[MUSIC PLAYING]
What is the most punk rock thing you've ever done?
Oh, man. I don't know. I'm really, really struggling.
Honestly, it's not glamorous. It's just housing bands, people sleeping on my floor, stepping over other human beings as I'm trying to make coffee.
Maybe I'll go with something that felt a little glamorous at the time. When I was younger, I was always in mosh pits and having a good time, and there would be the occasional one where a younger kid would come up to me and be I saw you in the pit. It was so fun. And so that was always-- that was always a good time to feel like I was inspiring others to get out there and dance and goof around and have a good time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK, Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett, and there's nothing punk about me. I'm in the studio with-- sorry, there was a laugh--
That's not true.
It was a laugh over here on my left, and I just going to roll with that. Let me start that again. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Cody Turner. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk, whichever you're here for. We hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: And our show today is called DIY Punk Strategies in the Library Classroom.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, feels like we're a bit overdue for punk-themed show.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, Charlie. You know how I like to dig in the archives for inspiration when I'm putting a show script together?
It's one of my favorite production tricks that you have.
Well, we did a couple of shows about DC punk and Discord Records about seven years ago.
Seven years is a long time to wait, but as anyone who's paying attention will say, punk's not dead. It's just sleepy.
And neither is its library counterpart, critical information literacy.
It's a parallel that's neatly drawn by our guests today.
And our songs today are about a community having your back, being critical of systems, and pushing back against power structures. And because our interview guests are superfans of hardcore punk, we're playing a lot of loud and fast rock music today with newer bands recommended by our guests as well as one or two classics that I may have thrown in there.
So it's going to get quite snarly and noisy.
Oh, yes. And the DIY punk scene, all kinds of voices and ideas are put into a blender and set to max power.
I love it.
Noisy. See what comes out. So let's start with a song that I frankly have no idea what the song's about, but I think it embodies the DIY spirit of putting it all out there for a hardcore DIY community.
I cannot wait to hear this.
This is "Old Gray Mare Stomp/Stark Raving Nude" by Rest in Pieces right here on Lost in the Stacks. CHARLIE BENNETT: Turn it up, man.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I told you it was going to get noisy. That was "Old Gray Mare Stomp/Stark Raving Nude" by Rest in Pieces.
Fred.
Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: You did not mention that that's actually two songs. I think it's a medley of two songs. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, there's a slash. There's a-- yeah. What's that, backwards slash. "Old Gray Mare Stomp/Stark Raving Nude." I'm guessing that's correct. I am just going to assume that you're right. And thank you. I appreciate that. Our show today is on DIY punk strategies in the library classroom.
That is the title, well, almost the title of a 2023 article in College and Research Library News.
Right, Fred. The full title is "Building Community-- DIY Punk Strategies for the Library Classroom," written by our guest, Kevin Adams and Edward Gloor. I'll let them introduce themselves.
I'm Kevin Adams. I'm the information literacy librarian at Alfred University, which is in western New York about an hour south of Rochester. It's a small rural area, pretty small university.
And I'm Edward Gloor, and I work at the University of Houston. I'm a teaching and learning librarian. We are a huge university, and we are continuing to grow. So it's been exciting but definitely times of transition.
We can all relate to that. I think I'd like to know what is DIY punk.
It's something that we've we were trying to figure out if we could provide a definition for and we ultimately decided we couldn't. So, yeah, there's punk music. I think most folks are familiar, but there's also an identity that goes along with punk that is related to all types of things, usually going to be counterculture. But it can be related to clothing, styling, art, and possibly attitudes about how you live your life and things like that.
There's are these elements of going against the grain, going against the norm but also usually having some kind of driving ethos behind what you're thinking about and what you're doing. And so then DIY, being the do-it-yourself component of that, is one of the driving ethos that can be really a big push behind punk music. I think in the article that we wrote, we developed some tenets about DIY punk, and I don't think that I'll be able to recall each of them off the top of my head.
But it's a lot about building community, doing things for yourself and for the people within the community, and not taking corporate money or being derailed by outside entities.
Yeah, and luckily, I have our slides pulled up because I knew I would get tripped up on any definitions. As Kevin said, we didn't want to provide an exact definition because then anyone reading it would be like, well, I don't think so.
But just some tenants to a DIY punk community in are that the members are responsible for upholding their community and for maintaining the spaces that they occupy, for promoting their shows, for running the sound system, for booking the shows, for housing bands, whatever the case may be. And I think maybe the most important one for our article is that members understand the needs of their scene and their community.
