Librarians as Co-Conspirators

This post is part of a series that reclaims community-centered librarianship from its institutional distortions, returning it to its roots in struggle, mutual aid, and collective survival. It treats libraries not as neutral services but as contested infrastructures shaped by power, resistance, and memory, and explores librarianship as solidarity work grounded in real communities, real conflicts, and the ongoing tension between institutional control and collective autonomy. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Beyond Support

Community-centered librarianship has developed an extensive vocabulary for describing positive relationships between libraries and the people around them. Libraries support communities, respond to their needs, advocate for access, build partnerships, facilitate participation, and provide resources. These activities can be useful, and in some circumstances essential. Yet none of them necessarily implies solidarity.

Support can remain external to the situation it addresses. A library may provide meeting space to tenants facing eviction, help migrants locate legal information, preserve records documenting environmental damage, or assist workers researching employment rights while maintaining a clear separation between the institution and the consequences of those struggles. The library helps, but what happens afterward remains somebody else's problem.

Solidarity introduces a different relationship. It means allowing the conditions faced by a community to affect the decisions made by the librarian and, where possible, by the institution. The question is no longer only what resources can be provided, but what responsibilities follow from knowing how those resources, procedures, and institutional choices intersect with a particular situation.

This does not require librarians to become activists by professional definition, nor does it mean adopting every political position advanced by people who use the library. Communities are internally divided, their interests may conflict, and librarians remain responsible to other users, colleagues, laws, and institutional obligations. Solidarity cannot erase those complexities.

What it does challenge is the assumption that professional responsibility ends at the point of service delivery.

When library procedures expose vulnerable people, when access policies increase the risk attached to particular records, or when reporting requirements turn sensitive relationships into information that can circulate beyond its original context, those consequences become part of professional responsibility. They cannot be dismissed as external effects simply because the underlying decision was administrative, technical, or procedurally correct. Professional distance does not remove the library from the chain of consequences created by its own practices.

The question is what librarians do with what they know.

Professional Distance and Institutional Innocence

Professional distance serves legitimate purposes. Librarians cannot become responsible for resolving every social, legal, economic, or political problem encountered through their work. They are not substitutes for lawyers, social workers, community organizers, medical professionals, or elected representatives. Clear boundaries can protect users from inappropriate intervention and protect workers from demands that exceed their expertise or capacity.

Distance also helps prevent another familiar problem: professional substitution. A librarian who becomes too convinced of their own political usefulness may begin deciding what a community needs, which struggle deserves support, who represents the group, or what outcome should be pursued. The result can reproduce the same hierarchy that community-centered practice is supposed to challenge.

The difficulty appears when professional distance becomes institutional innocence.

Libraries routinely make decisions that affect what communities can know, preserve, conceal, circulate, or contest. They decide which records are retained, which descriptive language is used, which spaces can be occupied, what information is collected from users, which partnerships are accepted, and what forms of visibility are considered desirable. These choices may be framed as technical or administrative, but their consequences do not remain inside professional categories.

A library may preserve testimony about displacement while placing it online in ways that expose names and locations. It may host a community organization while requiring registration procedures that discourage undocumented participants. It may collect evidence of local conflict while transferring control of that evidence to an institutional repository. It may publicly celebrate a community project while revealing relationships that participants expected to remain discreet.

In such cases, the institution cannot plausibly claim that its responsibility ended with providing access, preservation, or space. Its own procedures have entered the situation.

Solidarity begins by refusing the fiction that the librarian can always remain outside those consequences.

What Shared Risk Actually Means

The language of co-conspiracy can easily become theatrical. It can suggest that librarians prove their solidarity by exposing themselves to danger, breaking rules, or adopting the risks faced by the communities with whom they work.

That interpretation is both unrealistic and ethically careless. Risks are not equally distributed. A permanent senior librarian, a temporary library assistant, an undocumented user, a tenant facing eviction, and an activist already subject to surveillance do not occupy comparable positions. The same institutional conflict can produce inconvenience for one person and unemployment, deportation, homelessness, or physical danger for another. Pretending that everyone involved shares the same risk obscures the inequalities that solidarity should make visible.

Taking risks with a community therefore cannot mean reproducing its vulnerability. It means allowing community risk to shape professional judgment rather than treating it as external to library procedure.

If participants in a local documentation project explain that public names could expose them to retaliation, staff may need to reconsider standard expectations of attribution and visibility. If an organization fears that attendance records could be used against its members, the library can ask whether those records need to exist at all. If a politically sensitive archive would become more vulnerable through immediate digitization, preservation planning may need to separate preservation from public access. If a group needs continuity in a long investigation, the library may preserve working materials and research trails rather than treating each visit as an isolated reference transaction.

These actions do not equalize risk. The librarian does not suddenly experience what the community experiences. Nor should professional solidarity depend on pretending otherwise.

What changes is the distribution of responsibility. The community no longer carries every consequence while the library remains protected by the claim that it merely provided a service.

Institutional Position as a Resource

Librarians possess forms of institutional knowledge and access that can be valuable precisely because they are not distributed equally.

