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What Would Janeway and Roslin Do?: A Sci-Fi–Watching Library Historian Confronts COVID-19

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/libraries.5.2.0236

2473-036X

Bernadette Lear,

Misinformation and Its Impacts

When I started at Penn State Harrisburg in 2004, there were relatively few tenured females in the library system outside of University Park. While I received good mentorship (both formal and informal), I also took cues from science-fiction TV shows of the time that were beginning to cast women in commanding roles. In my limited off-hours between sprinting on the promotion track and rehabbing an 1830s side-by-side my father and I had bought, I collapsed on my living room couch and absorbed inspiration from the "small screen."Among my favorite characters were Kathryn Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager (played by Kate Mulgrew, 1995–2001) and Laura Roslin of Battlestar Galactica (played by Mary McDonnell, 2004–9). In the pilot episode of Voyager, a displacement wave hurls Janeway and her ship into the Delta Quadrant, more than 70,000 light-years (or 75 human years) away from Earth. While searching for a shorter route home, Janeway and her crew periodically confront the Borg, a cybernetic species that forcibly assimilates the knowledge and resources of others and turns them into drones. Battlestar similarly opens with a catastrophe—nuclear attacks on all twelve of humanity's United Colonies. Roslin, who was the federal Secretary of Education and forty-third in the line of succession, only becomes president because all her superiors are killed. While being hotly pursued by the attacking Cylons, Roslin grapples with all the economic, political, and social problems that arise when one's entire society has been destroyed.After I earned tenure and finished renovating my house, I didn't watch TV as much. But when COVID-19 hit the library history community, my professional "homeworld," I felt many parallels between the sci-fi openers described above and my own situation. I also realized how many lessons from Voyager and Battlestar had stuck with me. I can't point to specific quotes or scenes where Janeway and Roslin impressed me, but I recall their special balance of vision and practicality, firmness and empathy, self-possession and humility, as well as their tendency to accomplish things by involving other people, trusting them, and facilitating their work. I still haven't achieved all those balances myself, but they are ideals I've tried to emulate. When faced with a tough situation, I still riff on the Christian slogan that I've seen on a born-again neighbor's bumper sticker. My version is "What Would Janeway (or Roslin) Do?" I've found myself saying that a lot as a library historian and as LHRT's leader during the past year and I've leaned on my "crew" even more than my sci-fi heroes leaned on theirs.I need to say upfront that nothing I have experienced during COVID-19 compares to the fictive doomsdays that Kathryn Janeway or Laura Roslin faced. Nor have I suffered like millions of real-life Americans who have lost loved ones or livelihoods. I'm not an administrator or business owner dealing with the chaos and expense of complying with constantly evolving government orders. Nor am I a harried parent trying to homeschool her children. But similar to Roslin, who was diagnosed with breast cancer just before the Cylons attacked, I would definitely count myself among the millions of people with mental and physical illnesses who were vulnerable before the pandemic began, and who have been struggling even more since then. In my own case, depression and an eating disorder are the wicked duo that amplify each other. I have very high blood pressure and other health issues, too.I started January 2020 as I always do, setting work-related and personal goals for the coming year. On the professional side, I figured that my daily routine at Penn State would be the same as it had been for a long time. In fact, because my campus library was (finally!) fully staffed, I was optimistic that I'd be able to spend more time on research. I had just finished writing a book about the early history of Pennsylvania's public libraries and I was beginning to explore oral history—a methodology I'd need in order to write a second book about post-1945 library developments. On the personal side, my New Year's resolution list included learning about jazz music and Greece (I nerd on a different country each year). I also planned to read at least five biographies and fifty children's books. I wanted to get out a little more, too, so I made resolutions to attend a ballet, go to a Comic-Con, try geocaching, and visit SkyZone (a trampoline park). There were some whimsical goals too, like listening to David Bowie's entire discography and sipping my first Orange Julius.I've kept a diary for years and my entries for February 2020 show that coronavirus wasn't on my radar for most of that month. My days were consumed with start-of-semester library instruction. On cold winter nights I was reading voraciously—Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Dan Koeppel's Banana, and William Styron's A Darkness Visible in addition to works that related to my New Year's resolutions. It wasn't until February 27, when Penn State