Movers help ensure that stories connect to people

It’s early spring in New York; the windows are open, and the barrier between outside and inside is porous again. Twice, recently, I was awakened well before my morning alarm by sirens. They passed my block but left me wide awake with the reminder: Every day is an emergency for someone.

For the past several years, libraries of all kinds and in all sectors have been experiencing a growing state of emergency. Challenges to intellectual freedom have metastasized from local efforts by individuals to legislation that would drive the removal of titles and programming at the city, state, or federal level. And these efforts to suppress reading and access to information continue to spread far beyond the library.

In Tennessee, the state Senate and House recently passed a bill that would charge book publishers with a felony, or levy fines up to $100,000 per violation, for distributing what state law deems “obscene matter” to a public school or school district. A similar bill targeting publishers—this one at the federal level and cosponsored by representatives George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others—was introduced in February. And while these bills are concerned with the K–12 sector, over the past few years, book-banning efforts in public and academic libraries have followed closely on the heels of those aimed at school libraries.

These proposed laws are clearly counting on economies of scale to restrict materials and services for an ever-larger swath of communities. Attacks on large groups like publishers—or restricting funding by treating all libraries within a state or district as a single entity—attempt to recast censorship efforts as safeguarding institutions and organizations in the broadest sense, drawing attention away from the fact that these actions are designed to silence the voices of individual authors and limit the options of individual readers. Passing legislation that hurts people is always easier when those people aren’t in the picture, when someone’s emergency isn’t visible.

This month, as we have every year since 2002, LJ celebrates a new cohort of Movers & Shakers. The 49 individuals profiled hail from every corner of libraryland and beyond: staff, administrators, faculty, vendors, marketers, board members, and more. Some of the work they have created is exuberant—think teen punk band The Linda Lindas at Los Angeles Public Library, or a full runway show for queer and trans teens. Some initiatives highlight the essential nature of everyday tasks, such as the user-friendly work in progress on the Koha open-source ILS. Much of what we celebrate in these pages involves a deep desire for more level playing fields, from Pre-K literacy interventions to the incorporation of Hawaiian language in cataloging metadata.

One criticism I’ve heard over the years about Movers & Shakers is that the award spotlights only a handful of individuals each year when excellent work is done by so many across all corners of the field. And while I agree that the award can’t compare with the sheer number of bright lights in the library firmament, I also think the emphasis on individuals isn’t a bad thing. Yes, these services need everyone on board, every day, to carry them forward and turn them into reality. But someone jump-started those realities, and that’s what Movers & Shakers celebrates. You’ll also read about several people who have testified at legislative-committee hearings, spoken before their elected officials, helped change state and city policy, rallied grassroots support against restrictive bills, and run for office—or plan to.

Pro-censorship efforts bank on enough people’s reluctance, or inability, to imagine the individuals who need those resources: kids, teens, and adults of color, or who are LGBTQIA+, or who have a hunger to see others in the world who are like (or unlike) them. Those stepping forward to speak up in legislative sessions, secure funding for bookmobiles, improve access to tribal law, open food pantries—the Movers and the Shakers—make their work, and the communities they work for, visible, one person at a time, inside the library and out. That’s what, and who, we’re celebrating, and why.