Johanna Drucker Information Fields and the Pandemic

Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies shares ways that archivists, librarians, and other professionals can utilize skills to support learning and information literacy in the pandemic’s online environment.

BY JOANIE HARMON

On March 7, 2020, Johanna Drucker, the UCLA Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, and Anna Chen, head librarian of UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Library, presented a daylong conference on “Sustaining Visions and Legacies: The Future of Special Collections Libraries.” Speakers including Professor Ellen Pearlstein, UCLA Information Studies students and alumni including Jesse Erickson of the University of Maryland, and library deans, archivists, and librarians from across the nation, shared their expertise in addressing sustainability, not only of physical materials and methods but from a perspective of site specificity and community needs and culture.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, indefinitely shutting down in-person access to special collections for scholars, students, practitioners, and the public. Along with meeting the challenges of providing even greater access to virtual repositories so that scholarship, research, and enrichment can continue for these audiences, Professor Drucker delineates ways that information professionals can use their skills to support and enhance the new normal of a virtual environment that now exists for interactions in libraries, museums and archives, education, medicine, and the media.

UCLA Ed&IS: How does sustainability include planning for a catastrophic event like the COVID-19 pandemic?

JOHANNA DRUCKER: Several things come to mind in terms of the ways that information professionals can serve in a crisis like the one we are in and which could be built into planning.

One essential service would be to provide emergency services and information updates. Consider the role of information professionals in a time of shutdown. What are the information resources most essential for your community? What kinds of resources can be packaged effectively in communication strategies that make them more useful? Accurate information linked to expertise within medical and public health communities is also essential. Another service that information professionals can provide is data production and tracking, contact tracking, and other areas of applied expertise to assist in information gathering in and for your community.

UCLA Ed&IS: What other types of knowledge or expertise within the information fields can help to support other areas— such as medical or safety equipment, or supply chain information, in a pandemic?

DRUCKER: The activities most directly related to the pandemic include data visualization and contact tracing. The number of charts, graphs, and diagrams used to show statistics, but also to model the spread of an epidemic, is enormous. Work like that being done at the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 site (https://coronavirus. jhu.edu/map.html) includes mapping, data processing, and visualization in a constantly updated environment.

Questions about data and how it is modeled accurately are pressing. We are well aware that the lack of testing has hampered our ability to get a full picture of the rates of infection and death from COVID-19. Creating a way to communicate effectively about the scale of absent information or misinformation is important as a contribution to public education. Since underreporting is more likely in disadvantaged communities, the ethical issues that are part of the patterns of treatment and care are also ones that need attention.

Other kinds of professional expertise that can be used in a pandemic— specialized equipment and/or knowledge can be of value, such as the UCLA Library’s use of 3-D printers to help provide personal protective equipment (PPE) in the face of shortages.

UCLA Ed&IS: How about ways that the information field can augment the measures that education is taking to continue remote instruction, from kindergarten through grad school?

DRUCKER: There can be the design of educational support packages. It is all very well to say there are resources online for parents to provide activities for children; it is another thing to put together a “Children’s Activity Page” with themes of backyard science, kitchen chemistry, family history and other topics.

UCLA Ed&IS: How does this, more than ever, reinforce the need for better collaboration and exchange between schools and libraries?

DRUCKER: Teachers teach, they are effective classroom professionals. At the elementary and middle-school levels, they put in long contact hours. They do not have the time or resources to locate, filter, and vet primary materials and publications appropriate to different age groups.

The absence of school librarians works to the detriment of everyone since the necessary expertise is lacking. Librarians pay attention to trends in publishing for children and young adults. [They are] on the front lines of the process of selection and presentation of materials through which children come to understand the world. They are also advocates to the publishing industry and have pushed diversity in these areas.

The partnership of schools and libraries, particularly publicly funded institutions, created opportunities across populations. We lose that at the cost of a just and equitable society. People who imagine that proprietary search engines online provide the same service as professional librarians are like people who imagine the junk food industry is run by nutritionists. Bad information, as we have seen dramatically in the last several weeks, can be fatal.

UCLA Ed&IS: How do the unique skills of information professionals and the resources of their organizations have the potential to help the public with the ability to vet the deluge of information, misinformation, and hearsay that results from a global crisis?

DRUCKER: [There is] the creation of workshops on information literacy: programs and workshops on distinguishing vetted expertise from rumor, hearsay, misinformation, and propaganda. What does fact-checking involve and how can you assess online resources for reliability?

When we engage students in the task of figuring out how to communicate what is good information, we introduce many of the same criteria as in vetting print materials. Who are the editorial figures behind the information? And what professional processes of vetting (peer review, ethical standards of journalism) are being used in producing the information?

Finding out the sponsoring organizations of an online site can be difficult, but legitimate sites are more likely to be transparent. What is the brand—is it an academic, government, private, or secret organization? Who are the authors? What are their credentials? What organizations or institutions have given them awards?

Whatever your values or beliefs, you can apply the same criteria of assessment. Teaching students the fundamentals of fact-checking research techniques is a survival skill. Our job is to help people figure out how to get accurate and trustworthy information by those basic methods—identifying the source, double-checking the facts, and cross-referencing the information.

Those are a few things I think we would build into the emergency preparedness planning that are specific to the pandemic. In terms of ongoing sustainability, I would like us to consider the kinds of professional services that might be a revenue-generating consultancy in areas like digital archiving, data analysis, and other professional work that can be done remotely.  The partnership of schools and libraries, particularly publicly funded institutions, created opportunities across in the last several weeks, can be fatal.