back Talk — Key Notes from Charleston Conference

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

So we missed the friends, we missed the food — but we didn’t really miss the Charleston Conference itself. In fact, with registrations at an all-time high, the conference this year was in some ways even richer and more valuable than usual.

With the good (fingers crossed!) news about vaccines, we can start dreaming about future Charlestons when we’re back in the city — but, but! If we’ve learned nothing else in all these months of COVID, it’s that there truly are some excellent things we can do online — like including more people in conversations without the barriers of cost and time that keep many away from an event like the Charleston Conference. If we’re smart, we’ll find ways, when “normality” returns, to hold on to as many as we can of the good things we’ve learned along this way.

That’s where my thoughts were going when the conference ended earlier this month, and as I looked back, I thought I saw a theme. They keynote events were especially valuable for me and I was glad to see that with the rise in numbers they probably had more attendees per session than ever before. And all of them were focused, in a way that made sense — because we’ve all been feeling so cut off and isolated this year — on building richer, more expansive, more inclusive communities. Wherever we are at the moment and whatever our individual responsibilities may be, bringing more people into our professional activities and conversations seems obviously and importantly preferable to cutting out people or reducing conversations to people who already know each other.

So start at the end of the conference (Friday): “The Long Arm of the Law” ran its eleventh annual session and it’s a great recurring conference event. Most conference-goers aren’t lawyers, but the workings of the law affect us all, so it’s been powerful to have attorneys who know the information world interpret the legal world to us. This year, we missed the legendary Bill Hannay, whose insights and songs had animated almost all the earlier events. (Bill’s “greatest hit,” if you ask me, was his reworking of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” from a couple of years back, and we had the fun of ending the session this year with a video rerun — the altered lyrics reminding us that we rarely own anything in that space and always have to navigate the terms of use that the real owner controls.)

But the phrase “Long Arm of the Law,” as impresario and host Ann Okerson reminded us, goes back to the seventeenth century, and the Kenny Rogers song is about a story of a wicked judge abusing his authority to keep a fine young man (a coal miner) from courting his daughter: a reminder, if we needed one, that the power and majesty of the law can be abused — and even when it isn’t, can be used to the advantage of the powerful. This year’s session caught two threads from that skein: Nancy Kirkpatrick of OhioNET modeling for us how to think about and wrestle with the recent Presidential Executive Order that sought to demonize and interfere with diversity training (even legally required training!) in our institutions, while Pam Samuelson of the Berkeley Law School explored the domain of controlled digital lending to show us just how that model of resource sharing can and should prevail in the face of legal objections. You could go away from such a session heartened that people are fighting these battles with such smarts and at the same time puzzled why the resistance to things that are smart and wise can be so strong.

The day before (Thursday), John Palfrey, whose career has taken him from the exalted rank of librarian to his current role as President of the MacArthur Foundation, gave us insights into the world as it appears from a philanthropist’s perspective. Palfrey is a long-time believer in libraries — particularly digital libraries — and a fan of the “superpower” of librarians. He reminded the audience to press forward with innovation and scaled up activities, such as controlled digital lending and the Digital Public Library of America. The library profession’s power and future is in envisioning and building the future for the benefit of society.

But the week’s sessions began on the morning after the election (Wednesday), at an hour when everything was genuinely up in the air and nobody was quite awake. In spite of that, 1,700+ people logged in to hear Earl Lewis, former president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, former provost of Emory University, and a distinguished American historian now back at the University of Michigan directing their Center for Social Solutions. I have known Earl for twenty years and confess I was particularly pleased to be able to help him join us in Charleston, where there is always a hunger to hear a broader perspective and to think about how we can best serve our communities.

Lewis’ topic was “Leading in a Age of Chaos and Change: Building a Community of Grace.” It could not have been more timely. In a moment of polarization and dangers on all sides, he focused on what it takes to think beyond the everyday rou-

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