[MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Hey Wendy, since we're doing home recording, you can curse all you want. Is there anything you want to say while we do this? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Ah, I can't say it on command. OK, OK. What the [BLEEP]! [LAUGHTER] CHARLIE BENNETT: Cold open. Thank you so much. WENDY HAGENMAIER: There's more. [LAUGHTER] We should all record it. CHARLIE BENNETT: All right. You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I am Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Fred Rascoe, Wendy Hagenmaier, Marlee Givens, and Ameet Doshi. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. AMEET DOSHI: That's right, Charlie. Well, folks, we hardly know where to begin on this one. FRED RASCOE: Well, let's just stay, as normal as possible under these remote circumstances, although I just heard Charlies swear, so already things are not normal. CHARLIE BENNETT: I will cut that out, don't worry, everybody. [LAUGHTER] AMEET DOSHI: Today's show is called 2020AF, because this moment feels intensely like the year 2020. WENDY HAGENMAIER: The pandemic has made our library and our radio station inaccessible, but we have the technology to record at home and broadcast remotely. MARLEE GIVENS: It's a strangely comfortable dystopian future. We've been itching to get back into the studio and on the air, and today is our first episode as a record-at-home radio show. It's us in the virtual studio talking about libraries, archives, and COVID-19. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ugh. If you want to connect with us, we're on Twitter as @LibraryRadio. We'd love to know how you're doing in these weird, weird times. AMEET DOSHI: Our songs today are about, well, who knows? We haven't even programmed the music yet. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's right. This time-swapped recording process is going to throw us all into a tizzy. Although, Fred, I think we should start with a song that just captures everything-- everything about this new and frustrating circumstance that we find ourselves in. FRED RASCOE: I think we got one. Ameet, can you queue it up. AMEET DOSHI: Yeah. This is "Raging in the Plague Age" by Les Savy Fav right here on Lost in the Stacks. [LES SAVY FAV, "RAGING IN THE PLAGUE AGE"] (SINGING) I used to hold the biggest balls deep inside my castle walls. Spend my-- FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called 2020AF. And the AF stands for "All Fine," right? We're talking about how libraries and archives are doing during the COVID-19 pandemic. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Let's start with what Lost in the Stacks is doing. We are recording remotely from multiple locations while sheltering in place during the pandemic. So what do you all think so far? What's your experience? CHARLIE BENNETT: It feels very strange not to be able to reach over and cross something out on someone's script when I see a typo. FRED RASCOE: And we're relying on the video connection to do our usual visual signals to each other. But it's not live, so I guess we could just do a verbal signal and then edit in later to make it seem seamless. CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I can already hear a couple of edit points that I have-- FRED RASCOE: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: --ready to go. Here we are on something called BlueJeans, which is a remote meeting platform or app. We're all at home, I think. I don't want to presume everyone, but it seems like we're all at home speaking into a variety of recording equipment and computers and in a variety of rooms. I'm delighted to see you all, but it doesn't quite feel like we're recording Lost in the Stacks. How's it feel for you? FRED RASCOE: It feels like we're practicing for a conference presentation. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, no. MARLEE GIVENS: No! FRED RASCOE: [LAUGHS] CHARLIE BENNETT: We're going to have to shake that as quickly as possible. Marlee, you are joining this show in a way at a very strange time. MARLEE GIVENS: That's true. I guess I'm not part of the regular crew, but I'm available. So here I am, yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: And the pandemic is making you available for us so that you can now join the show with a little more thoroughness than maybe it would have happened at work? MARLEE GIVENS: I think that's true. There were a few shows in the past that I joined because Charlie happened to wander by that morning and said, do you want to be on the radio? CHARLIE BENNETT: I didn't happen to wander by. Those were carefully constructed manipulative moments. MARLEE GIVENS: OK, OK. But yeah. And I don't know what to make of this overall situation. It has not been that difficult for me for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm an introvert, and so I'm kind of in my element. But the other is most of what I do, I can do from here. The only thing I'm really missing is the printer. CHARLIE BENNETT: Wendy, you were nodding when Marlee said introvert. You want to get in on that thought? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah. I mean, it does feel sort of like I'm in a privileged situation, my life really hasn't changed that much. Like I felt like I was a bit of a recluse to begin with. So like-- this just makes it legal to do that. But, no, yeah, I feel like really lucky that so much of my work is already centered on things that are detached from the physical environment. And I definitely miss seeing you all in the studio, but it is kind of fun to see everyone so clearly like head on, not from the side all in a row. So in a way, I feel like we're a little more connected. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's right. Normally in the studio, we're shoulder-to-shoulder facing a bank of mics, but now we are looking right at each other. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Mm-hmm. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ameet, would you like to weigh in on this experience before we move on to what happened at Georgia Tech? AMEET DOSHI: I guess the thing that I miss is the ritual of asking our student board ops-- or op what's going on. How our class is going? And I think we all feel a sense of not quite parental connection with students, but at least as a kind of guide. And so it's I miss that. I miss hearing about Matt's crazy weekends. His preternatural ability to learn math proofs which has inspired me to try to learn sixth grade math again. So I miss that. But at the same time, like Wendy, I am very grateful that I'm able to do almost everything. In some cases, more productively than before. So it's an exciting time in that respect, but also very unnerving. CHARLIE BENNETT: I have been pondering the word "essential" since we stopped going into work. We're still all working. I don't think there was even-- there wasn't even an announcement about how you can go to part-time or anything like that. It was just, OK, everyone, you're working from home. And that didn't cause me a problem. Did it cause any of you a problem to just have to switch to working at home? I'm going to take that as a no. FRED RASCOE: Well, I think for me personally-- and Charlie, you're connected to this as well. The idea of switching a class on the fly-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: --at Georgia Tech from an in-person to online-- because you and I were teaching a section of what Georgia Tech calls their freshman seminar, they call it GT 1000. And we were in class one week, and then the next week, they said, it's just-- the rest of the year, we're online. And just like everyone else, most of my job I can do online pretty easily. And education can be done remotely online pretty easily, but that shift and without a clutch from in-person to online, that's a little jarring. CHARLIE BENNETT: It did turn into a, OK, what do we have to have done for this to really be a class? And that was the only thing that we did. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. We pared it down to the absolute essential. What learning outcome hasn't been met yet? How do we do that in the quickest, most efficient way possible so that they can have time back to get to their other more perhaps more demanding classes. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. So as an academic library on a campus that has been essentially emptied, we're not going into the building. I think we must have a slightly different feeling about that because there aren't nearly as many signals of the library in the building as there used to be. I've got more books behind me than I usually see when I walk into the office at the library. I do miss the people. Like Wendy said, I miss seeing folks, but I miss my office more than I miss the library spaces, especially because there's some books in that office that I wish I had. AMEET DOSHI: And those books aren't available electronically, Charlie? Or are you looking for the material oomph? CHARLIE BENNETT: I want those books, those books themselves. There's some things I need to cut out of some books and paste onto other books. AMEET DOSHI: Wow. I want to hear more about that. This is Lost in the Stacks. And our show today is called, What Else? 2020AF. We'll talk more about the effects of the pandemic after our music set. WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under RA643.K393. That was "Sick, Sick, Sick" by Queens of the Stone Age, and before that, "Down with Disease" by Phish, songs about adapting when all is not well. MARLEE GIVENS: You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. And this is 2020AF, an episode about libraries and archives in the age of the pandemic. We spent a lot of the first segment talking about ourselves. So who wants to talk about our colleagues, our building, what's going on with people who aren't here in this BlueJeans meeting? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah. I've been thinking a little bit about how things slowly closed up in our library. I mean, from my very specific perspective and certainly not seeing the whole situation at all. But I feel like as the pandemic is revealing inequities everywhere globally, nationally, it also reveals some inequities that occur within libraries, including ours, whether we're faculty or staff in the case of an academic librarian and how the assumptions there about whether our work can be done online or is tied to a building and really like perhaps not questioning how tied to the building we are. And my hope is that this experience reveals that perhaps everyone is entitled to the same safety, to the same rights to shelter in place, to be a good citizen, and that we've gone for a long time not questioning that power dynamics that are buried in our organization, but very present. I don't know if anyone else was feeling that. