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No Soft Cops, No Saviours: Abolitionist Notes Against Social Work in Libraries

In Brief

In this article, I look at the idea of hiring social workers into public libraries through the lens of abolitionist librarianship. Often presented as an obvious answer to make libraries more inclusive, there is little evidence within the published literature that this model is more effective than others. I argue that rather than expanding care and support for patrons, this model replicates dynamics of soft carcerality and saviourism within our organizations. Using principles of police abolition as my theoretical grounding, I offer alternative models and fields that we can instead draw on as we work toward more inclusive and liberatory public libraries.

Introduction (or, two questions)

Since I first started my MLIS in 2015, the question, “Should public libraries add social workers to our staff?” has been a constant hum around me. As a library worker with experience navigating social services both personally and professionally, I’ve been skeptical of this idea but found it hard to articulate why — beyond a gut feeling that I don’t want social workers anywhere near my job.

Another question that has been quieter but deeply present in my mind: “What does an abolitionist librarianship look like?” This question has only risen in volume since the uprisings against police violence that took place in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Within the unprecedented growth in abolitionist theorizing and worldmaking across North America, I’ve closely followed the work of library workers who have pushed our profession to look at the carceral logics within our own field, and challenged our frequent collaboration with policing.

In this article these two lingering questions come together as I grapple with the proposition of integrating social work into public libraries from an abolitionist position. The article is an intervention into the conversation, and an invitation to re-assess an uncritical embrace of social work within our spaces. Public libraries as an institution are one of the few places that community members can access for free, without disclosing their life circumstances, and with agency around how they engage with resources. I believe that as library workers we can advocate and organize for the working conditions we need without expanding our investment in carceral care. Imagining and fighting for new ways of working with the public is a chance to practice abolitionist skills, to look head-on at the legacies of racism and colonialism in our profession, and to build new social relations.

My own understanding of abolition and the harms of policing are inextricably linked to my understanding of the carceral histories of welfare, social services, and family policing. As libraries work to imagine models of working with the public that are rooted in anti-racist, trauma-informed, and inclusive practices, incorporating social work into our profession is not aligned with this project. Instead, the push for incorporating professional social work into libraries can be seen as an expansion of carceral care, in keeping with the long history of social work as a source of community capture and control1.

I start by diving into the published research about social workers inclusion in libraries, with a specific eye towards what gaps social workers are proposed to fill and what library workers are saying they need. I then turn to the carceral history of social work, and use two abolitionist analytical tools that we can hold up to this proposition: carceral care and evaluating reforms. I finish by sketching out other possibilities for better supporting social inclusion in our work, sharing some ideas and directions out of the millions of experiments we can try that lead us to more freedom2.

Positioning myself in this text

I’m a parent, an immigrant, and a mixed-race Mexican-American queer femme. I started my MLIS when my kid was a baby, and spent the first years of my career juggling auxiliary positions and short-term contracts so I could work during the exact windows of precious childcare available to me. I am also someone with decades of lived experience navigating social services to access things I’ve needed to survive. I’ve relied on rental subsidies to keep myself and my child housed; accessed free therapy from the neighborhood clinic; and have spent an absurd number of hours advocating for my child’s needs in school and healthcare settings. As someone with a master’s degree and whose first language is English, my experiences with these services have been mitigated by my perceived class position. As a parent in a visibly queer and trans family who had a kid in my early 20s, this relative ease has often felt tenuous and at risk of unwanted state intervention. My lived experience of systems navigation and precarity have shaped my approach to librarianship, and are what drove me towards the research I’m exploring in this article.

I grew up on the West Coast of the United States. Since 2009, I’ve lived in the Canadian city of Vancouver on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ nations. I’ve worked in public libraries since 2014, and for the past 4 years my primary employment has been as a community librarian in a neighboring city. While I’ve also worked in academic and archival settings, in this article I will be drawing most from my experiences as a public librarian. I will be discussing social work and public libraries within the particular contours of the Canadian settler state, but my larger arguments about abolition and the two professions extend across borders.

Literature Review

Wrestling directly with the question of why there has been such heavy interest in incorporating social workers into libraries, I first looked to the published literature available on the topic. I had a particular focus on scoping reviews and evaluation projects3, and was guided by three central questions:

  1. What are the primary arguments for including social workers in libraries? What gaps in library service would this fill?
  2. What existing research is available on the efficacy of this model?
  3. What are the specific supports and resources that library workers identify that would make their work more sustainable?

In the literature I reviewed, I found a genuine commitment from library workers and administrators to think about how libraries can do better with how we design and deliver services, especially for patrons facing higher levels of social exclusion4. There is frank acknowledgment that traditional library approaches aren’t meeting the needs of community members, and an interest in connecting patrons with outside resources5. There is also concern that staff are in need of more support and training when working with the public6. When it comes to addressing these gaps, there is a persistent feeling that social workers will have more time to spend with patrons than other library workers7. The idea that social workers will have more in-depth knowledge of local resources frequently came up8, as well that social workers will be better positioned to build relationships with community partners and assist in de-escalating tense patron interactions9. In total, I found a clear desire for better social inclusion within libraries, more support for staff, and an argument that social workers are naturally positioned to support on both counts.