So it's not universal the things that the punk scene in Houston might want or need look entirely different than what they need in Alfred. And that is the same in the classroom. So what students at University of Houston need or want in support of their research and support of whatever it is that they come to us for are going to look different than at other universities, and that's important to keep in mind.
So both of us are thinking about punk as we've experienced it. And so I think the scenes and communities that we've been a part of have been really more influenced by those hardcore trends that maybe started in the '80s but then continued.
I think getting more towards these attitudes of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, social justice being topics that come up are things that are present in some of the ideology but, again, painting with a really broad brush here because sometimes a lot of the punks that I would see in different spaces would hail more towards that '70s ethos and be much more about just being contrarian, being radical, making people upset, making people uncomfortable, that kind of thing.
But that's not so much what we're drawing on in this article.
What's your experience with DIY punk outside of the article, your background?
I can start. I've been going to shows since I was a kid and wasn't so much involved in the scene until I was-- I don't know-- 16 or so. And I would go-- so I'm from Denver originally, and when I first started going to shows, it was like-- I don't know-- I think there was a bit of a downturn. There were in the hardcore scene at the time. Folks started going to or stopped coming to shows, and spaces started to close down. And that was for litany of reasons.
I won't say that I know every single one of them, but if I had to take a guess, it was because if you're familiar with hardcore, you know that it can be like a violent space. And it's not necessarily or not always targeted violence, but it can be. And that's-- that started to be the case in Denver, and so people stopped coming to shows as much. And I stuck around through that. I just found the music, the energy very exciting despite all that. Made a lot of friends.
And the Denver scene started to pick up, and it switched directions and started to pick up. And now it's a real hotbed for music. There's lots of activity going on there. I run a cassette label with some friends, and that's really fun. It makes us just poorer I think because not a lot of people are buying cassettes. But it's fun. It's cool to get other bands recorded and get them in front of other people, which is cool. It feels weird. I feel like I'm an old head now, no longer a teenager.
And, yeah, but it's cool to see the ebbs and flows and to still be a part of it in some way.
I came to punk originally with no real understanding of what hardcore was. That started-- was something that I encountered a little bit later. My initial introduction to punk was I was a teenager and I started to going to a DIY venue, which was in this converted warehouse. And it was a lot of art punk and street punk and oy punk, just people that were trying to be real weirdos and were. I shouldn't say we're trying.
They were real weirdos and making art and music with a punk ethos behind expressing themselves. And that was just a ton of fun and really interesting to engage with as a teenager figuring out who I was and seeing all of these different bizarre expressions of art and music and action all coming together. And then-- so that was in Lafayette, Indiana, and a little bit in Bloomington, Indiana, as well.
And then I became a part of a scene in Champaign, Illinois, when I moved there for graduate school. And there was a confluence of emo and hardcore coming together there.
And I more gravitated towards the hardcore side of things, and that's where I got introduced to the scene that was much more about intentionally building community, bringing people into the organizing process for the shows and getting community members involved and whatever element that they were interested in of making those shows happen.
So getting into that DIY thing and bringing just like somebody who has very little knowledge of how to play music but really enjoys being there into that space and making me feel like I was a part of that scene, which was cool. After I moved to Alfred, Edward earlier mentioned the punk scene in Alfred. I'm still looking for it, trying to find it here, but there's a thriving scenes in Rochester and Buffalo.
And so I've been finding DIY venues there and going and checking out shows, but it's difficult being an hour away. It's harder to be an hour or two away. It's harder to be integrated into the scene and more just a show goer at this point. But it's still fun. CHARLIE BENNETT: You're the seed. You're going to start the Alfred scene. This is Lost in the Stacks. I'm looking forward to that Alfred punk scene.
We will be back with more on the relationship between the DIY punk scene and the academic library after a music set. File this set under ML3534.P885.
Listen, I believe with all of my heart that it is a contributing factor to our juvenile delinquency of today. I 100% believe it. Why I believe that is because--
[MUSIC PLAYING]
"Alternative Ulster" by Stiff Little Fingers. Before that, we heard "Don't You Want to Be Free" by Prevention. Incidentally, this is a band for whom Edward Gloor, our guest, and his band once opened for. And before that, we heard "Chubby and the Gang Rule OK" by Chubby and the Gang, songs about--
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Marl, that's not how you say it. "Chubby and the Gang Rule, OK."
Thank you. "Chubby and the Gang Rule, OK" by Chubby and the Gang, songs about communities rising up and supporting each other.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called DIY Punk Strategies in the Library Classroom, which is part of the title of an article by our guest librarians Kevin Adams and Edward Gloor. We asked them how they connected before deciding to write together.