They may understand how records are produced and retained, how administrative decisions can be traced, how public information systems work, how metadata affects retrieval, how privacy is protected or undermined, and how institutional procedures can be challenged. They may have access to databases, meeting rooms, preservation equipment, legal advice, professional networks, communication channels, or administrative authority unavailable to many community members.

Solidarity can involve placing those capacities at the disposal of collective work without converting them into authority over that work.

Institutional position becomes useful when professional knowledge is applied to concrete constraints faced by a community. Understanding municipal records can help residents reconstruct how a decision was made; knowledge of archival agreements can expose the consequences of transferring ownership before materials are deposited; familiarity with cataloging systems can make visible the distortions introduced by standardized terminology. The same principle applies to privacy and institutional procedure. Staff who understand the legal conditions governing requests for user information are better placed to resist informal disclosure, while control over library space can sometimes be exercised without forcing community relationships into formal partnerships designed primarily for administrative recognition.

These interventions usually consist of ordinary professional work carried out with a broader understanding of its consequences. Treating librarians as co-conspirators does not imply abandoning professional roles or replacing librarianship with political activism. It means using professional knowledge, institutional access, and technical expertise in ways that respond to community-defined problems while leaving decisions about priorities and courses of action with the people most directly affected. Professional expertise remains necessary, but its function is to clarify options, constraints, and risks rather than to determine the direction of collective action.

Solidarity and Refusal

Some forms of solidarity involve providing something: information, space, preservation, technical assistance, continuity, or access. Others require refusing something.

Refusal already appears throughout community-centered practice because institutions constantly translate complex situations into administratively manageable forms. They request data, visibility, documentation, metrics, standardized descriptions, unrestricted access, formal partnerships, and predictable outcomes. Each request may appear reasonable in isolation. Taken together, they can gradually transfer control away from the people whose knowledge or activities generated the work.

A librarian may therefore need to refuse unnecessary data collection, inappropriate disclosure, harmful descriptive terminology, premature publication, an extractive partnership, or a demand to transform sensitive community activity into evidence of institutional impact.

But refusal should not be romanticized either. A refusal is not progressive simply because it contradicts institutional procedure. Restricting access can protect vulnerable people, but it can also conceal evidence. Rejecting documentation can preserve autonomy, but it can also produce disappearance. Protecting community authority can become a way of protecting dominant figures within a community from criticism. Refusing institutional oversight can defend legitimate confidentiality or remove safeguards against abuse.

A refusal should therefore be assessed through its effects: what it protects, whose interests it serves, which risks it redistributes, and who remains accountable for the consequences. Resistance to institutional procedure has no inherent political value if it merely shifts harm elsewhere, protects local authority from scrutiny, or replaces one form of unaccountable control with another.

This requires distinguishing among different kinds of constraint. A legal obligation is not the same as an institutional habit. A professional standard is not the same as a managerial preference. A risk-management procedure may protect vulnerable people, or it may primarily protect the institution from embarrassment. Treating all of these as equally inevitable prevents librarians from identifying where discretion actually exists.

Solidarity operates partly within that space of discretion. It asks librarians to know when a rule is compulsory, when it is negotiable, when an exception is possible, and when compliance would produce a harm serious enough to justify challenging the procedure itself.

Co-Conspiracy Without Speaking for the Community

The language of the co-conspirator is useful only if the librarian does not become the protagonist.

Communities do not require librarians to discover their oppression for them, formulate the correct political interpretation, or lead them toward an appropriate response. Such a model would replace the neutral professional with a heroic one while leaving the underlying distribution of authority largely unchanged.

The librarian may possess useful knowledge without possessing the right to decide what should be done with it.

A community researching a municipal development project may use records located by library staff and still reach conclusions that those staff do not share. A neighborhood archive may decide to restrict materials that an archivist would normally make available. Participants in a documentation project may reject a public exhibition that the library considers valuable. A community organization may choose negotiation where a librarian expected confrontation, or confrontation where the librarian would have preferred negotiation.

If solidarity depends on the community adopting the professional's preferred response, it is no longer solidarity. It is political tutelage.

The same principle applies to representation. Institutional access often gives librarians greater opportunities to speak publicly. They may be invited to conferences, interviewed by journalists, asked to prepare reports, or treated as authoritative interpreters of a project. Those opportunities create a persistent temptation to speak about community struggles because the librarian has been involved in documenting or supporting them.

Participation does not automatically produce authorization. Knowing a community well does not grant the right to represent it. Helping preserve records does not create ownership of the story they contain. Providing technical infrastructure does not turn the librarian into the public voice of those who use it.

Co-conspiracy requires a disciplined willingness to remain secondary.

Protecting Workers Is Part of the Politics

Calls for librarians to take risks can become irresponsible very quickly when they ignore employment conditions.

Library workers themselves occupy unequal positions. Some have permanent contracts, union protection, seniority, managerial authority, or sufficient financial security to withstand conflict with an employer. Others are temporary, poorly paid, professionally isolated, dependent on visas, or working under supervisors who can easily punish them. Workers may also face racialized, gendered, or other forms of institutional vulnerability that make apparently identical acts of resistance carry very different consequences.