Given this demonstrated interest, I turned next to my second question. In my search for studies focused on the efficacy and sustainability of social work in libraries, the existing literature was surprisingly scant. Within an article examining attitudes of library administrators towards social work in libraries, the authors summarize that “while there is anecdotal evidence that library social workers are useful to the library and community, the effect of library social work can not yet be stated.”10 What I did find in the literature was an abundance of anecdotal speculation that individual social workers may be of use, but nothing close to conclusive evidence to support this model as more effective than other library initiatives aimed at social inclusion.11

In interviews with library staff and administrators about their feelings towards social workers in libraries, there is simultaneously excitement and significant concerns. Librarians and administrators alike share reservations about the long-term efficacy of this model if it leads to leaning too much on one or two staff members spread across an entire system.12 There is also worry that this will leave other employees feeling “off the hook” to offer reference services to patrons they perceive as high needs.13 Significant concerns are raised about appropriate clinical supervision of social workers employed in libraries, as well as questions around privacy and record keeping.14 One of the frequently suggested models of creating unpaid work placements for social work students instead of permanently funded positions also raises significant labour concerns.15 

Throughout the publications I reviewed, the key needs identified by staff and managers alike were very clear:

  • More education as part of the MLIS on working with diverse populations and social service navigation.16
  • More frequent community partnerships, including working with outside groups to plan programs and drop-in events.17
  • More on-the-job training about topics like social service reference and deescalation.18
  • More opportunities to meet others doing similar work and cross-sector professional development.19
  • More readily accessible  information about community resources.20
  • More support from management and higher staffing levels.21

Looking through this list, it’s striking how none of these areas of professional practice are particularly exclusive to professional social work. Skills around deescalation, crisis response, cross-cultural communication, and community-led planning are all core concerns of a diversity of fields, including non-profit management, nursing, public health, homelessness organizations, urban planning, domestic violence support services, settlement services for immigrants, and grassroots community organizing. Addressing information needs and information literacy through reference work, creating resource guides, and developing programs with community partners are quintessential librarian skills. The fact that MLIS programs need to improve their curriculum to better prepare students who want to work in public libraries was an acknowledged truism a full decade ago when I was in school, and is well supported by research.22

Given all the above – the concerns raised by library staff about integrating social work into libraries, the lack of any significant data on the actual impacts of this work, the varied fields that we could instead draw on for ideas –  the question of “okay, but why social work?” becomes more glaring. To try and answer this, I need to return to the question of abolition.

Abolition in our lifetime, abolition in our libraries 

At their core, policing systems in Canada have always been an explicitly white supremacist project aimed at shaping and upholding the interest of the settler-colonial state.23 Systems like the RCMP24 and child welfare were created from the very start with the direct goal of capture and control of Indigenous and Black communities in support of colonialism, dispossession, and capitalism. This project has been elastically extended to other racialized and non-normative communities,25 and is reproduced outside of direct policing organizations through carceral policies embedded within public institutions.26 In so many sites where people are told there will be safety and care, they are instead met with violence, coercion, and control. 

Abolition as a political project asks us, once we have given up on the fable that police keep us safe, how else are we going to take care of one another? How can we move away from coercion and control, and towards ensuring that everyone in our communities has the resources and support they need?27 It is a politic that asks, from our present moment and within our individual lives, what choices can we make that move us closer to freedom? As the editors of a volume on abolitionist projects in Canada writes, “Abolition is a horizon, a desire for the future, but it is also a series of actions in the present.”28 This “series of actions” encompass the choices and structures that abolitionist organizers are building that strategically move power away from policing and towards liberation.

In support of building this possible world in the here-and-now, abolitionist library workers have extensively analyzed how securitization and policing undergird so many library norms. Leaning on logics of control and punishment runs deep in our profession. This looks like overt policing by installing metal detectors, hiring uniformed security guards, and even limiting entry exclusively to account holders.29 It also looks like policing via policy in the form of library fines; code of conduct policies that explicitly target houseless community members; and demands for government ID to access library services that exclude undocumented community members and immigrants.30 Many colleagues have been writing about the issue of safety in libraries, and strategizing new ways to address this using abolitionist principles.31 Projects like the Abolitionist Library Association (ALA), and Library Freedom Project have created networks to share information and strategies.32 Other projects like the Prison Library Support Network work to directly meet the information needs of incarcerated people with a volunteer reference-by-mail service.33 Studying abolitionist librarianship has given me the tools to name carceral barriers that exist within libraries, and the tools to fight for welcoming and inclusive spaces that will lead to greater safety for everyone.34

Carceral care 

Many articles I read in my research romantically name librarianship and social work as twin callings, fields with an intertwined history as helping professions.35 This conceptualization elides the deep violence that social work as a profession is steeped in, and how librarianship has been shaped by similar forces. To untangle this, I’ve found the concept of carceral care particularly helpful. Writing about library work specifically, Teresa Helena Moreno defines carceral care as “work that centers community-oriented caregiving but relies on carceral frameworks and power structures to produce such care.”36 Familiar tools of coercion, surveillance and control are enacted within programs purporting to help people, leading to new and evolving methods of carceral care in spaces like schools, health care clinics, and increasingly libraries.

