and it was interesting when when you when you looked at just a run of his top 20 anyone by itself was pretty pretty uh you know ambiguous and but when you saw Pat the pattern that repeated over and over the the set of the head on the shoulders the way forward lean the way the arms swung the the compliant gate the high stepping high lifting of the feet you know which would show up not consistently in all of them but little snippets here and there scattered throughout it made a kind of compelling case that there was this remarkable undercurrent of consistency to these little glimpses and maybe there was something to it but it also is a dramatic demonstration that most people are terrible photographers and uh and most uh most of a lot of the clips were photo bombs they were just they were shooting something else and and Bigfoot happened to get up and walk out of frame or or walk across the frame or something on the on the horizon and and very few of them were intentional videos of Bigfoot really interesting and thank you for that as well as thanks for this question coming in from raw nakedness says there is a very small population of Sumitran orangutans with yeah with high genetic diversity only 7 000 individuals yeah yeah i mean the the interesting about the interesting thing about um uh pongo the genus pongo is that you know you got these these guys separated on several different islands they used to find them in the mainland too and in Malaysia but not not anymore um at least that we know of um they're not typically animals but the interesting thing is they're they're unique differences behavioral cultural if you will and morphologically between the different populations and different species i should say different species and different populations even on some of these islands particularly the main difference between the bornean and Sumatran orangutan which is very interesting is the Sumatran one spends much more time up in the trees than the bornean one does because they're still tigers on Sumatran uh so they think that perhaps it's this retained fear of oh my gosh like there actually is something that could take us out here other than people uh and so they stick to the trees so but yeah you know o-ring o-ring um anecdote there i just think they're cool yeah interesting and this one coming in from Cole Beasley says you can google big okay i'll read that one later next one harry white says erica if you were in the woods hunting and you saw a big foot and you had one chance to shoot it before it disappeared would you yeah i saw that one pop up in the side jet i don't think i could do it i i really don't think i could i mean and i know talk about probably like oh my god it would it would be we'd finally have like legit legit i don't think i could do it i really don't no i i couldn't as well that was that was dr crances and john greens position uh crance argued you know that it was justified in order to establish the existence and recognition and then if they required protection then then that would be forthcoming but um you know this will sound silly but but i had my uh my reversal in thinking occurred uh because i started out i wrestled with that ethical question and convinced myself uh as crance did that that it was necessary and and when i first began doing field work we were we were prepared and we were uh uh our intention was if the opportunity presented itself to do that but then i i'd taken the kids to go see uh the animated tarzan movie and there were these two characters one was uh uh clinton clayton the uh safari leader who shot at everything that moved and of course he he wanted to capture and exploit the gorillas and then there was the dotting professor who was willing in the end to give up his entire career and his way of life in order to live with and study these magnificent creatures and i had this this little voice in the back of my head said jeff which of these characters do you emulate right now and and that was uh that was the the moment of uh of introspection that caused me to say well what is my motivation i don't need to prove anything to anybody um and so my goal is to uh learn and study and we can we can accomplish that through uh the recognition we as a test case if nothing else through dna you know and there is actually a growing literature of uh arguing for the fact that it's specially in cases of rare and endangered species that we should be satisfied with a voucher dna specimen rather than requiring uh the conventional traditional type specimen to be lethally collected and stuffed in some museum drawer so um so yeah that's our that's my approach now and uh no i would not i would not i don't think i'd even be tempted i hope i wouldn't be tempted you know there's a lot of motivation there but but i think i've i've come to terms with uh with what it is i'm i'm motivated by and it's just to learn and to understand better i'm not doing this you know i don't do this to try to to garner converts i'm not proselytizing a belief i'm arguing the evidence i mean my one argument my principal argument is that the evidence is sufficient that we should be studying this question not dismissing it it it galls me that when people like uh michael schermer say the says the science starts when you have a body that is the most inane unscientific statement anybody can make the science starts listen to me the science starts when you have a question that's when science begins when you start to methodically collect observations and experimentation to understand and address and answer a question and if you wait until there's a body you ain't a scientist period you got it thank you very much and this one coming in from best in show says i think this is for you dr melton they said when visual sightings occur wouldn't you expect mrs bigfoot in jr to be nearby why are they always why are the bigfoot cited alone so often well i i think they're solitary i think that's that's their their adaptation you could ask why are why do we do orangutans choose to stay alone i mean it's it's their adaptation of social structure we do have uh numerous accounts of footprint trackways of females with offspring in tow even when when patty was filmed as was pointed out the motivation for going down there was that there were tracks that were that were identified and it weren't they weren't just hers i believe but she was in company with a 13 inch footprint set and an 11 inch and i think those were young adults that were still hanging out with mom she may even have had a baby in arms you know it's been suggested that those breasts you see look like they're in postpartum engorgement like she's nursing and uh she may have recently given birth and uh so yes there are it's not unusual for a species to be solitary but there are also ample sightings of what have been taken to be females as evidenced by the breasts and or the presence of of offspring the memorial day footage that's described in my book is is almost certainly a female it only stands about five foot seven um tall and uh when she's running down the hill she has something on her back and as she's running that thing on her back starts to slip and you see her uh you actually see what looks like a little leg dangled down and then her arm you know instead of running like this she suddenly swings one of her arms behind and clutches something to her and then she disappears onto a flat spot on top of the knoll when she reappears in camera sight suddenly she gets five inches taller which was measured by the photogrammetries that that analyzed the whole scene but it looks like a little infant has climbed up onto her shoulders and has his head sitting on top of hers as she walks away into the tree line I mean it's the most natural and spontaneous looking look you think you can see her breasts and as she's running the breast tissues gyrating in a very natural fashion you know and uh you you know it is what it is I mean you can you can say it's not but I just like I like that choice of I like that word you said a lot you like which one a lot gyrating gyrating not just not just jiggling they they were next up thanks for your question as well brain bug says what are the interlocutors thoughts on the my is it pronounced my aca ape oh yeah in short the my the photo of the my aca ape is a Ripley's believe it or not museum exhibit and you can find uh various iterations slightly different uh pelage colors slightly different vegetation but it's a mannequin and I I just that's another one of the things that irritates me is that it continually even though we demonstrated that previously and I had a friend who sent me a picture taken in a Ripley's museum and it's it's it but it gets all kinds of traction I mean the only other alternative is that it's a it's an escaped orangutan that it's a bizarre it would be a bizarre looking orangutan I had to look it up real fast but that's that's a classic one that that goes that does go around a lot and the other that particularly if that's an escaped orangutan I've never seen something with pelage like that I'm also inclined to I've seen I've heard the Ripley stuff as well and that one yeah it's it seems pretty it seems pretty cut and dry yeah I mean the report was an anonymous letter to a local uh police station uh you know I just you know the the circumstances around it are very questionable to begin with but then once you see the exhibit it's slam done super interesting and let me check oh that is it for our questions want to remind you folks our guests are linked in the description we really appreciate them folks and so please do check out their links we are this has honestly been we've gotten so much positive feedback I hope you guys know that seriously people really enjoy this and so thank you Dr. Meldrum thank you Erika it has been a true blast honestly I I've been looking forward to this all week because I actually reread I read your book before but I reread over some of some of kind of the highlights and I went over some of the um the chapters that I remember really enjoying and I was like oh my gosh this is going to be great like I had my list of questions all the stuff I want to talk about it was very fun very enjoyable very fun for me well likewise as well it's always I always find it invigorating to to have a especially an intelligent conversation with with someone that can appreciate the arguments and and and not react emotionally so I uh it's it's been a lot of fun your uh your command of the uh of the disciplines uh that you're involved with is is also very very admirable speaking as speaking as one who's whose memories are beginning to age and that's a huge enormous compliment I actually I see my php in the fall so that's just great to hear yeah well congratulations yeah good deal gotcha and want to say yes folks they're linked to the description I'll be back in a moment with a post credit scene giving you updates about upcoming debates that you don't want to miss folks as for example you'll see at the bottom right of your screen a juicy debate that is I don't know if you guys know this this I was surprised someone told me my friend Andy reached out to me and he reads just constantly he knows what's going on on the internet apparently the JFK assassination question is like really popular in some circles on the internet right now and so really we're like well hey we'll give it a shot as well as we've got some juicy political ones next week as well that you don't want to miss but I'll be back in a moment with more news on those and so thanks one last time to Erika and Dr. Melderman it's been a true pleasure thank you ladies and gentlemen that was so fun I honestly enjoyed that so much I can't believe holy smokes it's oh enjoy that so much we didn't get into the q&a until pretty late and I do I promised I would read those super chats I'm sorry folks