In Illinois, I was in a very terrible band, and we played a show. And at that show is where I met Kevin, and then we just became friends. We started talking, and we found out that we were both in the same library program, grad school program. And, yeah, we just became pretty fast friends, which has been a really nice experience despite living now across the country from one another. We've kept in contact, and I think we have a really nice working relationship as well as friendship.
Yeah, it was cool to connect, and as we've stayed in contact, we've learned all kinds of things like we like the same soccer team, which is cool and weird and random. So lots, lots of connections there.
I want to talk about your article, and you titled it "Building Community-- DIY Punk Strategies for the Library Classroom." In a punk scene, the scene builds around people seeking music, and obviously library users are seeking information. What parallels do you see in those two groups or communities?
One of the things is just the amount of time that you have together. So oftentimes in the library classroom, you're working with a one shot, and so it's a limited time. It's about 50 minutes. And you as the librarian come in, and you're trying to teach these students what they need to know to do the assignment, what connections they have to the library, and how they can follow up and all this stuff.
But it's not a lot of time, and it's not-- it's oftentimes doesn't feel like enough to make a meaningful impact, to start to build a relationship with the students and to start to platform their experiences and their potential as scholars and also encourage them to find the resources that they need. Similarly, in a DIY punk show space, it's-- there aren't these exact same constraints on time, but it happens really quickly.
So especially with contemporary hardcore, the sets are really fast, really short. Songs are like one to two minutes. Some bands will only play like a 15-minute set that takes them about as much time to set up and tear down as it does to play the set. Things are happening really rapidly in this confined amount of time, so you only have a set amount of space and time to engage with one another is one of the first things that we were thinking about as a parallel.
Yeah. And to build on that, there's no written rules. I guess in some spaces you'll walk in and there's written rules, but in most venues you go to, if you go to a show, it doesn't say in big letters what the rules are. It's a community-enforced thing. It's a community that understands itself, and it's self-policing and does its-- maintains its community through active work.
We talk a lot in the library profession in teaching about critical information literacy, and there's I think obvious parallels between critical information literacy and a DIY punk ethos. You are looking at power structures. You are deconstructing them. You are seeing how they are affecting either your access to information, the information that you do or do not receive from your searches, from your news, from whatever the case may be.
And then there's also in punk, there's, especially in hardcore, there's a lot of monologuing. There will be people like-- they will be very explicit about what it is their songs are about. Sometimes bands will get up, they will play, and they will say not a single word. And they will just storm through their set, and that's cool. Others will be very explicit beyond their lyrics and tell you exactly what they're about.
We really wanted to draw from that explicit discussion, that very direct conversation. We try not to shy around the things that are happening when students are engaging with information, telling them, hey, these voices are excluded because of this reason. These people aren't being cited because of this reason. When you're doing a Google search, a lot of that you might feel very comfortable engaging with the first page of results, but that's all pretty much paid for.
And so you need to really be thinking critically about how you're engaging with that information, and we want students to feel like they are active participants. We are not-- when I had library days in school, I would be like, well, I'm just going to zone out because they're just going to show me a database and they're just going to show me how to get an article and it means nothing to me.
We really want students to actively engage in this thing that we are doing, and we want it to be a thing that they are creating with us. And in order to do that, we really have to break down that power structure that exists, and we have to do it very quickly as Kevin said. There's only 50 minutes.
We really think that we can employ these strategies that DIY punk scenes use in the classroom in order to very quickly break down the structures that exist between student and teacher and make it a little bit more of an even playing field.
Do you feel like this has always been your approach, or is this an approach that you have developed over time?
I think it's always been my approach without maybe necessarily thinking about it that way. I'm very much off the cuff. I don't like to plan, plan, plan. And I think that that is really actually necessary when you're trying to do these things because if you have such a rigid plan, that doesn't necessarily address the student's needs. You might think a student needs one thing, but actually they want something totally different. So I asked a student, for example, searches.
It's my first class in grad school. I've been prepping so much, really nervous and asked, well, someone give me an example search. It could be literally anything. And the student just jokingly said tacos and we are in an engineering database, and so I did it. I did the search on tacos, and I think it was structural integrity that came up. So you can have fun, and that is a thing that we try to bring into the class as well is having fun. You can play. You don't have to be serious all the time.
Yeah, I think it's maybe not explicitly been my strategy, but it has always been a part of how I teach.
And I'd say the same. I was introduced to critical information literacy in graduate school and had a great instructor. And we spent enough time talking about critical information literacy that I figured out really quickly that was what I wanted to center my practice on.