A politics of solidarity that treats personal sacrifice as proof of commitment can reproduce exploitation inside the library.

Managers should not encourage frontline staff to violate policy and then leave them individually responsible when disciplinary action follows. Senior professionals should not celebrate courageous refusal by colleagues whose employment is substantially less secure than their own. Institutions cannot describe themselves as radical because individual workers quietly absorb risks that management refuses to assume.

In some situations, solidarity means that the person with greater institutional protection takes the visible position. A director may formally challenge a policy so that a junior worker does not have to violate it. A professional association may provide support where an isolated employee cannot safely act alone. A team may establish collective procedures so that sensitive decisions do not depend on individual courage.

This is another reason to resist heroic accounts of community librarianship. The objective is not to produce brave librarians — it is to create conditions in which responsibility, protection, and risk are distributed deliberately rather than falling automatically on those with the least power.

Solidarity in Ordinary Work

The practical test of solidarity is not whether a library describes itself as politically committed. It is whether the relationship changes ordinary work.

In collection development, solidarity affects the conditions under which materials are acquired and the authority contributors retain afterward. A community should not lose control of its knowledge simply because the library possesses better preservation infrastructure.

In description, it requires mechanisms through which imposed names, damaging categories, and misleading interpretations can be challenged. The professional responsibility to maintain coherent metadata remains, but coherence cannot be achieved by treating community language as noise that must be normalized away.

In access, it complicates the assumption that greater visibility is always better. Some records need broad circulation; others require delay, restriction, contextualization, or forms of access that remain under community control.

In reference work, solidarity can mean helping people understand the structure of a problem rather than simply locating an answer. It may require preserving continuity across several encounters and making research methods transferable rather than creating dependence on professional expertise.

In programming, it means resisting the pressure to convert every community problem into an event. Some collective work needs privacy, repetition, informal use of space, or long periods during which nothing easily reportable happens.

In evaluation, it requires acknowledging outcomes that institutional metrics often fail to recognize: reduced exposure, continued access to a trusted space, protection of sensitive records, strengthened capacity to investigate, the survival of a fragile relationship, or the successful refusal of an extractive demand.

In management, it means using institutional authority to absorb pressure rather than directing it downward toward frontline staff or outward toward community participants.

None of these practices is revolutionary in isolation. Together, however, they alter the terms under which the library relates to the people around it.

Accountability in Several Directions

Solidarity cannot mean unconditional loyalty to whichever group is currently closest to the library.

Libraries remain accountable to multiple publics. Staff have obligations toward other users, colleagues, legal requirements, public resources, professional ethics, and people who may be absent from the immediate relationship. Communities themselves contain conflicting interests. A decision that protects one group may expose another. A restriction requested by current community leaders may prevent younger members from accessing records they regard as their own history. A demand for confidentiality may conflict with the preservation of evidence of abuse.

There is no general principle capable of resolving every such conflict. This is precisely why solidarity should be understood as a form of responsibility rather than allegiance.

It changes the questions through which decisions are examined. Who benefits from this action? Who carries its risks? Whose knowledge is being converted into an institutional asset? Who has the authority to consent? Who is absent from the decision? Can the choice be revised later? What happens when different members of the community disagree? What responsibility does the library retain after the immediate project has ended?

These questions do not eliminate professional judgment. They make its exercise more accountable. A librarian may still decide that a community request cannot be followed. The important distinction is that the refusal should emerge from an explicit consideration of competing responsibilities rather than from the automatic superiority of institutional procedure.

Solidarity does not remove conflict from professional work. It changes where the librarian stands while working through it.

Not Above, Not Outside

The neutral librarian and the revolutionary librarian are both inadequate figures. The first imagines that professional work can remain outside the conflicts in which knowledge circulates. The second risks placing the librarian at the center of struggles that belong to other people.

Community-centered librarianship requires a less comfortable position.

Librarians are situated actors. They possess expertise, institutional access, resources, constraints, and forms of authority that can affect what communities are able to preserve, discover, conceal, challenge, or circulate. They cannot eliminate that power by declaring themselves neutral, and they should not enlarge it by imagining themselves as political leaders.

Solidarity places professional capacities within relationships of accountability, but it does not prescribe a single form of action. Providing access may be appropriate in one situation and restricting it in another; speaking publicly may be necessary in some cases, while in others the librarian's responsibility is to avoid appropriating a community's voice. Institutional procedures may provide essential protections, or they may need to be questioned when their effects conflict with the purposes they are supposed to serve. These decisions require attention to context, authority, risk, and consequence, and they will not always produce an outcome free of harm.

To act as a co-conspirator is therefore not to become a rebel on behalf of a community. It is to refuse the safer arrangement in which communities carry the consequences, institutions acquire the knowledge, and librarians preserve the appearance that their own position has remained untouched.

The librarian does not need to stand above the community or disappear behind professional neutrality. They need to understand where they stand, what that position makes possible, and to whom they are answerable when they use it.