When considering social work’s place in the settler-colonial Canadian project and how carceral care is central to the profession, one entry point is the 1950s. During the same period when Indigenous resistance to the power of Indian Agents and the Department of Indian Affairs was growing, the nascent field of professional social work was significantly expanding. As early as 1949, the Canadian Association of Social Workers explicitly lobbied to position the field as the natural replacement to Indian Agents when it came to “the provision and administration of services for Indigenous peoples.”37 When the Indian Act was revised in 1951, social workers successfully replaced Indian agents as holding key authority for the administration of welfare, child and family services, and adult education in support of the settler-colonial project. 

With this authority immediately came expanded power to inflict deep violence against Indigenous communities. As Chelsea Vowel writes, during the period directly after the revision of the Indian Act “in British Columbia alone, the number of Indigenous children in the care of the child-welfare system went from almost none to one third in only 10 years as the result of this expansion.”38 This period between the 1950s – early 1980s, when vast numbers of children were removed from families and adopted outside of Indigenous communities without consent from their parents, is referred to as the Sixties Scoop. Craig Fortier and Edward Hon-Sing Wong describe the Sixties Scoop as consisting of “two interrelated processes – extraction and pulverization – which were executed by social workers through the forced removal of children from their communities and the attempt to assimilate and reconstitute Indigenous children as neoliberal citizens in settler society.” Through political organizing and ongoing legal battles, Indigenous communities have been asserting their rights to keep children within their communities for generations, but up to today a wildly disproportionate number of Indigenous youth are still caught up the Canadian child welfare system.39 This family policing infrastructure also targets Black families at deeply disproportionate rates to white and non-Indigenous families.40  

Looking at the history of social work as a crucial site of settler-colonial power, the fields’ approach to supporting communities through carceral care can be understood more clearly. Across the field, the professed aim of social work is to “assist people to cope with and solve, even possibly prevent, problems negatively affecting their lives.” In practice, this assistance is too often a neo-liberal disciplining project.41 Structural issues impacting communities’ lives are boiled down into “negative problems” that can be “solved” at an individual level. Individuals are positioned as clients, who face a severe loss of privacy and autonomy in order to access services. They often must disclose their personal histories over and over to gain initial access, and then consent to regular meetings, documentation, and surveillance for services to continue. The root causes of poverty and violence are displaced onto individual choice, and clients who are not able to meet the parameters set by social workers can summarily lose access to the support they need to survive.42

Mirroring social works’ roots as a disciplining project, the long history of public librarianship in North America is explicitly assimilationist.43 Confronted with waves of immigration and a working class that was increasingly politically organized and mobilized, the public library was first envisioned as a space of education where the poor could be molded into productive citizens.44 Writing about this period, Terry Eagleton describes this line of thinking bluntly: “If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”45 This disciplinary tendency can be seen in modern public libraries in the form of policies that exclude the most socially marginalized from accessing our spaces.46

As those writing about white supremacy and carceral care in libraries show, this thread of not-so-benevolent saviourism runs up to our present moment.47 Teresa Helena Moreno warns of “care loops – the phenomenon in which library workers criminalize our community in our attempts to serve them.”48 Looking at the twinned histories of the two fields, it becomes clearer why libraries so often think of social work as the obvious profession to help us learn, and clearer still how this leads to precisely the kinds of care loops that Moreno warns against. 

Reforms

Thinking about what it means to fold social work into libraries, the concept of reformist reforms vs non-reformist reforms has also helped me tremendously. Originally theorized by André Gorz, a reformist reform is one which ultimately re-inscribes the existing power structure.49 A non-reformist reform (or transformative reform) is a change that is an immediate gain towards social justice, and opens up the terrain of struggle. A classic example of a reformist-reform is increasing the use of body cameras on police, rather than reducing the number of police on the streets.50 Abolitionist organizers and writers Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie propose an “evaluation framework for making transformative demands,” laying out a series of questions to help evaluate if a given proposal reinforces social control or moves towards dismantling systems of policing.

