day, but that day is not today and I don’t know when that day will be.
I have gone from striving every day to get to “yes” — yes, come visit us! yes, you can see that! yes, please take photos! — to instead swimming in a sea of “typically” (which, at the end of the day, feels like soft “no”).
And, yes, often the “yes” is more conditional than “yes.” It’s far more like, “yes, you can see that, but please don’t turn the pages so quickly or put it on the ground so you can take a picture of it or bleed on it” (really, just once). And like all special collections, there are rules and protocols that are old, that need to be (and are being) rethought to be less classist, less racist, less sexist. There are so many silent “no’s” or even worse “no, not for you’s” in this world, but even in the conditional “yes” and the coded “yes” (though not the “yes” that is actually “no” in disguise, because those can go straight to hell like the duplicitous creatures that they are), most of the time, where I work I get to start with “yes”.
Now, however, as the “yes’s” fall away in my daily interactions, the weight of these new, every day “no’s” merges with the larger, more structural “no’s” and I am left feeling directionless. I want my patrons move forward with their research, their interests, to follow their curiosities. I want this profession to move forward to become more welcoming, more inclusive, and more diverse. There has been too much stillness for far too long in far too many places. How do we keep moving, even in this moment?
Moving away from the complicated, tangled web of the “yes” and “no” that weaves its way around special collections, that which is making me feel like the entire framing above is flawed — the point is, I used to be a person that was helpful in a very particular way and now, I have to find new and different ways to be helpful. What is a librarian without her books? Without her library?
This is exciting and frustrating and rewarding and saddening. My self and my teammates are working so hard to find our way. I think we’re doing a good job.
And yet, I miss the problems I know how to solve. The easy wins.
(an example: I do not know how to solve the problem still being employed when so many others are not, to have this problem at all. I don’t feel like this is winning.)
But is the call to action of this current moment really any different from the ordinary moment? Should we not always be finding new ways to solve problems for our patrons whenever we can? To find new ways to say “yes”?
I worry that I use (/used?) the easy, every day “yes” as a balm on the frustration of larger, more knotty, more structural “no’s, allowing me to live in a land of “buts” instead of “ands” (“yes, we are open to the public and we have exposed cameras in the reading room that intimidate the public” vs “we have exposed cameras in the reading room that intimate the public, but we’re open to the public”).
There will always be “no bleeding on things” and “no ripping things” and “no making origami out of things,” but there should always be yes, too. Yes to access. Yes to movement.
So, we come back to the question I ask myself every morning these days: how do I say yes in my slippers? how do I say yes in my shoes?