that we did not get to read some of your super chats on air or while we will read them on air but some of them like the super stickers and stuff we I saved them for the post credits because I knew that you want them read and even though I forgive me for I just want to be sure we get the debaters out of here on time as we really do we appreciate them so much and so I'm excited to say hello to you in the chat but first I do want to read those super chats that came in from people we do appreciate it thanks so much for your support of the channel folks Chris thanks for your super sticker do appreciate it as well as I don't know if it was a super sticker or a question I didn't see a question attached to it though just so you know if you didn't know noxd also thanks for your super chat says who would win in a fight six Bruce Lee's or a gorilla with a brown belt and karate and two of the Bruce Lee's have none chucks Bruce Lee's let me do the math here two of them have none chucks gorilla yeah I kind of think it'll still be the gorilla I if there anything like deer man it's amazing sometimes you see a deer just get smoked by a car and they keep running it's just crazy it's just not like a human where it would be like boom and it hits the ground it's amazing how hard their heads must be but anyway but it let's see endo xd thanks for your question and woody says I think bigfoot is james coons show us your feet it's true I do have they're like relatively big feet and more importantly they're very hairy it's like hobbit feet just as graceful you don't want to see these I mean I know some of you do because you're sick but I am pumped you guys and thanks gosh since we're in the neighborhood of sick topics you sickos let's see Cole Beasley thinks you're super chat says you can google bigfoot PORN because we're a family-friendly channel we don't use the P word anymore and I guarantee you'll be convinced they are real well thank you Cole for letting us know about but yes I don't know if we're really family friendly you guys we have some controversial debates coming up that I don't like for real if we get our first strike this coming week it hey it might happen but we did actually host this debate last time and we we got away with without a strike so the debate that I'm talking about no not the JF even though the JFK conspiracy debate is mildly controversial and certainly a fun one I am not talking about that one let me show you the one that I am talking about I think you already know right the one that I actually am talking about is of course next week's super st r a i g h t debate with vosh and t jump that is going to be juicy folks you don't want to miss it and that is showing on your screen right now so that one whole baby folks that's going to be fun it's going to be controversial it's going to be a political debate of course and you don't want to miss it so we're excited about that and we hope you are too as well as whoa we got nephilim free returning tomorrow to debate newcomer dr wilson exciting to have dr wilson on for the first time as he takes on neph and he's well spoken he's got his own youtube channel dr nelson or dr wilson does so it's going to be fun to have him on we're excited about it and good ol nephilim free that's it's been a while since we've had neph on but we hope he's doing well he's my uncle a lot of you guys didn't know that but yeah no i'm kidding you've believed it for a second but let me talk about all these uh interesting interesting interesting debates we've got coming up you could say gyrating through the schedule we're excited about these but as tech thanks for coming by also dave langer thanks for being here and then thanks so much for being here lock beard and let's see lock beard yeah says oh i'm angry that people are reading about you know uh so you're taking time to read about squash p o r n when there are far better questions in chat it's like well you know i mean there are super chat so i do want to say thanks to those people so uh i don't know why it's like you know i can't read that but we have folks and it is true we do put like the super chats in order we don't always sometimes we do get to read the standard questions from the chat but we don't always and some people i remember i i remember cas was a guest moderator and i love cas cas did a fantastic job and some people were like cas you didn't read my question and it's like i have to be honest i have to be completely honest like if we wanted to do this show where we just took questions from people who emailed them in or something and we said like no we're not taking them from chat even if you put them in the chat like for the people who get angry that we don't read their standard questions especially for the people that abused cas that night because cas is a great guy i'm like you're not entitled to have your question read if it's a super chat i'll i'll say you are entitled and that's why we've told people if they send in a super chat we miss it i'll send them the super chat you know two or five dollars or whatever i'll send it back via venmo or paypal that's something i'm very serious about that so i do tell people i say email me but i will tell you at the same time we do try to read standard questions when we can but for the people who sometimes i remember they ripped into cas and they're like oh man yeah cas you're not going to read my question it's like cas doesn't owe you anything like stop acting so entitled that you're like honestly it's gross when people act like that so we try to read the standard questions but if we have limited time which a lot of times are the the guests we do have limited time and so just want to let you know about that so man i when people complain about that especially when they treated cas that way and i want to let you know though i loved this that that person complained and then like 20 people rebutted them and said uh seriously like you're you're that entitled in the comments i was so encouraged that modern day debate people are so positive and they were actually they were sticking up for cas and they were saying hey uh uh like you're like you're not entitled to have your question read if cas missed your question from the chat because cas is i think he did read standard questions at night but he just missed one and and so i was so encouraged that people stuck up for cas and i was just like that is awesome and so but we do appreciate all of your being with us and then let's see raptor crazy thanks for coming by but yeah when i see a lot of times too it's like hey we're a free channel you can watch for free all you want and so when it's like we're providing like these are quality shows i i i listen to these i download a lot of our debates on the modern day debate podcast because we haven't i mentioned that before and i'll listen to him after because my attention is split during the debate and i want to get to actually like hear what was going on because my attention was bouncing back between the live chat and the debate and uh so i don't always get to enjoy the debate while it's happening and i know nonetheless there are people out there even though i'm like attention split between ob s the actual dialogue in the chat there's like that one percent out there who are like and james and you also have to read my question even though i'm enjoying this debate and i don't have to go download it on my podcast after and listen to it because i get to put my full attention into it for no cost at all but so that's my thing 99 percent of you are positive but i'm i'm just so amazed at some of the people who will complain about something that's free and they they're so entitled to it it's honestly it's just disgusting and it's like it's they're so weak need and pathetic that i just can't get over it in terms of like they're the kind of people but kaz did a phenomenal job that night carissa always does a phenomenal job erica has always done a phenomenal job she's been a moderator here before and also you guessed it converse contender and praise you gotta hand it to him praises i jumped in a lot of the time on short notice i'm like bro i'm gonna like seriously just too much homework save me and he's like i'll totally moderate man so i love praise i've teased him i love him but orthodox more says apostate prophet said he was looking for a muslim to debate quote is islam true i'm down to take that 100 percent i'm open to it i gotta be let's see shoot shoot me an email at modern day debate at gmail.com we can try to figure out specifics on it i know he's got a debate set up for june 9th but if he's up for another one before that or after i'm willing to host it i would say though that like just to he's probably looking for a more conventional he's probably looking for like one of the more orthodox types of islam to debate and so um depending on what your version of islam is it's kind of like i know you're not like this but there's some people who are like i'm a theologian like i'm a you know like i'm a christian and i'm a theologian and i don't believe in god and i'm like i i don't like have any animosity toward those people but i'm kind of like okay i don't know if i want to call you a christian like it just doesn't make sense like if i just don't feel compelled to use other people's definition sometimes but long story short you may not be an atheist muslim but let me know email will talk and we'll see if you're kind of uh if you have a view that he'd be into debating but tony thanks for coming by us you and the old live chat and guts it given good to see you and sideshow nav good to see there as well thanks hannah anderson for all of your huge support youtube surgeon general glad you were here and made it says many non sequitur show crowd in here love it it is wow this is like youtube surgeon general hannah anderson heat shield riley s dav langer holy smokes this it sounds like it is crazy similar to the old uh the old gang at the non sequitur show i'm sure some of you others had watched the non-sex show mark read good to see you and amanda thanks for being with us as well as and hax glad you're here and then riley s good to see you again riley i remember there was a where there's a timer we didn't get to see you but we're glad you're back and then and yc says is that matt debate gonna happen believe me and thanks for reminding me i almost forgot believe me folks this is going to happen so let me show you this upcoming debate and folks we are absolutely thrilled about it check this out on the bottom right of your screen we're over 50% we're over 50% and folks the cool thing is that like you guys this is phenomenal so we're ahead of schedule compared to where we were for the last Kickstarter so that's encouraging believe me so how this works folks is we're doing and basically we're doing a crowd fund in order to raise the honorariums for our guests as we do appreciate dr kenny rose and matt illahunty as they're putting in a lot of prep time for this debate and also of course the debate time itself but we do appreciate them and you know as an example i mean folks we just from matt illahunty debates alone i would guess we've probably had literally thousands of our subscribers have come from matt illahunty debates i would guess like it could it could be as high as like this is probably a liberal estimate maybe even like 5000 of our 46,000 have come from matt debates for real i mean matt has helped us a ton and so yeah long story short we're raising funds through this crowd fund at indiegogo which is linked in the description and i gotta tell you folks look at this far right of your screen that is the meter we are at i think it's 52% right now and folks on this friday night we only have 14 days left so it doesn't close the next friday but the one after it'll close the day before the actual debate so that leaves this tiny little