created a website about COVID-19, that it appeared in my diary. The following week, some of us who staff Penn State's chat reference service noticed upticks in questions about the disease. I contributed my health reference experiences toward writing an internal FAQ for handling coronavirus questions that could be either research-oriented or personal care–oriented (the latter being less commonly encountered by college librarians). In my diary for March 4 I noted "with more than 10 deaths, people [are] getting scared." Then, on March 11, when Penn State announced it was shifting all classes online, I was "shocked" and realized that the situation was "serious shit."For most average Pennsylvanians—especially those with young children—the COVID-19 epidemic hit on March 13, 2020, when Governor Tom Wolf closed all public schools. Like many other people, I left work as soon as I got the news, withdrew as much emergency cash as I could from the nearest ATM, then dashed to the grocery store. A few weeks earlier, my husband and I had bought doubles of certain shelf-stable consumables that we knew we would use regardless of whether the pandemic was severe or not. On the thirteenth, though, we happened to be low on Coke Zero and chocolate, which seemed, at the time, to be indispensable. Hundreds of other people were converging at the same store—everyone pursuing their own staples and self-medications of choice.My urgency about soda and sugar notwithstanding, I thought I had held my fears in check fairly well. But Thursday, March 20, was the day I "lost it"—the day that Penn State University Libraries decided that it was time to shutter all locations indefinitely. For the first time in the sixteen years I'd worked at Harrisburg, our outer vestibule doors were locked. They were a portal that we had always kept open in case a stranded visitor needed shelter. There was something that tore me apart when I tested that ice-cold, unyielding handle and walked away. Although there was no question in my mind that administration had made the right decision, it devastated me emotionally to think that we'd locked our customers out and left them utterly on their own. This may seem melodramatic, but if you've seen sci-fi episodes where protagonists make wrenching decisions to "airlock" (execute) good characters gone bad, that's the internal conflict I felt as I faced my library's glass doors. In terms of the disease we all potentially carried, the dangers that students and colleagues presented now outweighed past empathies. Something about that felt horribly selfish. My raw emotions were out of proportion with the facts, of course—the college actually moved mountains to assist students who were stuck in their dorms or trying to leave town. Still, I bawled so much during my walk home that I don't remember any step of the journey.My entries for late March and April 2020 are reminiscent of scenes in Voyager and Battlestar when incoming reports about attacks on neighboring civilizations lead to a horrific realization that the Borg or the Cylons are coming for you next. Every day the number of cases and deaths seemed to jump exponentially. On the Pennsylvania Department of Health's map of locked-down jurisdictions, progressively more counties switched from green, to yellow, to red, closer and closer to where I lived. First Allegheny, Delaware, and Montgomery—the counties at the far western and eastern edges of the Commonweath, around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Then Erie (city and county). Then Lehigh (which includes Allentown). Then Lackawanna (Scranton). Then Berks (Reading). By March 27 the counties immediately to the east and south of mine—Lancaster and York—were under stay-at-home orders. Two days later, Dauphin (my county) was added. Then, on April 1, all remaining counties in the state were coded red. The very next day, there were news reports of the dire economic effects—thousands of people in Pennsylvania, and millions of people across the country already being laid off, revealing how vulnerable our so-called booming economy actually was. During these same weeks, my own mental decline was marked by bingeing, insomnia, throbbing headaches, and prayers. From my log: March 20: "268 cases in PA, 1 death"March 25: "1100+ cases of COVID-19 in PA, in 44 counties. This will be horrifying when they start dying"March 26: "Nearly 1700 COVID-19 cases in PA … Dad visited briefly—I wish I could hug him"March 27: "Insomnia again … 2200 COVID cases in PA. Lancaster + York now under stay-at-home orders. Prayers."March 29: "3400 cases of COVID-19 in PA, including 1 at Penn State Harrisburg. Glad we closed."March 30: "Nearly 4100 COVID cases in PA. Dauphin County now included in stay-at-home order."March 31: "Very distracted—difficulty concentrating. Splitting headache."April 1: "5800 cases of COVID, 74 deaths. Gvr Wolf issued statewide shutdown 'stay-at-home' order. Eating too much chocolate."April 2: "7000 cases + 90 deaths. Good God. 6 mil. filed for unemployment this week."Future readers of my diary might think that my anxiety gradually ebbed because my daily case counts started to trail off as the month wore on. The reality was, though, that as hospitalizations and mortalities soared, I simply couldn't face the numbers anymore. So I didn't watch or make note of the news as much.Besides