A few of the questions Kaba and Ritchie suggest when evaluating proposals:

  • Does it expand or legitimize a system we are trying to dismantle? Does it create window dressing for harmful systems and institutions?
  • Does it tinker at the surface without addressing root causes of harm?
  • Does it seize space in which new social relations can be enacted?
  • Who is working on these initiatives? Who isn’t? Why?
  • What are the logics, languages, and “common sense” that this reform validates or reinforces? Are these logics liberatory or punitive?51

Chatting with a colleague about this article, they mentioned they’ve noticed frequent calls for adding social workers into more and more spaces. I would argue that this is by design. As the trust in the police has dramatically dropped over the past decade, the question of who will take their place in maintaining safety frequently leads to social work.52 The broad appeal of this argument is precisely because social work as an institution does not challenge (and indeed, directly supports) the values of “superiority, benevolence, and salvation that thrive in the North American collective imaginary” and are crucial to the carceral project.53 With this expertise and benevolence in hand, social work isolates societal issues onto the individual, tinkering at the surface level without addressing the chasm of inequality below. 

The proposal for adding social workers into libraries is thus a reformist reform in three crucial ways. It is a proposal that moves libraries toward rather than away from systems of carceral control. It is a proposal that does not address the structural changes that libraries must undertake if we want to confront the inequalities baked into our profession. And it is a proposal that forecloses other, more liberatory possibilities and cedes ground within our spaces. More equitable structures for our work in libraries are impossible to build when constrained by carceral care. They are also difficult to build in working conditions marked by outdated policies, inadequate training, and a refusal to grapple with our professional legacies of racism and colonialism. In contrast, an abolitionist librarianship offers the tools we need to discern the barriers within our institutions and how to push for transformative reforms in our spaces. As Kaba and Ritchie write, “shifting how we invest our collective resources into collective care and support instead of criminalization and punishment is what campaigns to defund and abolish policing are all about.”54 For public libraries, this shift looks like divesting from our roles as soft police and moving away from the myth of saviourism.

What else is possible (or, everyday choices made every day)

One story that’s often told about our jobs: social work and librarianship are twin professions, aimed at helping those most vulnerable better themselves. We are experts in so, so many things. The story I hold onto: the library belongs to the community around it, and our services must be led and shaped by that community. A regular part of my job is bread-and-butter reference work. If patrons regularly come into a branch asking for help with APA citation styles, we make a worksheet for them. If patrons regularly need directions to the closest food bank, we make a guide for staff so they can find the answer with ease. 

On a busy weekend last year, I ended up chatting with a patron who was asking about harm reduction supplies. Through the reference interview I found out they were new to the city and needed to know where to find clean needles and pipes so they could use drugs more safely. I recommended the closest clinics that would carry supplies for safer drug use, and gave them the number for the local mobile outreach van that could make a stop at the library later that same day.

Another day, a coworker approached me asking about local resources for a patron he was helping. The patron’s belongings had been confiscated by the local RCMP, and she was looking for an advocate who could accompany her to the station to try and help her retrieve them. After talking through a few options I landed on recommending a specific outreach team that I knew specialized in wrap-around services and often had free time on weekdays. My colleague brought this information back to the patron and helped her use the branch phone to make contact with the outreach worker, and offered her some snacks and water from our supply at the desk while she waited for the worker to drop by.

In both of these examples, we as library workers made no direct referrals to allow patrons entry into a specific program. We needed no personal details beyond the information needs of the patrons in front of us. And we were not tasked to follow up, document, case manage, or chart the interaction.55 We had no professional obligation to try and support the patrons in front of us with changing or bettering their life circumstances.56 Instead, we used principles of reference work, harm reduction, and social inclusion while we met the information needs of the patrons in our branch.57 This approach is rooted in principles of community-led librarianship, a model that has shaped much of my public library experience. Based on principles of community development, a community-led approach centres our patrons who are socially excluded and looks at how libraries can change our practices and remove barriers to better serve all our patrons.58

Inclusion (like abolition) is enacted in the small, everyday choices we make while at work, and can be supported or hindered by organizational policies, norms, and practices. Some other possibilities:

Table 1

Actions towards social inclusion at the libraryIs a social work licence required to do this?
Look up information about a local shelter and share the contact details with a patron.No
Find the application for a free bus pass program through the local transit company and print it out.No
Hand out a granola bar to a patron.No
Stop charging fines for late items.No
Attend monthly meetings of service providers in the neighborhood to learn about new trends and resources.No
Adopt a policy allowing patrons to sleep in the library.No
Chat with a community member who is sleeping outside by the entrance to the library to let them know the building is opening soon and they’ll need to move so patrons can get in.No
Identify key training needs of frontline staff and develop a robust training plan that addresses compassionate deescalation, working across cultural differences, and trauma-informed practices.No
Build relationships with community partners and plan programs in the library where patrons can meet with outreach workers.No
Adopt a registration policy that allows patrons to sign up for a full library account without needing to show government ID or proof of address.No