time in terms of like we time is running it is becoming more imminent and so i want to encourage you folks we are pumped about this and we're determined let me show you some of the deeds about this as you might be new to it and you're maybe like what what is like you guys do a crowd fund really talking about so we're pumped about this in particular evidence for god is the topic of the debate and believe me it's going to be epic dr kenny rhodes and juggernaut debater matt delahunty will be here on saturday june 5th you don't want to miss that one folks and here are the details about this though so let me just show you some of the other stuff you might be like well james are you sure you can do this like crowd fun thing like are you sure you're gonna make the goal believe me don't bet against us folks and i would say hey join us in this crowd fund is that's a lot of fun i've actually i'll show you what i i jumped in the crowd fund last time i'll show you what i got for one from somebody else's crowd fund but long story short 143 people jumped in last time and we raised 3141 that was for our honorariums for mic jones and michael schermer back in january so you can see that on the bottom right of your screen we've successfully done this and we're going to meet this new goal which is only about 400 dollars more than the last goal we are pumped about it folks and this gives us you could say it opens doors for us it allows us to take more risks in terms of bigger speakers so like i'm not joking we do eventually want to get people like richard docins jordan peterson ben shepiro sam cedar david uh was it a steven crowded sorry long day we are excited about this folks and believe me we are absolutely determined we are going to make this goal i don't care if me and t jump have to do a car wash in january it's going to happen folks whether it be in january or may you don't want to miss it it's going to be absolutely fun and so let me show you the rest on this crowd fund stuff though so you might be like well is it easy to get in there it's so easy folks if you even you don't even have to give them your password if you just go on to the link that i'm going to throw in the chat right now you can actually get into the crowd fund and it's also linked in the description you can actually get into it bypassing all of the sign-in stuff by signing in with your facebook so awesome i just really love that and so we're really excited about that you guys this is going to be epic and want to let you know about this as well we have new perks so some of these you've maybe seen before and some of them may maybe you haven't well let's see right now so in particular from last time i'm excited i'm still here i was just a dusting screen okay so we're excited for three dollars if you want to throw three bucks in folks that helps us a ton for real as like i said you maybe you're even like i don't even know if i really am like that big on this like topic or on the debaters like i'm not really that big of a fan of Kenny Rhodes or Matt Dillahunty or whatever it is but i would say hey folks just so we can have a better idea of how well we can use this crowd fund i would say hey i mean less than the cost of a cup of coffee you can throw your support in and it shows us like hey this is a strategy that can work for us in terms of getting more high-profile debates and so one at the lower lowest tier you can see is less than a cup of coffee folks and then next one up would be helping us make this event huge we want to do promotion for this and that depends on how much we're able to raise whether or not we're actually able to do the promotion so the next tier just helps us with that a little bit and then your name on screen is the next one some of these you've already seen in fact i'd say most of them so let me show you the next ones you can see top of the page now your name read out loud is another tier and then the modern database coffee mug for 25 bucks and want to let you know this is really important at every tier you not only get the reward at that level but you also get all of the rewards from all of the level all of the tiers below it so let me give you an example so let's say for example you're like oh like 50 bucks like cool like i i feel like this is a fun show and i hope you guys can like keep improving you know the kind of high-profileness of the debaters and all that so want to let you know about this folks we are absolutely pumped seriously thrilled if you were to get the modern database t-shirt 50 bucks you would not only get that but the embossed postcard and like not much but also the coffee mug modern database coffee mug plus your name read out loud and then as you can see as you can see uh your name on screen as well and so let me pull it back up i'll show you the tiers that are remaining modern database t-shirt i mentioned then the modern database hoodie which for example if you got the hoodie then you'd not only get the hoodie but you'd also get the t-shirt plus the modern database mug and the postcard and your name on screen etc one-on-one zoom chat with james i think someone might have just signed up for that so that we might only have i think it's only it might be that now there three out of five are taken such that there's only two i've got to check somebody signed up for a big donation in the last like 24 hours i think but i can't remember if it was that and here's the thing too maybe you're like i don't like any of these tiers james even the meet and greet with the guests which is obviously going to be epic matt's a pleasant fellow i've gotten to meet matt in person we've gotten along as well as i'm nothing but kind things to say about dr kenny roads and want to let you know you're maybe like well james i don't like any of that you know what so stick that in your pipe and smoke it well i want to let you know this you could even just for a dollar like throw a dollar in i mean that's like 90 you know throw in 99 cents if you don't if you're like i don't know about a dollar throw in 99 cents again that helps support the channel we really do appreciate that and then oh i did forget to pin the crowdfund riley s says i hope you find greater and greater success and recognition thank you riley s for that support that seriously does mean a lot and b badass says yeah you got the coffee mugs that's right i remember it was your guys's idea in the live chat you said that it would be cool michelle desert says thanks another great show so glad you enjoyed it michelle glad to hear that and and oxt says what's embossed mean embossed means it's kind of like it's almost like a stamp except it's it's about like making an imprint so you like use this metal clamp and then it has the modern day debate logo on the postcard and then the postcard has the picture of the thumbnail for the debate so heat shield says day eight reminding you that nobody reads other people's coffee mugs but everyone reads laptop stickers and bumper stickers better for your channel promotion all by a dozen that's good to know heat shield maybe i mean the trick is like if i do the stickers for example on teespring it's like nine dollars for a sticker which to me i'm like what so we were to put it as like a perk for the crowdfund well we obviously wouldn't want to put you know like let's say we put it five dollars for a sticker well then it that's like a five dollar loss toward the crowdfund so that like that doesn't make sense so we maybe if we put like twelve dollars but some people might be like that twelve dollars is a lot for a sticker uh but i don't know i'll think about it but yeah they're they're kind of unusually expensive uh from what i've seen but anyway at least on teespring actual socialist trash has could you get vosh versus even crowded with the crowdfund i honestly think we could next time what i want to do folks like i'm serious i fully believe in this strategy after we did it in january during the holidays like i really do think we could do some really cool stuff you guys so it is i'm absolutely i'm thrilled and i really think that that is a realistic kind of goal to shoot for and so like for real that's like maybe the kind of debate we're going to shoot for at the end of the summer like i'm i'm actually i'm very serious about that because i'm like hey like let's let's take some risks now you know like last time our goal was 2,500 now it's 3,500 the next one we might say hey like let's go for really high profile people and maybe the goal's like 4,500 or maybe even 5,000 and we shoot for the stars and like i said i we really want to increase the quality of our guests all the time including for those headliner debates and so yeah we're excited about it but want to say hello as well and hacks thanks for coming by says thanks for the debate james thanks guests thanks mods thanks everyone watching and chatting i have to go early thanks for coming by and hacks we're glad you did make it and i agree thank you mods for doing a great job in the chat we really do appreciate that and moominrider good to see you as well thanks for coming back here louis presciato glad you came back as well and then resuelta gore thanks for coming by and brian stevens says i'm new to this channel amazing we're glad you're here brian stevens good to see you and then also actual socialist trash says i went back and listened to one of the first few debates on this channel seriously only like three comments on this vahad i love that you have always greeted people in the chat that's funny that's really cool i've always enjoyed it i like for me it's like wanting to do modern day debate i have wanted to meet people like i enjoy people and so it's fun for me to like whether it be in the chat or in real life whatever it is and then bell marduk thanks for coming by as well as youtube surgeon general thanks for your wink face i anarchist thanks for coming by glad you were here with us as well as larry clois thanks for coming by but yes iraq aka youtube's favorite daughter we do appreciate her she's tremendous like my little sister i you know i just we have to tease you know our our little siblings so pin up let's see says no evidence let's see thanks for coming by and riley s let's see you got to say hello as well as social nexus everybody needs a modern day to bait coffee mug amazing you won't regret it folks and so yeah i can tell you for real we're excited about it i um pumped and i hope that the 12 hour live stream would be another way in which we could raise funds for this crowd fund and so yeah 14 days like folks the time is running out it just like sometimes it's like man a year goes by and it feels like a month does anybody else have that i feel like that all the time but thermal rain youtube thank you for coming by my dear friend we're glad you're here with us and then amazing david jeralt thanks for coming by as well and then i almost caught up with the chat you guys are moving fast on me let's see brian griffin glad you came by and then gabriel real says am i later early thanks for coming by gabriel you are like so late but we're pumped that you're here while we're hanging out and germania thanks for coming by says well i'm late yes but this is arguably well actually you can't top that debate that was amazing but this is the second best part of the night so it is always fun to get to chat like chat hang over you guys and say thank you guys for your support and thank you for making this channel amazing because seriously you do it really like your guys's ideas everything just being here and being a fun melting pot of different people from different like walks of life appreciate that davie langer says we still need a tear where you shave off one eyebrow maybe for $500 i'll think about it i mean i'd have to well that's the the funny thing i'll tell you a story but reservoir of course is great