that, I had other concerns to worry about.As with many historians, my scholarly plans for 2020 disintegrated as the disease spread and educational institutions responded. While research was (rightfully) the last thing on most people's minds that spring, it was a significant concern for me since I work for a Research 1 institution. Due to the centenary of women's suffrage and my previous focus on women's nineteenth/twentieth-century library activism, I had been invited to present at eight different conferences that year. Looking ahead to my next project, I had registered for some regional workshops on oral history, too. But as the pandemic reached every corner of the country, each event was canceled or indefinitely postponed. I wasn't familiar enough with online video recording to reimagine the new oral history project that I was just beginning to plan. So, like Kathryn Janeway and Laura Roslin often did, I tried to calm myself down by grounding my thoughts in practical realities and the positive opportunities those might encompass. In other words, I "pivoted." Because my daily work as an education specialist involves children's literature, I identified worthwhile projects in that arena that I could pursue from home. I'm grateful to say that two of my studies have already been published—one about college libraries' holdings of award-winning juvenile science titles, and another one concerning availability of award-winning children's and young adult books (both fiction and nonfiction) in various e-book platforms. Both co-authored with Andrea Pritt, Penn State Harrisburg's STEM librarian, they engaged quantitative skills I hadn't used in a long time. Also, Andrea's bubbly, can-do attitude did a lot for my spirit. But if I'm being completely honest, the detrimental effect of COVID-19 on my historical research still leaves me feeling bereft at times.I can't recall which sci-fi protagonist modeled this behavior, but another lesson I learned from the small screen in terms of staying sane during a crisis is to focus on one thing you can actually influence. For me, that "one thing" became ALA's Library History Round Table (LHRT). To our group, COVID-19 wasn't unlike a horde of Cylons attacking on several fronts all at once. The pandemic wasn't the direct cause of every problem, but it always contributed additional strains to finances, human resources, or logistics. In a variety of ways, I was similar to Laura Roslin—stunned and unsure whether I would see the end of the calamity. But I also felt a keen sense of duty and recognized some of the possibilities that a clean slate could represent.To make several long stories short, when LHRT's chair resigned, I stepped up and was "sworn in." When ALA announced that it was considering abolishing small round tables (including LHRT), I formed a Futures Committee to investigate our options. When the Futures folks recommended more frequent programming and member engagement, I helped to start a book club and other initiatives. When LHRT's institutional partner for Library History Seminar determined it couldn't host an online conference, I formed and led a committee to organize it. When several LCHS editorial board members signaled that the time was coming for them to retire, I recruited new advisors. And when research manuscripts for LCHS dried up because of COVID-related hurdles, Eric, Brett, and I said, "Well, let's write something about that."It remains to be seen whether all these decisions and efforts were the right ones, but I know that each of them has already provided a useful opportunity for at least one person (often, quite a few). We've also discovered that Zoom and other free technologies enable us to offer more no-cost and low-cost events, thus breaking down the economic source of some scholarly inequities. I am very pleased to see that many of our latest volunteers and attendees are people who weren't as active in the Round Table during my previous terms as LHRT chair. Ultimately, that's the whole point. To borrow a phrase from Voyager and other series in the Star Trek franchise, empowering colleagues and ensuring that historical knowledge survives for the next generation have always been my professional "prime directives."If I were writing this for Hollywood, I'd conjure up a transformative moment when I pulled myself together to become the Janeway or Roslin that COVID-19 seems to perpetually require. But it didn't happen that way. Anyone who would visit my house or observe me in other aspects of my life would conclude that I'm a feckless mess. LHRT is the "one thing" that seems to be going right. And truth be told, I don't feel like much of LHRT's rightness comes from me. I definitely contribute a lot of institutional knowledge and sweat equity—maybe also a knack for matching people to tasks that suit them. But crucially, every time I've asked colleagues for help, they have answered. Quietly, I often refer to the committees I've appointed as my "away teams" or "strike teams," groups of diverse and highly talented people whom I trust implicitly to accomplish the things that I can't. I won't name names because I don't want to slight anyone that I might inadvertently forget. Suffice it to say that I have my Chakotays and Adamas—and many other cast members I can rely on, too. I am thankful for all of them and everything they do.