1913 - library established in Houston by a black community. Years later, the city disbanded the all 8 black board members and shut the library down

1939 - 5 black people thrown out of a Virginia library for “disturbing the peace” (they were quietly reading).

1961 - Geraldine Edwards Hollis and eight other students from historically-black Tougaloo College — a group known as the Tougaloo Nine — held a sit-in at a “whites-only” public library in Jackson, Mississippi, as an act of civil disobedience.

1970 - the first meeting of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association formed to address the fact that the ALA wasn’t meeting the needs of Black library professionals.

The late 1990s started to become the sweet spot for library inclusion and governance. Everyone was welcome to access books and media without restriction.

In the 2000s, technology emerged in public libraries in a quite inclusive way. There some libraries had PCs and some had ethernet and/or Wi-Fi (free of captive portals). Anyone could use any of those technologies.

2024:

  • Ethernet becomes nearly non-existent, thus excluding:

    • people running FOSS systems (which often lack FOSS Wi-Fi firmware)
    • people with old hardware
    • people who oppose the energy waste of Wi-Fi
    • people who do not accept the security compromise of Wi-Fi (AP spoofing/mitm, traffic evesdropping, arbitrary tracking by all iOS and Android devices in range)
  • Wi-Fi service itself has become more exclusive at public libraries:

    • captive portals – not all devices can even handle a captive portal, full stop. Some captive portals are already imposing TLS 1.3 so people with slightly older hardware cannot even reach the ToS page. Some devices cannot handle a captive portal due to DNS resolution being dysfunctional before the captive portal is passed and the captive portal itself is designed to need DNS resolution.
    • GSM requirement – some public library captive portals now require patrons to complete an SMS verification. This of course excludes these demographics of people:
      • People who do not own a mobile phone
      • People who do not carry a mobile phone around with them
      • People who do not subscribe to mobile phone service (due to poverty, or for countless privacy reasons)
      • People who object to disclosing their mobile phone number and who intend to exercise their right to data minimisation (under the GDPR or their country’s version thereof)
  • Web access restrictions intensified:

    • e-books outsourced to Cloudflared services, thus excluding all demographics of people who Cloudflare excludes.
    • Invidious blocked. This means people who do not have internet at home have lost the ability to download videos to watch in their home.
    • Egress Tor connections recently blocked by some libraries, which effectively excludes people whose systems are designed to use Tor to function. So if someone’s email account is on an onion service, those people are excluded from email.

There’s a bit of irony in recent developments that exclude privacy seekers who, for example, deliberately choose not to have a GSM phone out of protest against compulsory GSM registration with national IDs, because the library traditionally respects people’s privacy. Now they’re evolving to actually deny service to people for exercising their privacy rights.

There needs to be pushback to get public libraries back on track to becoming as inclusive as they were in the 1990s. A big part of the problem is outsourcing. The libraries are no longer administrating technology themselves. They have started outsourcing to tech giants like Oracle who have a commercial motivation to save money, which means marginalising demographics of people who don’t fit in their simplified canned workflow. When a patron gets excluded by arbitrary tech restrictions, the library is unable to remedy the problem. Librarians have lost control as a consequence of outsourcing.

One factor has improved: some libraries are starting to nix their annual membership fee. It tends to be quite small anyway (e.g. $/€ 5/year), so doesn’t even begin to offset those excluded by technology.

  • coffeeCleanOP
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    6 months ago

    Wouldn’t direct access to a library’s network via Ethernet in an uncontrolled manner pose a security risk though?

    You would have to detail why. Ethernet offers /more/ security by not exposing users’ traffic and by avoiding MitM to a reasonable extent. It’s far easier to spoof a Wi-Fi AP from next door or even a block away than it would be to to plant an ethernet attached MitM box, which means getting behind the drywall or breaking into a utility room. Not to mention the mass surveillance of all iOS devices collecting data, timestamps, location of every other WiFi device in range and feeding that to Apple. Ethernet is trivially immune to that collection, whereas Wi-Fi users are exposed without a countermeaure. They can dynamically change their MAC daily or whatever but that’s not the only data being collected by Apple.

    (edit) It’s worth noting as well that the NSA actually advises people not to use Wi-Fi.

    Also, while propriety Wi-Fi and other technology-related solutions are sometimes frustrating, many libraries are ultimately budget constrained, making the use of standardized solutions far more economical than custom ones.

    Economics does not justify excluding some demographics of people¹. If a public funded service cannot offer service in an equitable way, it’s better to not offer the service at all. When a public library offers a service, assumptions are then made in other contexts that the whole public has that access. Governments operate on the assumption that people they serve have access, and they use that assumption to remove analog means of contact and service. Some government offices have already closed their over-the-counter service. How was it that they could afford it previously but not anymore? Those budgets are themselves set by assumptions, like assumptions that everyone carries a mobile phone.

    ¹ exceptionally, public funding cannot for example cover every heart transplant everyone needs. But the library does not face those kinds of extremes. Ethernet cable is cheap enough. Getting people to agree to terms of service the old fashioned way (paper) is cheap enough. Priorities have to be really screwed up to be willing to exclude someone from service to save money on paper agreements.