debate love the big foot baywatch imagery near the end that's funny nasty guy i laughed so much when erica started laughing uh gabriel real says here once again thank you gabriel career kind words and he still says whoa that's through teespring holy moly maybe do a limited print through amazon yeah i it is unusually expensive on teespring i i'm baffled by that but platinum says good evening james thank you platinum for being with us good to see you i'm almost caught up amazing says the legend rives thanks for coming by and then heat shields is i have family in colorado we do printing let me know if you want to talk about that james for real if you email me at modern day debate at gmail.com like that's a great way to do it i'll even put it in the chat if you want to copy and paste it modern day debate at gmail.com heat shield i just put it in the chat i want to encourage you to check that out as i am pumped about that and then that's right the discord thanks sideshow nav oh that's right so we do have a discord sideshow nav i think maybe shared the there might be a separate link for mods one i'll let you know a few things for moderators one thank you for all you do two we are probably going to do some changes at this channel that we hope improve the channel and we hope there are several changes i'll talk about one is i want to give you a heads up so you know what to expect we're not going to we're not going to like put it into practice yet but it is coming probably starting on monday so the new week we are asking moderators to refrain from putting i know this is different you're gonna be like james is totally different you always said the opposite and it's like i know but we do think that there's a good reason for it namely is that the moderators like you guys are a real part of the channel so we are asking moderators and this is something if you're like yeah like i don't know if i want to be a moderator anymore nobody like trust me that i don't ever feel entitled to have your help as a moderator so don't feel obligated or anything like that we we're happy to have you stay but if you if you want to leave we have no hard feelings that we're going to ask the moderators to basically not make their you could say not argue their positions in chat now if someone like asks you what your position is like it's okay to say it we're not going to see like can't say it or something but but we're going to ask that without people like trying to ask you and which should probably be rare um we're going to ask you to do the same thing as me basically where we're going to be like pretty we're going to be completely nonpartisan so want to let you know about that there is something else i was going to mention about that but i can't remember what what it is i am excited about the culture of being so positive and i do appreciate you in the chat those of you you guys 99.999 percent of you are so positive and it's so encouraging and we do have folks we do have twitch we do have discord oh thanks hannah anderson just put it in the chat and i'm going to pin it so if you didn't know we have discord i would say oh man check it out like you'd be crazy not to check out what amazing things larry let's as well as platium math pig and others have done in terms of making the discord for modern day debate epic for real you won't regret it check it out thanks for your kind words rightly s as we love you too that seriously means a lot and you i do appreciate that more than you know youtube search general says how's one signed up to be a mod it is hard work to be honest like being a moderators becoming harder where it is like it is actually like there's like meetings and stuff so i would just say he's like uh need to know that so one thing i want to mention as well let's see thanks riley s for being cool with it and then so the idea though is the reason that we want to do it is we have had a lot of people who have said like hey they i think what happens is i didn't know this for a long time other channels the moderators are perceived as like if they share their views they're like oh like well it must be a partisan channel so when they come to a non-partisan channel like we claim to be and they see moderators like taking a position on something they're like oh well i thought this was non-partisan here you've got this moderator giving this political view or this religious view or anti religious view or whatever it is and so that is something or like hey if we want to grow more we want to have moderators neutral just like i am where it's fully neutral and so new thing i they're trying to think about what else i was going to say i'm trying to remember be badass as that makes sense glad you understand but that's the reason basically is we want to be more non-partisan and we want to grow and have bigger impact on youtube and so i'm not ashamed to say it sometimes people are like hey like you want to grow because sometimes like i see a creator and they're like oh i would never lower myself to telling people to subscribe and i'm like well don't don't you think what you're doing on youtube is like valuable don't you even believe in your own like content like i would say i think that we what we're doing is awesome it's amazing i'm excited about it what are we doing we're providing a level playing field for everybody to make their case on a neutral platform we think that's valuable and so my thing is i'll tell you folks absolutely if you haven't yet hit that subscribe button we're excited about the future and we think you're going to be happy that you did hit that subscribe button it's got a lot of epic stuff coming up platinum says i understand i completely agree people do see the moderators the first hand reaching out to welcome them in yeah i definitely think that's the case it's something that i didn't really recognize as much until yeah it's but we'll be i think it'll be a positive change and then rylea says how i looked at it for this channel was the fact that you took on mods of all viewpoints that meant there wasn't a specific bias in the chat not that i remember arguing i you're right i i do think there is something to that and that was a good rebuttal i think but sometimes people still i think they just they don't i i think they just don't see it the same way we do in terms of that being neutral i don't know it's probably because it is true that some debates just by coincidence almost all the mods will be politically right politically left religious non-religious whatever it is and so that might be as they might be like well yeah maybe you are open to mods of different beliefs but right now all of your mods seem to have this view and so that's probably why so davilinger says so if you want to be in discussion for a certain debate can mods take off the night from modding and use an alternative account to join the discussion yes absolutely so as long as you don't have that wrench totally and so yeah i think it's going to be a good and positive change like i said is that it'll be like beyond what's the word i'm looking for will be uh beyond above reproach so like they won't there won't be any way in which a person can like try to argue that we're not neutral and so yes we are excited i'm trying to think of anything else that i want to share yes folks we do have discord in the old live chat and also i'm excited about this let me show you this if you haven't checked out our facebook i want to encourage you to do this and the reason is you don't you you might not believe this i'm pumped that our facebook page is growing we're at 980 likes for the channel so we're almost at a thousand so i did just put the facebook link in the old live chat if you want to go over to the modern day debate and what is it called facebook page and if you just copy and paste that link www.facebook.com slash modern day debate that will bring you there if you want to like modern day debate on facebook we're excited as we approach the thousand or thousandth like and so we do appreciate your help with that and trying to think of anything else we are on twitter that's another thing is if you happen to be on twitter and you're like hey i'd be open to having reminders of like what debates are coming out or coming up oh well you can find us on twitter we put them all on there all the time and also last but not least folks if you have been living in a cave on mars with your fingers in your ears if you didn't know hey strap your ears in their seatbelts because we're going to take them on the rides of their lives folks we are on podcast we are thrilled about this so you can pull out your phone right now i know some of you are listening via your phone right now i would encourage if you haven't yet what you can do is you click on your favorite podcast app like i just did then type in modern day debate into your search and then click on modern day debate all of our debates every single one of them are on podcast now every single one in the last year or so because we just started uploading them in the last year and so we do sometimes put like our old epic debate so like once in a while we'll put one from like 2018 on there and which is fun we'll put one on from 2018 back when we were called like modern day hysteria that used to be our name did you guys know that little modern day debate trivia and long story short we do on that's only on throwback thursdays we do that we do a throwback of an old debate that happened before we started the podcast but we always put new ones on and right now i think we're about four or five days behind we're trying to get it so that the new debate will come out like basically the day after and so excited about that it's epic believe me i encourage your people tell me they listen to it while they're at work they listen to it while they're working out exercising cleaning the house commuting long form content and so we're excited about that and then b but b bad as s sorry i wasn't trolling people were mentioning in the live chat no worries i didn't think you were trolling but yeah i want to say thank you guys so much for all of your support we really do appreciate it and so we're excited about the future i am pumped and i just appreciate you guys so our heat shield says the podcast links in the description aren't links is it redirect restrictions oh maybe let me check i've never actually like oh you're right you you probably would have to copy and paste let me try it right now but you're right it should be hyperlinked so people can copy and paste i if you or i should i would is it that i'm looking at i forgot if you copy and paste it works i just tried it yeah but yeah we are excited about that is it's been encouraging to see it grow and so thanks everybody for your support of the podcast as well actual socialist trust is i love modern day modern day hysteria that's right that was old school so thank you guys though we appreciate you we love you i hope you guys have a great night i'm excited to see you tomorrow night we will be live it's going to be epic it's going to be juicy you don't want to miss it and then you guys not tomorrow but one week from tomorrow you know what's going down right let me know that you know what's going down the 12 hour debate stream with four different debates within that time is going down so we're going to start at 11 30 eastern time not this saturday but next saturday may 29th so i'm going to get up at 9 30 in the morning and i'm going to start streaming and it's going to be the first we're going to have a debate right then and there like right at the very start and then we are going to have some break you know break time in between and then we are going to have i'm pumped about it maybe you guys will have to watch me play video games i don't know i've got to check and see but after that we will have another debate and then another debate and then one final debate and by the way the debate that we're going to end it with will be the finale for the day believe me it's you guys when you see it you're going to look home man this is going to be hot h a w t so thanks everybody i hope you guys are pumped for that 12 hour stream of debates it's going to be absolutely pumped this is our first 12 hour stream it's going to be all day so if you're on saturday if it's saturday at any time during the day hopefully that's a fun feeling anytime during the day you can pop in and we'll be live you can just oh hey you guys you're still going huh for real so yeah thanks everybody keep sifting all the reasonable from the unreasonable and i'm excited to see you for the next one