Writing on the need for true inclusion in public libraries, Annette DeFaveri points to the arrogance that too often underlies our work. We assume we know what our communities need and want, and so we design services based on those assumptions. We are so sure we are welcoming that we don’t notice who isn’t in the room. As DeFaveri writes, “our institutional culture lets us impose our concepts of appropriate services on people who were never interested in them in the first place.”59 There is no significant data that patrons want or desire social workers in our space, especially those who are socially excluded. For patrons already entangled with social services, patrons impacted by incarceration and family policing, undocumented patrons, patrons with experiences of involuntary care — social workers in our spaces can instead pose a significant barrier to access. I sometimes think about myself in my early ‘20s, using my neighborhood branch to find resources about very difficult things happening in my life. If a well-meaning staff member faced with my reference questions had suggested I meet with a social worker on site, I would have most likely politely taken the information — and then never returned to that particular branch. In our arrogance that we know what the communities we work with need, we risk tightening the loops of carceral care instead of lowering barriers. 

We also risk ceding ground from our own professional roles and duties. The push to add social workers into public libraries elides an opportunity for library workers to dig into the messiness of working in a public institution, for the public. We need to sit there, though, to stretch and feel the limits of what we can do, in order to recognize the importance of those limits as well as the vital role we have in providing information and information literacy. Arguments for integrating social work into libraries too often boils down to “this isn’t our job.” But the reason libraries don’t need social workers is because so much of what’s being discussed is, precisely, already our jobs. Libraries already have a mandate to be open to all in our community and to meet the information needs of our patrons. We have a mandate to answer reference questions, create accessible spaces, provide early childhood literacy and support social inclusion. Shifting our practices and policies so we are actually meeting this mandate takes work and time, but I believe that looking critically at what choices we are making within libraries and how they materially move us towards collective freedom is worth the work. 

The story I hold on to: at its best, at its most lively and alive, the public library is a space of horizontalism and agency. When a patron comes into the library, they have autonomy over their time and energy. They don’t owe library workers any details of their life circumstances in order to access resources or information; they are afforded privacy through both the ethics of our profession and provincial legislation. There is no hierarchy to how patrons can use the space; sitting and resting for hours in a warm chair with wifi access is no less correct then applying for a job or researching 20th century poetics. A parent facing multiple crises may leave with books on DBT therapy and math skills for 1st graders, or they may leave with a new horror novel and a Pixar movie on DVD. They leave with what they need from us. 

Public libraries are already starting from a point of deficit of trust with so many communities. Our relation to education, our commitment to colonial knowledge production, our place as a civic government organization — all can be barriers to entry for community members who most need our services. We can choose to lean into the myth of expertise and saviors, add interventionist professionals, and try to help more by extending carceral care in our spaces. We can refer patrons to the social worker on shift, and hope this fixes something. Or we can get to know our community. We can learn about what’s going on outside our walls, figure out how to lower barriers to access and make our spaces more welcoming, and collaborate with community partners. We can explore and adapt existing library models for providing reference services to patrons facing social exclusion and crisis.60 We can push for more staff on skeleton shifts, broader and more relevant training for all workers, meaningful changes to how we operate day to day. We can let go of expertise, and sit with the generative discomfort of an imperfect solidarity with the communities we are situated within.61 In our increasingly narrow public life, public libraries at their best are an unfinished and ongoing experiment in what a social good is, what a commons could be, what our life might look like past the horizon where there are no more police and there is everything for everyone.62

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Ryan Randall & Baharak Yousefi for your generous and insightful peer reviews. Thank you to Jaena Rae Cabrera for your support and coordination as editor on this article. This article came out of innumerable conversations with fellow library workers –  if I ever talked to you about this project, know that you helped shape this text. Thank you especially to Jorge Cardenas, Beth Davis, Danielle LaFrance, and Noreen Ma for your feedback, encouragement, and key insights while I was writing. And finally, thank you to Mayari and Caitlin — our endless and ongoing conversation about how to navigate systems that mean us harm has sharpened my analysis, and your mutual love and friendship holds me down. 

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Lipinski, Brent, and Nesha Saunders. “Welcoming Spaces, Welcoming Environments: Addressing Bias and Over-Policing in Libraries.” Journal of Library Administration 61, no. 8 (November 17, 2021): 1017–22. doi:10.1080/01930826.2021.1984147.

Maynard, Robyn. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Halifax Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017.

Moreno, Teresa Helena. “Beyond the Police: Libraries as Locations of Carceral Care.” Reference Services Review 50, no. 1 (March 2, 2022): 102–12. doi:10.1108/RSR-07-2021-0039.

O’Brien, M. E., and Eman Abdelhadi. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022.

Ogden, Lydia P., and Rachel D. Williams. “Supporting Patrons in Crisis through a Social Work-Public Library Collaboration.” Journal of Library Administration 62, no. 5 (July 4, 2022): 656–72. doi:10.1080/01930826.2022.2083442.

