Why Libraries Are Crucial to Faith and Justice Movements

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

As a journalist and biographer, I’ve learned how important it is for people to intentionally collect, archive, and disseminate the work of writers and communities. Especially libraries.

Over the last year, I spent an inordinate amount of time in libraries, from the Bishop Payne Library at Virginia Theological Seminary to the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia. I have found the deep well of writing and history to be profoundly important in helping me develop gratitude for those who came before me.

In recent years, the work of librarians has been sucked into the center of the “culture wars” as fascist and authoritarian movements in the U.S. attempt to censor materials, especially about queerness and racial justice. Meanwhile, justice movements have recognized how libraries are a shining example of public-funded community goods.

Keegan Osinski is a theologian, author, and librarian at the Vanderbilt Divinity Library in Nashville, Tenn. Leading up to our conversation, I wanted to learn more about how libraries contribute to social justice movements and how social justice movements can contribute to libraries. I also wanted to know about the challenges of responsible curation, particularly around sensitive materials.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: When did you decide to pursue librarianship and why?

Keegan Osinski: I studied philosophy and theology in undergrad, and I worked in the library as a student worker. I got a job [in the] spring semester of my freshman year, working in the library at the front desk, just for some extra money.

I loved what I studied. I’ve always been an academic at heart. By sophomore/junior year, [I was asking,] “What am I going to do after graduation? What am I going to do with my life? I don’t know that I want to be a professor, but I love being in the academic environment.”

I found out you could do subject-specific librarianship, and [that] there is such a thing called theological librarianship. And I was like, oh, perfect! That’s what I’ll do. I will get a master’s in library science, I will find somewhere to work, I’ll get a library job somewhere, and then I’ll get a master’s in theology, and I’ll be a theological librarian. So that’s what I did.

Is there anything that has surprised you since you started this work?

What I do most that I wasn’t expecting is writing instruction. By identifying the gaps in the curriculum and the needs of the community and the divinity school, it just seems like students need support in writing and academic writing. And that’s something I’m capable of doing. I’m able to step into that gap in a way that can support the curriculum. That way, faculty don’t have to waste their class time teaching writing.

I didn’t really expect that I would end up being a writing instructor, but it’s actually something I really enjoy doing.

What are the core values or commitments that you bring to work in your librarianship?

That’s something I actually think about a lot because I work in the Divinity Library, which is a smaller department of the bigger university library system — Vanderbilt has nine libraries.

[What makes] the Divinity Library unique is our relationship with the Divinity School, which is a super-progressive space and itself is steered by commitments. As a department, we in the Divinity Library have really latched onto the commitments of the Divinity School to drive our work as librarians. And that’s been really beneficial, particularly when I’m talking to my library colleagues, because they are dealing with their own political entanglements or ethical issues with their own schools. I can’t imagine being a librarian in the Business School. That’s not my vibe. At the end of the day, I can always rely on: My place is in the Divinity Library. My commitments are to the Divinity School and their commitments, like working against homophobia, racism, and sexism.

[I appreciate] having those commitments to point to and say, “That’s what we’re doing here in the Divinity Library, that’s what drives our collections and our instruction,” in a way that’s unique to the libraries more broadly in Vanderbilt and librarianship as a field as well.

What is the role of libraries and librarians in social justice work?

The [two] most important things that librarians can do in social justice and movement spaces are instruction and archiving.

I’m not an archivist, so that’s not really my specialty. But [I’m referring to] things like collecting ephemera from movement spaces — zines, [for example]. There’s been a big push in the past five or 10 years of zine libraries [and] collecting these independently published works. This is happening because the work of the oppressed, of labor, or “the people” are not necessarily published by Cambridge University Press.

So, finding those small publications or going to movement meetings and collecting handouts or other material that’s being disseminated and used in the movement spaces can be really important and powerful for historical record.

And that leads me to my second piece: instruction. Something that’s really important in social movements is history and learning. There’s so much that has been done before. Activists feel like they have to reinvent the wheel when there’s been so much work done in the past that we can learn from.

David France wrote How to Survive a Plague — there’s also a documentary of the same name — and it’s a recounting of the AIDS crisis and the activism and work that happened there. It’s a big book. But it’s really enjoyable to read because it’s lots of stories and [is] really historically rich. I learned so much about queer advocacy and activism. Personally, as a queer person, I was really shocked by all the work that was done and the things that we take for granted today as young people.

As librarians and archivists and historians, teaching that history to the younger generations of activists can be really useful and really powerful in helping them know where everything’s coming from, providing context, and providing tools for activism.

What are some of the misconceptions about your work?

That oh, you just read all day. Which, sometimes I do actually! That is part of it — keeping up with the field and what’s being published. I do read sometimes. But there’s other things involved.