Okay, so welcome everyone and please come on in, sit down, it's all good. My name is Char Booth, I'm Associate Dean of the Library at Cal State San Marcos, which is right down the road. Luckily I didn't have to do any flying for this presentation, which was lovely. I also don't use Twitter all that much, but I've put my handle up in case you want to holler at me at any point in this presentation. I love to receive feedback on what I'm talking about and I also love to engage in the context of conferences, so you are more than welcome to do that. Before I get started in earnest, I'd also like to thank you for joining me during this hour. CNI has the most brutal concurrent session game of like any conference in the world. They stuck me in the big ballroom, there's a camera on my face, there's these amazing spotlights and I know that you've made a choice between seven really amazing concurrent sessions to be here, so I appreciate your interest in this and I appreciate your time. I also want to thank the people who are working to make this conference happen. I know a lot of labor goes into things like CNI, so if there's anybody in the room who is a CNI affiliate or working on this conference, thank you also. So the project of this talk, the title of what I'm talking about today is Libraries, Information Equity and Economic Justice, and I want to do a little bit of reflection on why I'll be talking about this of all things at CNI today. On its face you may think this is a little bit of an un-CNI topic, but I hope to, like I was just saying to my old boss Kevin Mulroy, diverge and converge back to make sure that I'm aligning the message of this talk with what CNI is all about, information access and developing innovative technologies to make sure that the greatest amount of access is going to the fullest group of people. So in my former roles in libraries I tended to be focused on information literacy, public services, different sorts of projects that were really focused outward on educating people about how to discover, use and really manipulate information towards their own ends. And over the last few years I've had a very different role at Cal State San Marcos, I'm the associate dean who's focused on resources, operations, budgets and that sort of thing. And this convergence of a kind of a different view on the library, the practical project of the library, has got me thinking about the ways that libraries use and apportion their own resources towards this bigger project of information equity, which of course is what libraries I believe are all about. So I'm coming from the standpoint of thinking about information literacy in my past, information access and the barriers that exist to information access and also how libraries as institutions with a massive resource base can make critical intentional choices about how to kind of use those resources for a greater social good. Speaking of social good, I'd like to start with a quote from Jaeger, Taylor and Gotham from a 20,000 15 book called, libraries, human rights and social justice. The human rights and social justice functions of libraries are truly what make each library a community good. I believe and I hope you share this belief that knowledge is a fundamental human right, just like sustenance, just like shelter and similar to education. We are challenged to consider as people who are affiliated with libraries to understand the power and responsibility we have to fully embody that mission of being a community good. It's also incumbent upon us to think about what our community means. Who is our core user community and can we, like Joan encouraged us to do, to think beyond what we might consider like a narrow definition of community and think about a broader project? So at its core, my conversation today is about barriers, unfortunately. The barriers that exist between people in the cultural record and the barriers between our institutions and the steps that we can take within our own institutions to reduce information inequality through the prioritization and realignment of our own resources. And what resources we have, it's an amazing thing. Aerial member libraries alone in 2015 had a combined expenditures of over $3.4 billion. And if you scale that up to the vast network of libraries that exist in this country and across the world, you have a real capacity to make true change, actual change in the landscape of information equity. And it isn't just financial resources that I'm talking about. Of course, now that I focus on operations, I think a lot about the human capacity that is embedded within libraries. The people who work in our organizations, they represent a vast collective force with the ability to impact discourse and action in higher education and beyond. And if you need proof of that, just look what has happened in the scholarly communication landscape around information open access, open educational resources, and open data. Without the dedicated efforts of librarians themselves, people who are working in scholarly communications and digital initiatives, OA would not be where it is today. And OA is not where it will be and where it can be, but it's come a long way in the last 20 years thanks to the efforts of librarians. And I have a selfish project as well. And this gives you part of the reason why I'm talking about what I'm talking about today in the context of CNI. At CNI, the attendee base of CNI is basically a room full of people who make decisions about how libraries use their resources. So I'm thinking about you as folks who have a project of directing the priorities of your own institutions and therefore the power and the capability to shape the ways that they work on behalf of others. And of course, I want to acknowledge that in the context of our different types of libraries, our different Carnegie institutions, our different communities make these decisions that we make on behalf of a social justice mission of libraries very different. So the strategies that I put out today, they're not meant to be one size fits all, but they are intended to say that independent of the institutional context that you come from, it is possible to make critical, principled, ethical decisions about the way library budgets are run in order to have a broader social impact in terms of combating information inequality. So I want to shift focus now and think about what makes libraries libraries, what draws us all together, despite our institutional context and what kind of project binds us as information professionals. So the Library Bill of Rights has been around for a long time. I often use this document in my presentations to make a variety of different points. And today I want to make the principle point that libraries are truly altruistic information organizations organized around a non-profit imperative, which is becoming increasingly rare in this world of information commodification and commodification of all things truly. It's also increasingly important as we see the rising tide of things like fake news and just basically epistemological crisis, what is truth, this kind of discourse that's going around in society, libraries fulfill a unique and essential function towards pushing back against that kind of discourse. But if you want to dig a layer deeper and think a little bit more complexly about libraries, there is a deeper kind of meaning or complexity to this picture. Libraries are not perfect, we still have work to do. For every one of our foundational structural principles, access, advocacy, openness, there is a flip side that I think we can and should work on to truly forward this project of universal access to information. And it starts within our institutions at the ground level. So challenging things like a myth of neutrality that our institutions can be inherently neutral in the face of a variety of different challenges, the homogeneity of our own staffing bases, just look around the room, most of us are white, let's be real, it doesn't reflect the broader context of society. Restrictive fines, things that we may not need to levy on our users, fines that haven't been critically examined in the past, policies that may throw up more access barriers than we attend to, and of course, the paywalls that we still are up against ourselves that are levied on us from these large, extremely profitable publishers. So I want to challenge us to consider these barriers. From a human level, from the level of real people. And I want to quote an article that I highly recommend that everyone in this room read, especially if you're interested in collections and collection development. Michelle Bailden of MIT recently wrote in CRNL News, an article titled, Extending the Open Access Mindset, that if we focus on the needs of real people right now, we must remain flexible within our proposed solutions. This is the mission of social justice itself to think about real people, marginalized people, and how they're impacted by the decisions our institutions make. This also challenges to redefine what we think of as our core user groups, which I already mentioned. Applying the mission of our institution beyond its immediate boundaries, despite the pressures that we feel from our core constituents and stakeholders towards a broader commitment to confronting information equality. And to do so in a way that acknowledges both the digital and the analog. And that's my project here today, to talk about real people, real problems, from that digital and that analog standpoint or framework. So in sum, what I'm trying to do in now 55 minutes is explain what is complicated, let's say, with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, all of us, and provide achievable, attainable, practical goals for social transformation. I believe we can do this on a daily basis, I really do. And I want to think about this idea through two frames that of economic justice, simply and in principle, economic justice is a component of social justice theory, which recognizes that structural inequality is a reality in all sorts of different institutions and organizations in the world that creates differences and equities, such as classes and racism, homophobia, and so forth. These things pit people with privilege against people without privilege. And issues of economic justice specifically are clear and things like homeless lists look around downtown San Diego, unsafe jobs, unemployment, income inequality, poor health care, and declining public education. And that last one hits us really hard ourselves. So from a systems perspective, which is how I want to talk about economic justice, it's about making sure that the benefits of growth and prosperity and resources are dedicated towards people over projects, over profits, over systems. So if we're keeping human individuals and their experiences, sometimes their experiences of marginalization at their core, what can we as academic libraries do to create a more equitable distribution of our own resources? The second frame is information equity. This one's probably a little bit easier to just intuit. This is a simple principle that who you