“One Million Experiments,” n.d. https://millionexperiments.com/.

Pasternak, Shiri, Kevin Walby, and Abby Stadnyk, eds. Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2022.

Popowich, Sam. Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship: A Marxist Approach. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, LLC, 2019.

Rahman, Sarah. “What Are the Library Freedom Project and Abolitionist Library Association?” Book Riot, October 2021. https://bookriot.com/library-freedom-project/.

Santamaria, Michele R. “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work.” Library Trends 68, no. 3 (December 1, 2020): 431–49. doi:10.1353/lib.2020.0000.

Schlesselman-Tarango, Gina. “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library.” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 667–86. doi:10.1353/lib.2016.0015.

Selman, Brianne, and Joe Curnow. “Winnipeg’s Millennium Library Needs Solidarity, Not Security.” Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 14, no. 2 (December 3, 2019). doi:10.21083/partnership.v14i2.5421.

Shephard, Monique, Jane Garner, Karen Bell, and Sabine Wardle. “Social Work in Public Libraries: An International Scoping Review.” Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association 72, no. 4 (October 2, 2023): 340–61. doi:10.1080/24750158.2023.2255940.

Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada. The Debwe Series. Winnipeg, Manitoba: HighWater Press, 2016.

Wahler, Elizabeth A, Mary A Provence, Sarah C Johnson, John Helling, and Michael Williams. “Library Patrons’ Psychosocial Needs: Perceptions of Need and Reasons for Accessing Social Work Services.” Social Work 66, no. 4 (October 2, 2021): 297–305. doi:10.1093/sw/swab032.

Walia, Harsha. Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago (Ill.): Haymarket Books, 2021.

Westbrook, Lynn. “I’m Not a Social Worker”: An Information Service Model for Working with Patrons in Crisis. Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy. Vol. 85, 2015.

Whynacht, Ardath. Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide. Halifax Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2021.

Williams, Rachel D. “Policing with Policy: An Analysis of the Impact of Public Library Behavior Policies on Unhoused Patrons.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, November 11, 2025, 09610006251384334. doi:10.1177/09610006251384334.

Williams, Rachel D., and Laura Saunders. “What the Field Needs: Core Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities for Public Librarianship.” The Library Quarterly 90, no. 3 (July 1, 2020): 283–97. doi:10.1086/708958.

Wong, Edward Hon-Sing, MJ Rwigema, Nicole Penak, and Craig Fortier. “Abolishing Carceral Social Work.” In Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada, edited by Shiri Pasternak, Kevin Walby, and Abby Stadnyk, 145–53. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2022.

Wood, Rachel Nevada. “Exploring an Abolitionist Framework For Safety in Public Libraries,” n.d.

Working Together project team. Working Together: Community-Led Libraries Toolkit. Vancouver, B.C, 2008. https://www.vpl.ca/about/working-together.

Zettervall, Sara K., and Mary C. Nienow. Whole Person Librarianship: A Social Work Approach to Patron Services. 1st ed. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Libraries Unlimited, 2019.

[1]  Craig Fortier and Edward Hon-Sing Wong, “The Settler Colonialism of Social Work and the Social Work of Settler Colonialism,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 441 doi:10.1080/2201473X.2018.1519962.