When I interviewed at my current position, that was one of the main things that I talked about was critical information literacy, and I've tried to make that a part of my practice as much as I can throughout my time teaching here.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll hear more about how we can be more punk in the academic library on the left side of the hour.
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(SINGING) There ain't no cure--
Hi, I'm Jon Lindeman from the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Obsolete Library Science. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. More wattage in the cottage. Tune it in and tear the knob off.
(SINGING) You betcha It's only rock'n'roll CHARLIE BENNETT: Someday I'm going to tell the story of that ID on air. Today's show is called DIY Punk Strategies in the Library Classroom. Our guests are Edward Gloor and Kevin Adams, co-authors of the article "Building Community-- DIY Punk Strategies in the Library Classroom," which was published last year in College and Research Libraries News-- Library News?
After the interview, we asked them a few extra questions, and I want to play you one of those questions.
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How much did you enjoy writing this together? Do you have another idea in mind? Are you going to-- you going to put this stuff into action and not write for a little bit? What's your-- what happens now?
Like I said, I really enjoyed it. Yeah, Kevin and I are just friends. Most of the time, we would meet, and the first 20 minutes was just talking about what we were doing outside of work. And I was joking that Kevin is now-- because he's come up so many times in department meetings, he's been seen at other conferences, he's now an honorary member of our teaching department. I think a lot about community building as this article might tell you.
A foundation to building community and to be able to build community in the classroom is building community in your department because if you're not supported, if you don't have-- if your manager will back you up when you make a decision that an instructor doesn't agree with, you are able to then make those decisions. You are able to say, hey, this-- I think that this is maybe not traditionally what you would want from this, but I think that this is our best route.
I had a professor tell me can you just show us the databases mid class. And being able to say, well, I'll get there and know that my manager will back me up and that I can say no to things that my department will back me up, that my department will support me in those decisions, those are-- those are really important. So I want to do more writing about building community within your department, and some of that shows up in the article. But I would like to focus more on that.
And I agree. I had a ton of fun writing this stuff and working with Edward on it. I don't know. We should probably find another research project to work on together so we can keep having fun, but right now I think also like Edward, I'm really focusing on putting this stuff into practice in my own library, similarly building that community within the library but especially also with the faculty members at my institution.
And that looks like critical information literacy but also looks like building a community of people that are willing to question different forms of authority and think through what's happening at our institution and try to affect it for the better.
File this set under Z71.25.C65L53. So complicated, Fred. So complicated.
Sorry about that.
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CHARLIE BENNETT: That was "Ignorance" by Public Acid and before that "Hate" by the Red Ants. And we started that set with "Want to Throw up When I See Your Face" by Liquids. What an angry, nasty, awesome set that was. Those were songs about critically calling out people and systems.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and in our show today, we are talking about DIY punk strategies in the library classroom with librarians Kevin Adams of Alfred University and Edward Gloor of the University of Houston.
We asked Kevin and Edward to shed more light on the thesis of their article.
I think that we were not really sure what we were doing. We had this idea of some parallels, and folks around my library are always really encouraging me to think about research in a way that incorporates the things that I'm really most interested in, which is great. I try to do that for students as well.
And so I was just starting to think about I know that I'm thinking about critical information literacy as maybe the more academic side of things, but what else exists in my life that have some parallels. And Edward and I spent plenty of time trying to figure out what form this article would take, what the parallels were that we were going to stress and highlight, and figuring out how it all came together.
Prior to starting this, we had a little reading group where we read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress, and the conversations that we had in there were really fruitful. And I think that that's where I started to see some of the parallels and started to propose some of this, and it was pretty wide ranging at first.
We were seeking-- going through watching documentaries and reading articles and books about the history of punk and things like that, maybe thinking about a little bit more of a heavier research project than what this article turned into, but as we went through, we felt like that didn't make quite as much sense. And we decided to zero in on this piece about just the parallels that we saw and how we see it influencing our teaching and what others might be able to take away from it.
So one thing that you mentioned in the article is how in a DIY sort of focused class framework, the instructor shares-- the instructor has inherent power, and that instructor shares power with the students. And now, of course, you both are practicing librarians. What does that look like when you go to teach a class and you're sharing that instructor power?
Yeah, it's tricky for sure because ultimately it is your responsibility to guide the class to where it needs to be. However, like I said earlier, sometimes you come into the class, and you think this is what students need. And then you learn more about what your students are doing, and then you realize, oh, actually they want this. And so we shift.
So that could look like putting up an anonymous message board or an anonymous response or an anonymous poll and have students talk about how do you feel about research. How do you feel about these concepts that we've been talking about. And just doing some assessment there in the class and it might actually just lead you somewhere totally different, and I think that students respond to that.