are, what you earn, what your institutional affiliation is should not matter in terms of the amount of raw knowledge-building resource materials that you're able to access. This is not the case. We all know that this is not yet the case. The cultural and scholarly record should be as available to a rural resident looking for information on environmental pollutants as it is to a researcher at a large R1. That is really not the way things are right now. And libraries as a collective can do more than any other profession and any other group of individuals or organizations to make this change. Despite incredible gains made towards open access over the last 20 years, still only 15% of current journal publications are available as green or gold away. So that doesn't count hybrid away, which some people even question whether that's open access in and of itself. So with those lofty goals and those large frames, I know that this feels like a very huge project, right? So these are truly stratospheric level ideals. So what I wanna do over the next part of my presentation is bring this closer to Earth. Bring this down to that human level that I talked about. And I'm gonna do so by telling a couple of stories of my own experience, because I definitely like to speak from my own experience about what it looks like for people who are kind of struggling through situations in which access is not a principle that they have much affiliation with. When people are marginalized from information and how institutions such as libraries can do different kinds of projects to broaden and open up that resource base to more people than you might consider to be part of your core constituency. So my first library job was at Ohio University and this is back in about 2006. I went to library school in Austin, Texas at UT Austin and I kind of shot out of there like a rocket to this rural research institution. It's about a mid-sized public institution that was doctoral granting, but it was definitely situated in the context of rural poverty. We're in the southeast corner of Ohio, which is an Appalachian area that had a lot of intergenerational unemployment. So we were treated really much like a public library by a lot of people. Working on the reference test there, I would get a lot of questions about how do I create an email account? What's an email account? People applying for unemployment, that sort of thing. And I got my own taste of living ruraly and my own sort of information in access situation. This is my cabin in the woods out there in Ohio that I lived in literally in a hauler. I lived off of Bean Hauler Road. This is an amazing location name. And the interesting thing about this place is that there was literally no way to have internet access out there. Dial-up wasn't even an option because of the general crappiness of our phone coverage. So I got the bright idea as a student at Ohio University to go for an online master's degree in a house with no internet access. And I made this happen and the way that I made this happen was a total workaround. I would take my laptop to work. At the end of the day, I would load up like 800 tabs in my browser with all my course readings and all the different learning management system things that I needed to type my assignments into. And I would just pray that nothing would crash while I was working on it, right? So this is pretty much the most benign example of information poverty I could come up with, right?  And just by the fact of not having access to the internet, I literally almost couldn't complete my second master's degree. And I wanna acknowledge this as a very vanilla or benign example of information poverty because there's really a lot more people that have it way worse than that. But it may be one way of thinking about the fundamental challenges that still exist between people, information access, and education. According to the Pew Research Center, 11% of US adults still don't have access to the internet. 22% of those are rural citizens, people located in rural areas. And I wanna extend this analogy to the concept of isolation and information isolation. When I worked at UC Berkeley, which was the institution I went to after Ohio University, of course huge R1, amazing base of resources, 26 libraries or something at the time I worked there. And it was really a vastly different context than working at Ohio University. At the time that I worked at Berkeley, a friend of a friend reached out to me, this is a very interesting individual, you can see him there with his hand in a jar of fermented foods. This person went around the country giving workshops on fermentation to basically share the knowledge that he had learned in the context of being sick. So he had a health problem and he found that fermented foods made him feel a lot better. So he goes around the country as an educator teaching people how to make this food. He's also extremely scholarly as an outsider scholar if you wanna think about it in that way and was researching a book at the time of doing all these different workshops. And so Sandy reaches out to me, knows that I'm a librarian. I was like, okay, Char, so I live in rural Tennessee, I don't have a public or an academic library anywhere near me and I have all these extremely obscure random articles that I need, can you help me? I was like, well, I do work at Berkeley and there's a lot of things that we have access to that you don't. So maybe I'll just hook you up a little bit, scan a few things, download a few things, send them your way, right? So this individual started to cultivate this personal interlibrary loan resource base in order to connect him to these articles and these book chapters that he needed to complete this work. And I make this example because what resulted from this outsider scholarship and a bunch of librarians maybe violating some access regulations was an incredible work that made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. And the funny thing that Sandy did was thank every single librarian that ever helped him out and sent him anything which was totally like narking on people, right? But at the same time, it was an incredibly interesting thing to see how many people had literally kind of violated the access provisions of their own institutions to help this individual out that literally would have had no other recourse to what he needed in that scenario. So what you have in that context is people with information privilege helping people without information privilege. And now I'm gonna make an analogy that Kevin's gonna like. When I worked at the Claremont Colleges, very different group of students than at Berkeley or at Ohio University. So seven liberal arts institutions, very elite, a lot of really smart students, but also a lot of really privileged students, students that came from very economically affluent backgrounds. And of course, being a teacher, I had had about eight years up to that point of teaching information literacy sessions for people who, you know, a little bit bored, maybe not like right there with me where I wanted them to be until I started talking about information privilege. When I would write on the board, you know, X million dollars and then go through this backwards conversation with students trying to analyze what that figure meant and what I, you know, hoped that they could come away with from it. We would kind of deconstruct that acquisitions budget, how much scholarly communication costs them as students at an institution in terms of tuition. We would really dig into the money. And it was the most compelling way to talk about lack of privilege and access in the context of higher education. And it was a way to really motivate students to think about why information is closed and why information is open. And most importantly, the responsibilities that they had as information privileged people to then push out the institutional resources that they had access to beyond the boundaries of the Claremont Colleges. And also to realize that when they graduated, the tap would be shut off, which was a huge revelation to all of them. They didn't expect that. And it was hard news for them. So one of the ways that we did this at the Claremont Colleges was to edit Wikipedia articles together. There was a class that I worked with for years on end that was a really amazing course. It was Introduction to American Politics. And what we would do is organize groups of students into about four or five people and we would assign them to create new Wikipedia articles where none existed for core concepts in American politics. And what we found was that, like presenting information privilege as a concept of information literacy instruction, that students were incredibly engaged in this work. It was very hard. We had to drag them at some points, kicking and screaming through the process of developing a highly robust tertiary source. But at the same time, the project that came out was one of ownership over a piece of the public record that they had created. So invariably, when students would present on their final projects after the articles had been published, what we would see is that they were very fascinated in how many page views they were getting, how many article edits that were coming through, and as a result, realizing really the scope and the impact of their own scholarship. If you can call Wikipedia scholarship, which you actually can, as MIT Sloan School tells us, there was a study that I would really recommend people check out if they're interested in Wikipedia, which was published in September of 2017, which showed that primary research coverage of topics in Wikipedia and scientific disciplines influenced the way that secondary studies were published. So the better the primary coverage in Wikipedia or the tertiary coverage in Wikipedia, the more secondary research articles they would see coming out of that Wikipedia coverage. So moving forward to present day, Cal State San Marcos, and I want to contrast my experience at this institution with the institutions that preceded it. So our learner population at Cal State San Marcos is very different than any I have worked with before. 47% of our freshmen students are Pell Grant recipients. Underrepresented minorities are about half of our learner population. First generation students are also about half of our population, and we just have a lot of challenges among our learners. Statistics show us that about 25% of our low-income students will drop out before the end of their second year. So the project of our institution becomes trying to figure out how to keep these students enrolled in school. The CSU system, all 23 schools in the CSU system has a really interesting project devoted towards understanding students' basic needs. And by basic needs, we go back to those fundamental human rights, housing, food, clothing, physical health, healthcare. And what they found was really shocking to me, frankly. 41% of CSU students, and keep in mind, this is 500,000 students across the state of California, reported food insecurity. So this is a persistent lack of access to nutrition. 