Footnotes

  1. Craig Fortier and Edward Hon-Sing Wong, “The Settler Colonialism of Social Work and the Social Work of Settler Colonialism,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 441 doi:10.1080/2201473X.2018.1519962. ↩︎
  2. After https://millionexperiments.com/, a web repository that gathers “snapshots of community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.” ↩︎
  3. There have been two major scoping reviews of the literature on social work in public libraries: Sunwoo Lee et al., “Professional Social Work and Public Libraries in the United States: A Scoping Review,” Social Work 67, no. 3 (June 20, 2022): 249–65, doi:10.1093/sw/swac025; and Monique Shephard et al., “Social Work in Public Libraries: An International Scoping Review,” Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association 72, no. 4 (October 2, 2023): 340–61, doi:10.1080/24750158.2023.2255940. ↩︎
  4. Lee et al., “Professional Social Work and Public Libraries in the United States.”; Shephard et al., “Social Work in Public Libraries.” ↩︎
  5. Bennie Finch and Brian Real, “Social Workers in Public Libraries: Resource and Referral Practice and Re-Thinking Patron Engagement,” Public Library Quarterly 42, no. 4 (July 4, 2023): 325–47, doi:10.1080/01616846.2023.2199671; Lydia P. Ogden and Rachel D. Williams, “Supporting Patrons in Crisis through a Social Work-Public Library Collaboration,” Journal of Library Administration 62, no. 5 (July 4, 2022): 656–72, doi:10.1080/01930826.2022.2083442. ↩︎
  6. Ogden and Williams, “Supporting Patrons in Crisis through a Social Work-Public Library Collaboration”: 658 ↩︎
  7. L. Crabtree et al., “Social Workers in the Stacks: Public Librarians’ Perceptions and Experiences,” Public Library Quarterly 43, no. 1 (January 2, 2024): 109–34, doi:10.1080/01616846.2023.2188873.
    [1] B. Baum et al., “Bridging the Service Gap: Branch Managers Talk about Social Workers in Public Libraries,” Public Library Quarterly 42, no. 4 (July 4, 2023): 398–423, doi:10.1080/01616846.2022.2113696. ↩︎
  8. B. Baum et al., “Bridging the Service Gap: Branch Managers Talk about Social Workers in Public Libraries,” Public Library Quarterly 42, no. 4 (July 4, 2023): 398–423, doi:10.1080/01616846.2022.2113696. ↩︎
  9. Crabtree et al., “Social Workers in the Stacks.” ↩︎
  10. Melissa Gross, Don Latham, and Brittany Baum, “The Scope of Our Ability: Administrators on Social Services in Public Libraries,” Journal of Library Administration 65, no. 5 (July 2025): 559–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2025.2506149. ↩︎
  11. Some examples include creating physical space in a branch for immigrants such as the Surrey Library’s Newcomer Welcome Centre; bi-weekly drop-in programs for houseless community members such as the North Vancouver City Library’s Open Door Hub; and the adoption of community development practices, as seen at the Toronto Public Library in their commitment to outreach and responsive programing (Jackson Davis, Isobel Heintzman, and Aditi Mehta, “Havens and Hazards: Exploring the Critical Role Toronto Public Libraries Play in Serving the Precariously Housed,” International Journal on Homelessness, October 30, 2025, 1–42, doi:10.5206/ijoh.2023.3.22160. ) ↩︎
  12. Baum et al., “Bridging the Service Gap.”; Crabtree et al., “Social Workers in the Stacks.” ↩︎
  13. Finch and Real, “Social Workers in Public Libraries.” ↩︎
  14. Sarah C. Johnson, Margaret Ann Paauw, and Mark Giesler, ““Spending a Year in the Library Will Prepare You for Anything”: Experiences of Social Work Interns at Public Library Field Placements,” Advances in Social Work 23, no. 1 (August 16, 2023): 166–84, doi:10.18060/26176.; ↩︎
  15. Lee et al., “Professional Social Work and Public Libraries in the United States.”; Sara K. Zettervall and Mary C. Nienow, Whole Person Librarianship: A Social Work Approach to Patron Services, 1st ed (Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Libraries Unlimited, 2019). ↩︎
  16. Gross et al., “‘I Didn’t Know It Would Be like This”: 46; Gross et al., “The Scope of Our Ability”: 570 ↩︎
  17. Finch and Real, “Social Workers in Public Libraries”: 230 ↩︎
  18. Gross et al., “‘I Didn’t Know It Would Be like This”: 47 ↩︎
  19. Gross et al.: 48 ↩︎
  20. Gross et al., “The Scope of Our Ability”: 566; Lee et al., “Professional Social Work and Public Libraries in the United States”: 20 ↩︎
  21. Gross et al., “The Scope of Our Ability”: 564 ↩︎
  22. Rachel D. Williams and Laura Saunders, “What the Field Needs: Core Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities for Public Librarianship,” The Library Quarterly 90, no. 3 (July 1, 2020): 283–97, doi:10.1086/708958. ↩︎
  23. Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017); Shiri Pasternak, Kevin Walby, and Abby Stadnyk, eds., Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2022); Ardath Whynacht, Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide (Halifax Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2021). ↩︎
  24. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is the national policing system in Canada, and operates across the country. The RCMP operates on both the federal level, as a Government Agency, and on the provincial and municipal levels through contracts to provide local policing. See M. Gouldhawke, “A Condensed History of Canada’s Colonial Cops,” The New Inquiry, March 10, 2020, https://thenewinquiry.com/a-condensed-history-of-canadas-colonial-cops/. ↩︎
  25. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, Sexuality Studies Series (Vancouver, B.C: UBC Press, 2010); Harsha Walia, Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago (Ill.): Haymarket Books, 2021). ↩︎