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, I've been feeling very lucky that I don't work in a public library because public libraries seem to get the bulk of the, oh, you have to be open, you're important in this time. You're such essential parts of how life works. But also, the public libraries I've seen open, they talk about not getting a lot of help, not a lot of support in terms of keeping healthy. It seems like some folks who run things don't really imagine the crowding and the touching that goes on in a library. Ameet, you're a closer to the administration than we are. Were there some decisions, choices, or factors that maybe we are not aware of that went into some decisions? AMEET DOSHI: Yeah. I think this is also laying bare this-- I don't know if it's a divide or a schism or what, but there's some scientific truths about how these kinds of organisms spread, to the degree that there are mathematical models that are pretty accurate about the incident, the likelihood of something spreading on campus in lieu of social distancing. And so I found it very jarring that there was this kind of slow walk to the science instead of a clear acknowledgment that there's a fundamental biological truth happening here that we need to acknowledge. It's like gravity in some ways. So I was surprised that we did such a slow walk to closing, closing the facility and trying to keep some spaces open while others closed. And really, I think ultimately it was, at the state level, there was just this effort to try to thread the needle in some strange way, which counteracts the type of threat that we're dealing with. Just a full-on closure would likely have been the best policy. And it's not like we haven't seen this before. There are experts right here in Atlanta that I don't think were vociferous enough about the need to just shut it down, shut everything down. Now that's easier said than done, I acknowledge, but I suspect that there's also just some mistrust, a latent mistrust of some of these models and some of these truths about how viruses spread. And there's more noise in the information atmosphere. So that would be my real concern about how the early days pre-social distancing, about how this happened on campus. Now what's happening now, just as we all know, is just shocking. I mean, I'm going to go get a tattoo right after this just saying the word "I'm Shocked." [LAUGHTER] CHARLIE BENNETT: But Ameet, not all of our listeners are as deep in Georgia politics as we are. So would you like to explain that very quickly? AMEET DOSHI: It turns out that our state is allowing certain businesses to reopen during this pandemic. And they are being deemed essential. And these include bowling alleys, tattoo parlors, hair salons. I mean, I feel for the people that work in those industries and I can't imagine what it's like right now to be on the brink of bankruptcy. And it's just-- it's gotta be-- the pressures are acute. But the nature of this threat is one in which we can't underestimate what it means when just one vector or one small cluster of cases emerges. So hypervigilance actually makes sense here. And we're throwing that to the wind, caution to the wind, which is also a very American tradition, for better or worse. CHARLIE BENNETT: So if we analogize these two libraries, the leaving folks on the circulation desk so that other folks can still check out books is kind of like saying, well, tattoo parlors and hair salons, people need to have their haircut, people need to have reading material, so work it out. As opposed to us in the position we're in, that all five co-hosts at this moment on this show have faculty status and jobs that are almost built into teleworking because they're so digitally based to begin with. Is that-- does that come back to what you were thinking of, Wendy, when you were talking about inequities? Or what's missing-- WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah. Totally. And I will say that I'm a faculty member, but I'm also part of the Archives Team, and we were very much at the last minute asked to report to the Reading Room as normal. And I said that I would not report because feel like I had that privilege. It was still really scary and emotional to do that. But yeah, I think totally, like what kind of delusions are going on about how we're valuable to students? I mean, certainly how we're valuable to them normally, like are the print books valuable to them? Certainly they are, but not as much as we're deluded into thinking they are. And then certainly right now, what's a value to them is totally different than what's normally a value to them. So we just have to be awake to what our power is and what our value actually is to our stakeholders right now, and that-- I didn't see that going on. And that's distressing and it's hard to speak out about that in a culture that becomes a lot more hierarchical in a time of crisis. I think also, I'm channeling so much of my helplessness about the world into my very small world that is the library. And I see that. But I do feel like it's good to move through this experience and to, yeah, wake up to like what I can do to be useful to the students right now, but going forward. So it's a good learning experience, and I hope that we can also take care of each other in the library regardless of our role. CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, this is a perfect moment for you to take control of the very small piece of the world that you have total control over. WENDY HAGENMAIER: All right. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called 2020AF. We'll be back with more about our professions and COVID-19 on the left side of the hour. JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, this is Jad Abumrad from Radiolab. And you are listening to Lost in the Stacks, the one and only research library rock and roll radio show here on WREK Atlanta. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's episode is 2020AF. And here I am at home. So I thought I would recruit one of the folks around here to give you our standard Midshow Moment of Zen. SUBJECT 1: I like being on the radio because I get to talk in front of pretty much the whole world. SPEAKER 2: The best part of being home because of the pandemic is maybe roller skating or maybe the trampoline or maybe spending time with my family, I don't know. I like roller skating because it's like for exercising and it just feels good to go fast and get fresh air. And I like the trampoline because it feels good to jump up high. And I like spending time with my family because I love my family. When we leave the house, which probably going to be like June, then we're going to go to my grandparents' house, Mimi and Papa, and we're going to spend a week at the pool. CHARLIE BENNETT: You can file this set under RM161.D63. [FIONA APPLE, "DRUMSET"] The drumset is gone and the rug it was on is still here screaming at me. Why did you take it all away? Why did you take it all away? [MIND THE GAP, "VENTILATOR BLUES"] --to fight it? Are you gonna fight it? Are you gonna fight it? Are you gonna fight it? Are you gonna fight it? Are you-- are you gonna fight it? CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard "Ventilator Blues" by Mind the Gap, and we started with "Drumset" by Fiona Apple. Songs about coping with a loss of personal connection. AMEET DOSHI: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And today's episode is about COVID-19 and how libraries and archives are handling it. So in the last segment, I think we uncovered systemic problems with power and just the nature of this horrible threat that we're right in the middle of. But in some ways, this is also brought out the best of organizations and the best of just our desire to be compassionate towards our colleagues and our friends. And so there have been very inspiring examples of mutual aid. At the institute level, Georgia Tech has created this student fund for direct transfers of money to students that need it immediately. Almost not quite no questions asked, but where that's not-- there's little bureaucracy. And I think that's an example of what Tech is doing to help students immediately. And libraries are also participating here. There's an organization that we've interviewed on this show before called EveryLibrary.org, and they've created a similar fund for direct transfers to library and archives workers that are needing some help. Marlee, I know you have some ideas about other kinds of mutual aid that we're seeing during this time of pandemic. MARLEE GIVENS: One of the things that distinguishes Georgia Tech's response-- Georgia Tech Library's response is that so much of what we do is already online. And so we're able to keep up a lot of our services pretty seamlessly, but there are a lot of libraries that have more print collections, and if they're closing for safety, which is obviously, yes, what they should be doing, they no longer have access to some of the resources that their patrons might need. And so there are some organizations like the Internet Archive which has a lending library and they've opened up lending so that more than one person can check out a book at a time. And we're seeing some of that from actual commercial vendors as well, more unlimited borrowing. And Fred, you do some work for the HathiTrust, right? FRED RASCOE: Yeah. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. So-- and they've done something. FRED RASCOE: Oh. There's the HathiTrust Emergency Access which the Georgia Tech community benefits from because we are members, partners with the HathiTrust. Under normal circumstances, the HathiTrust Digital Book Collection, which includes digital books-- books that have been digitized from print collections from all the partner libraries, the ones that are under copyright are not available in full text access. However, because of this, the responses of libraries, eventually the libraries-- maybe some of them were a little slow on the draw, but it did close and collections-- print collections are unavailable, but a lot of folks are still doing the work that requires access to those print collections. So what HathiTrust did is, if a partner library had a book in print and it was in copyright and HathiTrust had a digital copy of that, HathiTrust opened up that in-copyright book so that anyone who's affiliated with a partner library can log on and view the full text so you can-- Just for an example, Stephen King book, if the library has a Stephen King book in print and HathiTrust has a digital copy, under normal circumstances, you can't view the in-copyright version, but now since most print collections are off-limits to community users, you can log into HathiTrust if you're a member, if you're at an affiliate institution, and you can view the full text online of that print book. In normal circumstances, if someone has some sort of disability or different ability that precludes them from accessing a print book, even under non-pandemic conditions, HathiTrust makes the case that they can offer the digital version of to that print-disabled person. So they extrapolated that in essence-- I'm kind of summarizing broadly here. They extrapolated that to mean that everyone has an inability to access print, so they're opening that up under this limited circumstance. Marlee mentioned the Internet Archive a minute ago, and they opened up in-copyright items to everyone, anyone who has an internet connection and can log on to the Internet Archive and view some digital versions of in-copyright books. And it's-- some folks are questioning that as maybe going a little bit too far, too infringing of copyright. CHARLIE BENNETT: Wendy, in the last minute we have left, can you talk about the Archivist Association's Mutual Aid Program that you-- you threw a link up a little while ago. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah. It's similar to what Ameet mentioned, so SAA, the Society of American Archivists, has this Archival Workers Emergency Fund. And it was started by just a few members talking together, and then very quickly wrote a proposal, had it approved by council, and they've raised significant funds already. And yeah, anyone can apply for a variety of reasons. It's intended to be quite open. So if you just Google the Archival Workers Emergency Fund if you were interested, you could find out more. Or if you're interested in donating to the fund. CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called 2020AF. Because recording a library radio show remotely when the world has turned upside-down seems like an extremely 2020 activity. MARLEE GIVENS: File this set under JC575.K38. [TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS, "DON'T COME AROUND HERE NO MORE"] You just heard "Don't Come Around Here No More" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a song about wanting that thing that's no good for us to disappear forever. AMEET DOSHI: Today's Lost in the Stacks is 2020AF. We've been talking about how librarians and archivists and libraries and archives are helping the members of our community. We've also talked about the power dynamics of our organizations and when to shut down. And we've been just interrogating this time that we're in. So I'd like to ask you guys, all of you, what's kept you going? Marlee, you want to start? MARLEE GIVENS: What's kept me going is still having stuff to do. Even though we're far away and we're all remote from each other, that there's still so much that we can do the other thing I'll say is having a chance to connect, continue connecting with my colleagues and with my students who are about to leave for the summer. AMEET DOSHI: How about you, Fred? FRED RASCOE: What keeps me going, besides the fact that I get to wake up a little later and also I have two breakfasts in the morning, I do like the fact that I am in a position where I can still do work from home. Not everyone in Georgia Tech or the State of Georgia or the US can do that. I am appreciative of Georgia Tech in that. However they may have handled the eventual coming to the decision of shutting down the campus, the full-time employees are still being paid whether they can work from home or not. And there are a lot of people out there, as we've seen in unemployment numbers, that are not in that same situation. So I'm pretty grateful for that situation right now. AMEET DOSHI: What about you, Wendy? WENDY HAGENMAIER: The first thing that came to mind was spring, just being able to go outside and see the plants as they evolve, even if it's a yellow street from pollen. But I think also just this amazing thing to witness of the whole world experiencing the same stress. Certainly in different ways, certainly with different levels of privilege and gratitude and struggle. But I just never seen anything that is so commonly shared. And it's a gift to live through that. AMEET DOSHI: Charlie, take us out. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours. AMEET DOSHI: Mine is the higher things in life-- poetry, fiction, non-fiction, writing, teaching-- kept me going. CHARLIE BENNETT: What's keeping me going right now are pretzels, peanut butter, and a big backyard. OK. I don't know how are we going to roll the credits when it's-- oh, there we go. AMEET DOSHI: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Ameet Doshi-- that's me! CHARLIE BENNETT: That's you! AMEET DOSHI: Amanda Pellerin, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show was edited and assembled at home by Charlie in beautiful Tucker, Georgia. FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and a few basic household items provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to all the essential workers who leave their homes to keep the world going while we flatten the curve. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. MARLEE GIVENS: Find us online LostinTheStacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio picks. CHARLIE BENNETT: For the next few months, we'll be working on an every-two-weeks schedule for new episodes. So next week is a rerun, and we'll be back with a new show the week after that. AMEET DOSHI: It's time for our last song of the day. Sometimes it's been a challenge dealing with the new normal of social distancing and minimal in-person contact, but recording the show remotely was a lot of fun, and I'm glad that we're going to be able to keep sending our library messages into the world even if we can't be in the same studio together. So in that spirit, let's close with a classic. This is "Message in a Bottle" by The Police right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everyone. [THE POLICE, "MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE"] (SINGING) Just a castaway, an island at sea, oh. Another lonely--