41% of our students, again, like this really almost jerks me up as I talk about it. So you have people who are learning while hungry, attempting to be successful students while not having enough food. We also found that 11% of our learner population reported experiencing homelessness in the last year, which is a really profound figure. And it is not isolated to California, nor is it isolated to the CSU system itself. The Department of Agriculture estimates that one in seven United States households experience food insecurity. So this can be extrapolated to any institutional type that are represented in this room. So I challenge you to think about what kinds of barriers are confronting your students in a very human, fundamental, kind of lived experience way, and how your library might be able to assist them if they're experiencing those challenges. So recognizing that student basic needs are a huge concern, the CSU-SM California State University, San Marcos, has done a lot of projects oriented towards understanding what students are kind of coming up against in terms of learning persistence challenges. And as part of the textbook broke hashtag movement that happened a couple years ago that's still active, we ran a little project that put on a whiteboard, a couple whiteboards in the main entrances of our institution, what would you be able to afford if you didn't buy textbooks? And students wrote sticky notes and put them up on the board and kind of laid out for us a very important set of findings. So once we took these results, combined them, and put them together in this little word cloud, we see that students are forgoing food, rent, and life in order to buy their course materials. And this is a really astounding finding for us and something that has kind of wrapped our heads around different ways that we can come at our students in the system. My colleague Jill Waite, who's a sociologist at CSU-SM, did a extra credit assignment in one of her second year classes where she asked students to talk about the top three barriers to their own academic success as a sophomore. And time and time again, she found that these fundamental human rights challenges were what were really standing in the way of her students and their academic success. So I lost my job last year. I was on parole, I lacked transportation. I have family obligations and home life that prevent me from doing the schoolwork that I need to do. Stress and allocating finances to pay for school. My culture, my race, my economic background. So if we pay attention to these things that our students are saying, my academic challenges are not being able to, you know, find the exact right sources for my assignments and then information literacy sense. They are being able to pay for my housing, pay for my own food and get to and from school. So our project as a library is not to ignore those things that we're learning from our students but rather to meet them head on. To consider and critically analyze how we as a library can become an ally to our students who are facing these systematic oppressions in their lives. And we've done that in part by strategic planning, frankly, we have a five year strategic plan that we recently refreshed, revised, that has embedded in its mission, vision and values, concepts of social justice, concepts of information equity and very practical aims to help move the needle for our students in these core basic needs areas. And I'm gonna give you some examples of projects that we're doing at CSUSM that kind of get at this basic needs question and attempt to have a more information equitability as well as economic justice scenario and landscape for our own learner population. And then I'm gonna, like I said, converge back into the bigger concept of information justice and economic justice. So first and foremost, what we need to do is analyze are we paying our employees enough? One of the first things that I realized when I got to CSUSM is that there was no way to give our student assistance raises. Now, this seems like maybe a small thing but I think we probably all know how much labor student assistance put into academic libraries and they're usually paid very, very atrociously. Sometimes they're only paid through a federal work study until federal work study runs out and they get kind of fired, which is not maybe the best practice but some libraries have to because of budgetary constraints. So I determined that there's really no way to give students raise. I brought this to the University of Human Resources and I said, you know, this is kind of problematic. We'd like to have a wage equity program in place. And I kind of was annoying enough for long enough that they were able to change the rules, creating a better compensation system for our student assistance, which has improved retention, which has improved job satisfaction and increased their productivity. We also pay attention to Cougar's affordable learning materials. So this is, of course, a textbook affordability program that has saved our students over, I think, two and a half million dollars at this point. So putting institutional human resources and economic resources into creating affordable course materials. And I'm so heartened to see so many institutions doing this project. We're also servicing open access collections in our discovery layer. And shout out to Lauren Magnuson and Ian Chan, who are my very brilliant colleagues who are really pushing the needle on what discovery means and how open our own discovery layer should be to these OER resources and OA resources. And in analog capacity, like I mentioned earlier, we're figuring out creative ways to make textbooks available on reserve. So check them out for a semester, then, or excuse me, we rent them for a semester and then check them out to students on two-hour reserve, thus getting a huge amount of circulation and they really do circulate quite a lot. We've also abolished fines and fees that we found unnecessary. We were getting next to nothing in revenue from these and it was really just kind of a punitive measure that was being imposed on our students and in some cases keeping them from being able to graduate due to their resource challenges. So we now only charge for our book losses, for our actual replacements. And I would challenge and ask requests that libraries in this room think about whether fines are actually necessary and what they're achieving at writ large. We've opened a 24-hour space that has a really great, it's just getting a lot of action, a lot of play. And in that 24-hour space, we actually have donations from our Cougar Pantry, which is the campus' food pantry, that put the snacks out available for students overnight. Because we've done research and we've found that a number of those students are actually there because they have nowhere else to go. They are studying, indeed, but they literally have no other home to go to. Other projects include creating accessible and open spaces such as gender-inclusive restrooms, and lactation facilities for parents, for mothers who are nursing, ensuring that we have enough space for ADA-accessible seating in the building. And also, coming up with projects and exhibits that help represent students from marginalized communities back to themselves. So it's very important for students of color, from students from underrepresented backgrounds to be able to see themselves in different sorts of cultural programming. And this is an example of a recent exhibit we did in our library on the history of the Black Panther Movement. It had photographs of original Panther members and then kind of narrative stories of their experience at that time. This is part of a common-read program that featured Ta-Nehisi Coates between then World and Me, which is a fabulous book, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. And creating programming around this common-read book, such as inviting Alicia Garza from Black Lives Matter to speak at our university on the topic of racial justice, a very challenging topic indeed. And finally, making sure that we're apportioning our resources towards justice and our own hiring practices. We're creating a position for a senior assistant librarian that's bilingual in English and Spanish. This is in recognition that we're a border region institution that has a great number of native Spanish speakers. We're a Hispanic serving institution and it's absolutely essential that we're hiring staff that reflect our own learner population. So what ties all of these things together, what ties all of these initiatives and all of these analog, typically, efforts together at CSUSM is that we're attempting to identify real lived human barriers that our students and our faculty, frankly, are meeting and then overcoming those barriers through programming and resource allocation. And that means making really difficult decisions about where our resources are going. And I wanted to mention that this project of information equity and economic justice in libraries, it's not possible for us to do everything, right? So we forego institutional subscriptions to things like Spark and the Library Publishing Coalition because we have these higher needs among our core learner population. So making critical decisions, prioritizing different sorts of initiatives that is absolutely a part of this process. So now I'm going to zoom back out. I'm gonna check the time first. Excellent, I'm right on time. Zoom back out to the stratospheric level and think about the more, I'd say the larger scope picture of information equity and economic justice in the context of libraries as an aggregate on the whole, what can we do to move the needle on this picture? So I'll begin this section with a quote. Again, John Walensky writes that, access to knowledge is a human right that is closely associated with the ability to defend as well as advocate for other rights. And there have been many activists that took this position and really put a lot of their own individual effort and livelihood into making this a reality. Not the least of which is Aaron Schwartz who unfortunately and tragically took his own life several years ago after being arrested for attempting to download the entire JSTOR corpus from the MIT libraries. So what Aaron wrote in his Grilla Open Access Manifesto is about the responsibility of those with information privileges to those without. Those with access to these resources, students, librarians, and scientists, you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not, indeed morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world and you have trading passwords with colleagues filling download requests with friends. And again, I am not advocating for these measures. I'm not advocating for these approaches, but I am saying that they are very real and they have persisted and been inspired by this kind of rhetoric in a variety of different ways. On a smaller scale, the ICANN has PDF hashtag, shows you kind of the efforts of a bunch of different academics who put out a DOI or put out a citation on Twitter and then hope to net back a PDF downloaded by a colleague at a different institution. On a much larger scale, Alexander Elbacayan, who's a neuroscientist and researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci Hub, which Joan mentioned this morning in her keynote, which nefariously, and I must admit ingeniously, takes publicly posted login credentials for pay-walled institutions and uses them to backdoor, pass the paywall, and to spit out, using just a DOI, the PDF copy of a journal. It's really, I mean, again, it's a genius and it's also a huge challenge to the amount of resources that libraries put forward on all of these subscriptions. So this is to say that knowledge is a fundamental human right and it will find a way of being accessible, even if that way is not precisely legal. Sci Hub has been enjoined a number of times by Elsevier and other publishers to stop what it's doing, to take its resources down. Every time they kind of whack a mole, it pops up somewhere else under a different URL and people still use it. And I wanna linger for a moment on how people are using Sci Hub, which I think is very fascinating and very important for academic libraries to think about as we try to forward the kind of massive project of open access. Science Journal found, and this again just kind of gives me chills, that not only are individuals across the global south who have a very compelling interest in being able to get around the paywall because of the lack of resources in global south