  26. Pasternak et al., Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: 8-11 ↩︎
  27. Whynacht, Insurgent Love: 54-62 ↩︎
  28. Pasternak et al., Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: 6 ↩︎
  29. Brianne Selman and Joe Curnow, “Winnipeg’s Millennium Library Needs Solidarity, Not Security,” Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 14, no. 2 (December 3, 2019), doi:10.21083/partnership.v14i2.5421. ↩︎
  30. Rachel D. Williams, “Policing with Policy: An Analysis of the Impact of Public Library Behavior Policies on Unhoused Patrons,” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, November 11, 2025, 09610006251384334, doi:10.1177/09610006251384334. ↩︎
  31. Sarah Cooper et al., Millennium for All Report on Securitization of the Millennium Public Library Prepared for the Standing Committee on Protection, Community Services, and Parks City of Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/Millennium-for-All-2300719336921543/. ;  Wood, Rachel Nevada. 2021. Exploring an Abolitionist Framework for Safety In Public Libraries. https://doi.org/10.17615/bdn9-qv33. ↩︎
  32. Sarah Rahman, “What Are the Library Freedom Project and Abolitionist Library Association?,” Book Riot, October 2021, https://bookriot.com/library-freedom-project/. ↩︎
  33. Claire Kelley, “Prison Library Support Network Volunteers Meets Incarcerated Information Needs with Grassroots Reference by Mail Service,” Library Journal, January 2025, https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/prison-library-support-network-volunteers-meet-incarcerated-information-needs-with-grassroots-reference-by-mail-service. ↩︎
  34. Brent Lipinski and Nesha Saunders, “Welcoming Spaces, Welcoming Environments: Addressing Bias and Over-Policing in Libraries,” Journal of Library Administration 61, no. 8 (November 17, 2021): 1017–22, doi:10.1080/01930826.2021.1984147. ↩︎
  35. Lee et al., “Professional Social Work and Public Libraries in the United States”: 249 ↩︎
  36. Teresa Helena Moreno, “Beyond the Police: Libraries as Locations of Carceral Care,” Reference Services Review 50, no. 1 (March 2, 2022): 105, doi:10.1108/RSR-07-2021-0039. ↩︎
  37. Fortier et al, “The Settler Colonialism of Social Work and the Social Work of Settler Colonialism”: 441 ↩︎
  38. Chelsea Vowel, Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada, The Debwe Series (Winnipeg, Manitoba: HighWater Press, 2016): 182 ↩︎
  39. Cindy Blackstock, “Residential Schools: Did They Really Close or Just Morph Into Child Welfare?,” Indigenous Law Journal 6, no. 1 (2007): 71–78 ↩︎
  40. Maynard, Policing Black Lives: 186-192 ↩︎
  41. Baum et al., “Bridging the Service Gap”: 398 ↩︎
  42. Chanelle Gallant, “The Only Good Social Worker Is a Criminal Social Worker,” ed. Craig Fortier, Edward Hon-Sing Wong, and M. J. Rwigema, 1st ed (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2024): 124-129 ↩︎
  43. Sam Popowich, Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship: A Marxist Approach (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, LLC, 2019): 208-225 ↩︎
  44. Moreno, “Beyond the Police: Libraries as Locations of Carceral Care”: 102–112 ↩︎
  45. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction ; with a New Preface, Anniversary ed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 21 ↩︎
  46. Williams, “Policing with Policy: An Analysis of the Impact of Public Library Behavior Policies on Unhoused Patrons.” ↩︎
  47. Michele R. Santamaria, “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work,” Library Trends 68, no. 3 (December 1, 2020): 431–49, doi:10.1353/lib.2020.0000; Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library,” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 667–86, doi:10.1353/lib.2016.0015 ↩︎
  48. Moreno, “Beyond the Police”: 109 ↩︎
  49. André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, 3. print, Beacon Paperback 282 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).  ↩︎
  50. George Ciccariello-Maher, A World without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (London New York: Verso, 2021): 81-83 ↩︎
  51. Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition (New York London: The New Press, 2022):, No More Police: 132-33 ↩︎
  52. Kaba and Ritchie: 148-49 ↩︎
  53. Wong et al., “Disarm, Defund, Dismantle”: 148 ↩︎
  54. Kaba and Ritchie: 174 ↩︎
  55. Johnson et. al, ““Spending a Year in the Library Will Prepare You for Anything”: 75 ↩︎
  56. Baum et al., “Bridging the Service Gap”: 398 ↩︎
  57. Shira Hassan, Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022); Jen Hoyer, “Finding Room for Everyone: Libraries Confront Social Exclusion,” in Public Libraries and Resilient Cities, ed. Michael Dudley (Chicago: American Library Association, 2013): 58 ↩︎
  58. Working Together project team. Working Together: Community-Led Libraries Toolkit (2008); Audrey Barbakoff and Noah Lenstra, The 12 Steps to a Community-Led Library (ALA Editions, 2024). ↩︎
  59. Annette DeFaveri, “Shedding Our Culture of Comfort,” Feliciter 51, no. 6 (2005): 259 ↩︎
  60. Lynn Westbrook, “‘I’m Not a Social Worker’: An Information Service Model for Working with Patrons in Crisis,” in Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 85, no. 1 (2015); Working Together ↩︎
  61. Aruna D’Souza, Imperfect Solidarities, Critic’s Essay Series 7 (Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2024). ↩︎
  62. Emily Drabinski, “The Library Is A Commons,” In These Times, 2023, https://inthesetimes.com/article/public-libraries-are-commons-in-america;  M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022). ↩︎

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