Issues

democracy: libraries are critical infrastructure for democracy. they are where we read, watch, learn, gather, debate, hang out, recreate, and neighbor together. when the big picture feels overwhelming and you’re not sure what to do, leaning into local community, where it already exists, like at the libraries, is always a good idea.

funding: nationwide, we are asking our libraries and librarians to serve an increasing number of needs: heat and cool us, help us apply for jobs, file taxes, learn a language, use the internet, learn CPR and access public health resources. locally, funding for the Brookline library has not kept pace with overall town funding. A dollar invested in libraries gives back far more in both community and economic benefits, so library funding is an incredible way to invest in our community. meanwhile, as we ask our librarians to do more and more, we must ensure that they are paid fairly for their labor. public library workers face a huge risk of burnout, and I want to make sure we are treating them like the valuable public servants that they are.

safety and inclusion: libraries are for everybody. we must ensure our libraries remain a place of safety and inclusion for all our community members, of all ages, faiths, gender identities, abilities, sexualities, races, and ethnicities.

digital and personal privacy: unlike Jeff Bezos, libraries and librarians respect your privacy. they’re not surveilling you in order to scare you or sell things to you. in the library, you get to just be. what you read and watch are your business, not the billionaires’.

book bans and freedom of speech: libraries and librarians are under attack. I support all efforts to protect them from politically motivated attacks, including this legislation passed by the MA senate and currently in the house ways and means committee that would increase these protections.

reliable information: the internet and media environment are increasingly full of misinformation, disinformation, and just plain junk. even internet-savvy people struggle to make sense of this overload. search engine results are decreasing in quality. librarians are experts in navigating information and libraries are islands of accurate and reliable information in a sea of slop. the problem of ai-generated garbage polluting our information ecosystem is only going to increase; I believe our public libraries and librarians must be a huge part of the solution.

access to media: a lot of us once believed the dream that somehow all of human knowledge and cultural production would eventually be on the internet, available to access at home for free. instead, we’re seeing decreasing access. news paywalls that make it impossible to read the news. archives and collections that used to be available being taken down. movies and tv shows that you used to be able to stream being taken offline by media companies for their own, inscrutable reasons. libraries have always been and remain institutions that seek to preserve and archive our history. maybe you can’t see it on netflix anymore but the library has a copy on blu-ray. I think this will be an issue of increasing urgency in the next several years, and I want to make sure that our library system is planning thoughtfully for this future.