institutions, not only are people in the global south and people who are unaffiliated researchers downloading from Sci Hub, it's people in our own institutions, in our own colleges, in our own libraries who find this interface easier to use, more straightforward and more systematic to use than the other legitimate open access resources that are out there. And I think, I would posit, that what's happening is things are open but they're still difficult to access. We have a proliferation of different tools, of different search interfaces, of different acronyms, my God, the acronyms alone are enough to make you wanna memorize for like three years. But the resources are open but they're hard for people to understand how to access. This goes for our institutionally affiliated people, our faculty, our students, as well as people who are not part of that core user community. So if we have open but hard to access, we also have closed and readily available. And this is not a sustainable model. Sci Hub cannot be around forever. It will get whacked down a number of times and it will pop up, pop back up. Perhaps not forever though. So this challenge to libraries, this challenge to scholarly societies is to figure out this access problem, this incredible, difficult, sticky problem to answer. How can we make this open yet challenging to access, close but readily available picture, dwindle into obscurity? So John Winsler, who's a fellow dean in the CSU system, posed in a 2017 article that it's a collective action dilemma that prevents the library community from truly banding together to address this problem, to reduce redundancy of effort in funding, redundancy of effort and resource allocation to foster a new communication publishing ecosystem, or at least to gain enough leverage to start negotiating ourselves back off of the cliff that we are all on with the increasing rates of inflation that we get every single year on our core journal access subscriptions. And I quote John, to truly reduce their costs, librarians would have to build a shared online collection of scholarly resources jointly managed by the academic community as a whole, no small task. This call for collective action is being answered by so many efforts, some of which are being discussed at this very conference literally right now, and I kind of wish that I was in that room as well, but I cannot particle split in that way.  Contextually specific, depending on the type of institution we are, depending on the needs of our user communities and the broader scholarly ecosystem, as well as the bigger social project of social justice itself. The authors of a recent CDL OA Pathways study, and this is something that I highly recommend people check out, OA Pathways, California Digital Library. The authors of the study write in nature index, quote, if we are going to accelerate progress towards free readership for all, we as libraries, scholars, societies, and authors must make critical choices about how we spend our money. That means deciding to spend less where it is not well spent, making critical decisions about things like cancellations, pushing back against double dipping practices around hybrid OA, et cetera. David Lewis proposes a 2.5% commitment of institutional budgets towards open access, and I quote David, there's money. The critical question is, are we in the academic library community prepared to reallocate enough of it to accomplish what needs to be done? So what I wanna do over the last part of this presentation is talk about the collective actions and the institutional actions that I think are really getting this right, that are doing an excellent job of having a information justice orientation as well as an economic justice orientation, where the decisions they're making about institutional and collective resources are truly guided by ethical imperative to make sure that this access and discoverability picture is truly better for all people. And I begin with an example that might be known to some people in the room at least. There are grassroots collectives, such as Radical Reference, who literally set up shops at things like protests and political conventions that dispense information as needed on the street to people who may be getting arrested for being protesters, who help the sandies of the world when they're unable to, through things like ICANN has PDF or Sci Hub, find what they need. So true research assistance through individual collectives. We also have large consortia making the critically difficult decision to cancel huge research packages as a leveraging technique, as a negotiation technique, right? So one of the ways that we can pressure big publishers to kind of ease up on the prices and ease up on the APCs that they're charging is to say, absolutely not. And this happens all the time and it always makes a big splash, but this is truly what Roger Schoenfeld of Ithaca SNR poses in a 2017 Ithaca issue brief called Red Light, Green Light. What if libraries found ways to bring together the whole library behind the collective, the objective of stabilizing or reducing what they pay. This collective action does exactly that, stabilizes and reduces what we all pay. Boycotts, cancellations, and collective protest in this forum. I also want to call out interesting projects such as Sci ELO, Scientific Electronic Library Online. And this is a global south initiative that brings together countries such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica to create an open access publishing platform and search repository where the scholarly output of global south countries can be as visible and be raised to the recognition of global north researchers. And this is a very important point because a lot of times the output of these nations are subsumed or subaltern to researchers in the United States or European nations. Similarly, the African Journal Online Library seeks to raise the level of access to African scholarship and increase the global profile of African scholarship in the research cycles of the global north. And it does so by hosting open access journals as well as paywall journals, create an account, and you can kind of debit an account from the number of articles that you download. Similarly, a bit a little bit differently, there are things like Agora, Enare, and ORA which are collaborations between major publishers, nonprofits, and NGOs that help make the scholarly output of global north countries available to researchers in the global south in developing nations. I also want to call out creative and awesome, if I do say so myself, technological tools such as the unpaywall browser extension which uses OA DOI to surface from a digital object identifier much like Sightfinder does, but legally, the whatever open access content or version of an article is out there. If you don't use OA DOI, if you don't use unpaywall, I strongly recommend that you check that out. And organizations that are providing new research workflow platforms such as Wellcome Open Research which covers APCs through the Wellcome Trust and creates an entirely new way of submitting articles, having them peer reviewed, instantaneous publication through the article revision process. Switching from the collective to the institutional, these are a few projects that I respect very deeply and that I want to call out as again, highly successful at orienting institutional resources towards a broader open access effort or initiative. So OpenStacks is a open courseware and technology or excuse me, textbook publishing platform that is based at Rice University. And I believe they have about 30 textbooks available at this point that are fully open and there's library engagement in this project. Excuse me, 29 books are available now as well as open courseware and assignments and things like that. The Data Refuge project is fascinating at the University of Pennsylvania. This was created to help data from going kind of into obscurity from being lost after it's published. Laurie Allen, the assistant director for the scholarship at Penn Libraries and a key organizer of the project says that the loss of data happens all the time. The web that we rely on is really brittle. So what they've done is create a platform that can aggregate and preserve data from a number of different institutional contexts. The Makutu team for digital, excuse me, the Makutu platform for content management of culturally aware community-driven digital collection building is something that I really, really respect. So this is a CMS that allows digital special collections to be created with the consent and input of the communities that have created the content, such as Native American and other indigenous communities. And this is created and run out of the Washington State University Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation. Spark recognized Tidewater Community College for a project that actually creates a $0 sum course text cost, which is an amazing program. Statistics range from between $600 to $1,200 a year in textbook costs, and there are institutions popping up across the country that have figured out ways to subsidize the cost of course text and reduce the student outlay on their resources and in service of being able to pay for their basic needs instead. And finally, very importantly, a whole institutions orient their operations around a social justice project, such as MIT Library's recent global platform, vision and mission, which takes every aspect of their institution and finds ways to basically align it with ethical values and social justice values. And there was a report published, I believe, in 2016 that was like a preliminary findings on a large project they had done to align the library's values with the institution's values as well as a broader project of information equity. So the common point in all of these projects is like MIT to align vision with resources, to have a broader and like a more focused underpinning of information equity and equitability of access for more than just an individual institution and to take the resources that are available in that institution and realign them behind this open project. And they do so in a way that recognizes both the digital and the analog. I think this is the most interesting thing of all. They see the human cost of information inequity, the human cost of economic privilege and information privilege that isn't distributed more broadly than the individuals that hold it. So in closing, I hope that I've made the point and made the challenge that information equity and economic justice are inextricably linked and are guiding principles that our universities and our libraries can use in service of achieving the former in the face of growing information commodification. Libraries have the capacity to conceive of a project of liberation, true liberation for those in positions of information marginalization and to act on these principles in service of the greater good in very human individual ways. So I challenge you and encourage you to think about your own institutions, how they are situated, who their stakeholders are, what kinds of justice oriented decisions you could be making with the resources that are available to you. If those decisions are currently informing the projects that you're developing and the initiatives that you're engaged in. And I wanna leave you with a quote from the amazing Toni Morrison that I think helps focus kind of this project of among us as individuals. When you get these jobs that you've been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, which I believe that most of us are, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. And I hope that we can align ourselves behind that project as information professionals, as our professional clothes of ethics tell us to do. And that was my presentation. Thank you very much.