It doesn't necessarily have to be like now you're teaching or tell me exactly how you want this class to go because, again, we have responsibility. We want students time to be valuable and for them to get something out of the class. We don't want them to have my library experience where they just tune out and come back next class.
But then also to try not to place value statements on everything, especially as the instructor, and trying to ask has anyone else had a similar experience or has anyone else encountered this issue and how did you solve it. Trying to get the solutions from the classroom.
Ron Scapp in a discussion with bell hooks talks about how students are looking for the validation from the professor, from the teacher, and anything else that someone says about their comments is just doesn't matter until we acknowledge it. So if I say, oh yeah, that's a really good idea, and suddenly it becomes a good idea because we've placed this value statement. But if we try and pull that back, that can be really helpful.
And then also, too, just the room that we have, letting them know that this is a space that we are sharing. So we have flexible furniture that students can move around. I had a student-- it was actually amazing. Students just form a giant table rather than the pods that we had, and they were all sitting together. And that was so fun because it was just immediately they shaped the class, and that was their decision. I didn't say, hey, you can do that if you want or anything like that.
They just did it. And allowing students to just-- that doesn't harm anyone. I don't need to control the things in that way, and that made them feel more comfortable. And when I do-- when I start the class, I let them know, hey, you can do that if you want. You can get up and move around if you need to. You can shout out if you have questions. You don't have to-- I am not the source of all the authority that you have.
You yourself are autonomous, and I hope you practice some of that in our classroom.
I think there's a really interesting tension in library instruction between here's how to do it but then we're also talking about why and what you're doing. And that's where this article really starts to cook.
What has been the reception? How have people responded to your article or your presentation or whatever you've brought out there?
Yeah, I'd say pretty positive. So we've done a couple of presentations on this as well, and I think the most positive response that we got was at Loix. And we talked to some folks afterwards. People were really excited. We talked to somebody who was in Champaign Urbana and was excited to find out that there was a punk scene there and wanted to get involved with it, and so that was a really fun connection to make.
And then somebody reached out to us after Loix that had seen the presentation and asked us to do a workshop at Penn State University libraries on critical information literacy and DIY punk. And so that was a real highlight I think so far for me and my career, and I was so, so excited to be asked to do something like that.
I lead a team of librarians and the information literacy team here at my university, and I'm always trying to get them excited about critical information literacy, which they are. And that usually goes pretty well, and they're very interested. But to have somebody from an outside institution say, hey, could you come talk about this was just really thrilling and also to get to talk about DIY punk and continue carrying on that conversation. So that reception has been really positive.
And I don't really think we've gotten any negative pushback on this. People often ask about how does your institution or administration respond to you telling your students to question authority. How do they react to bringing up social justice issues in the classroom and such a explicit way? And so far, I haven't gotten pushback from the professors that I'm teaching with or any administration or anything like that but keeping an eye out to see if it'll happen. We'll see.
That'll be part two of this show.
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you both for joining us. This was too fast but fun.
Yeah, thank you for inviting us. This has been really fun.
Yeah, super flattering. Thanks for having us.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and you have been listening to our interview with Kevin Adams and Edward Gloor. Kevin is information literacy librarian at Herrick Memorial Library, Alfred University, and Edward is teaching and learning librarian at University of Houston libraries.
File this set under LC196.H66.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
"Self-made American Man" by Candy Apple. Before that, "Room of Clowns" by Power of Dusk and "Sailing On" by Bad Brains, songs about pushback against power structures.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show was DIY Punk Strategies in the Library Classroom. And I have limited experience with the punk scene and DIY, so I wasn't really sure what to expect with this interview. But I think now I get it.
Nice.
And I want to try it. I just have to figure out what it might look like for me. Charlie, have you found an inspiration for your library work from an unexpected source?
Marlee, look where we are right now. We're on the radio, and it has informed all of our professional identities.
Well, then let's just roll the credits.
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Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and a plate of tacos with superior structural integrity were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia, really good tacos.
Special thanks to Kevin and Edward for being on the show, for all the music recommendations too, and to students and librarians sharing power in the classroom. Thanks as always to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.
Next week's show is a rerun, and we'll be back with Georgia Tech Library tourmeister Jason Wright the week after that.
It's time for our last song today. I wanted to play one more classic hardcore punk song from my youth, but it fits the theme I think. It's a song about how participating in a DIY community grows the power of that community.
That's what all those songs are about.
Exactly. From the classic hardcore album Walk Together, Rock Together, this is "Strength" by 7 Seconds right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. CHARLIE BENNETT: Definitely from your youth.
[MUSIC PLAYING]