There’s also just so many different kinds of librarianship. I primarily do instruction. I teach a lot: workshops, classes, one-on-one instruction. I have colleagues who do cataloging, or acquisitions and purchasing. I have colleagues that do network tech stuff.

I don’t know if it’s a misconception, but something that people definitely don’t know is the politics of collections, cataloging, and citation.

There’s a lot of politics and bias that people don’t really think about. There’s this whole subfield of librarianship called “critical librarianship” that uses insights from critical theory to think about how we function in categorizing or using materials, how we can make our collections more diverse, and how to work for justice in library spaces, which have typically been very white and affluent.

One example I like to give is how the Dewey Decimal System is super-racist, Eurocentric, and Christocentric. [In] the Dewey Decimal System, call numbers 220 through 290ish are all Christianity, Christian history, Christian theology, Christian preaching. 290 to 299 is every other religion.

That’s just an example of the bias of cataloging, categorizing, and assigning. If you’re doing [religious work] that’s not Christian, you’re relegated to these itty, bitty, tiny numbers that are hard to find.

What can people do to support their libraries working toward inclusivity and progressive values?

There’s been a pretty major push for progressive people to get on their local library boards or “friends of the library” groups. [Mariame Kaba] does a lot of library stuff in addition to her work with prison abolition. She’s been heading up a push to get people on their local library boards.

All local public libraries are different, but I think they all want community engagement. I’m always going to encourage people to get a library card, go to your library, meet your librarians, talk to them, and request books.

Most places, even though they have budget cuts, if you’re like, “Hey, I’m a member of this community, I want to read this book. Can you get it for me?” Librarians are going to go out of their way to get that for you, most of the time.

You, as part of your community, can be a part of creating a collection in your library that reflects your community.

Vanderbilt has more money than God, so my budget is never really an issue, therefore I rely heavily on my community — the students and the faculty — to help me with my collection. My main goal in collecting is to buy what my community needs. And that’s generally the case for any library.

I had a trans woman several years ago who was coming through the program and doing stuff on trans spirituality and poetry. Our collection just didn’t have a lot of that stuff, but she would send me these lists of books and I was just like “Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.” And now we have a pretty good collection of this trans spirituality stuff.

I lived on a seminary campus for the last three years. I was not a student, and yet the Bishop Payne Library staff were very willing to get me whatever book I was looking for. For personal or professional interests.

Anyone that’s a librarian is in a service profession because they like helping people and they want to give people the things that they are looking for.

I have what feels to me like a hard question: How do you handle materials that are “harmful”? I’ll use the example of Christofascism. People who write about and study Christofascism need access to Christofascist texts. They need to be able to read, cite, and understand them. But how do you carry those materials knowing that somebody who’s not an expert could read them out of context and be radicalized?

That’s a real question that we talk about in library school. I remember in my collections development class, we had a whole unit on the ethics of collections. How do you carry books that are Holocaust denial literature and things like that?

The way I think about it is a little bit different because I work in an academic institution. The core here is about intellectual freedom, and the standard of an academic place where we do academic things. It’s a bit different than a public library, a church library, or any other kind of collection that’s more public-facing.

The standard answer is to provide context. In a library you can provide context in the form of the record, on the website or in the catalog. For Holocaust denial, people use a subject heading of “revisionist history” or something like that.

It is a difficult question of ethics, especially when you have different communities and stakeholders, but my main answer is to give as much context as possible. Don’t put a Christofascist book out on [a] display of normal Christian perspectives. Don’t give it more airtime than it needs. But yeah, you want it to be available so that you can learn from it, compare it to other things. [It can be] a useful text, even though it’s bad.

I once saw “context giving” in the form of fundamentalist churches that stamped Rachel Held Evans books with “HERESY: For research purposes only.”

I’ve seen that [type of stamp]. But, to the point, that’s how you do it! If that’s what you believe, that’s how you give the context of: “We, as a library, view this material [as heresy]. Reader beware.”

How can churches support the work of librarianship broadly? Should churches consider developing a library?

I love the idea of a church library. I actually did a couple projects in library school about church libraries and how to create one. Obviously, information and resources are really great and important. If you can get the stuff into people’s hands, I think you can do a lot of good.

Depending on the size of your church and the programming going on, any kind of Christian education minister or whatever could absolutely do some really cool things by creating a library or getting involved in another library and making some kind of relationship.

Here at Vanderbilt, I administer this program called the Kesler Circulating Library. It was started in 1936 by the director of the Divinity Library, John Louis Kesler. When he retired, he actually left an endowment to continue this program.

Any minister from the U.S. can sign up with me and request a book — a physical book — from Vanderbilt Divinity Library and I will mail it to them for free. The only cost to them is to mail it back.

Particularly back in 1936, rural ministers or any minister that was outside the city didn’t have access to a theological library. That’s still the case today. A lot of ministers don’t have access to a good theological library. So through this program, you have access to the Divinity Library here at Vanderbilt.