Jessamyn West (librarian)


Jessamyn Charity West is an American library technologist and writer known for her activism and work on the digital divide. She is the creator of librarian.net. She is the Vermont Chapter Councilor of the American Library Association, and was Director of Operations at the massive group blog MetaFilter from 2005-2014. West has been writing a regular library-themed newsletter, , since 2016, which she publishes on the Medium platform.

Early life and education

West grew up in Massachusetts, where her father, computer engineer Tom West, worked for RCA and Data General. He was the key figure in the 1981 Tracy Kidder book The Soul of a New Machine. She may be named after the author Jessamyn West, and as a child corresponded with her. She is also the niece of actor Peter Coyote.
She graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst and moved to Seattle in 1990, before moving back to Vermont in 2003.

Career

In 1995, she went to Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where she ran a library for the Freedom Forum. After returning to the U.S. she completed graduate work at the University of Washington for a Master of Librarianship degree.
West works as a freelance library consultant, mainly in Orange County, Vermont, focusing on helping libraries with technology. She moderated the group blog
MetaFilter, retiring as Director of Operations in 2014. She
continues to be active answering questions in Ask MetaFilter. She is also an active Wikipedian, working particularly on Vermont and library topics. In June 2011 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. She has staffed information desks at Burning Man and the 1999 WTO protests, and supported and maintained the Internet Archive's Open Library project.
West briefly signed up as a researcher for Google Answers, writing about her experience for the journal Searcher. She resigned after finding she had probably violated her contract by writing about the service. West believed that "the money factor" skewed the relationship between the researcher and consumer of information, and played a part in the service's later demise.
In 2002, Library Journal named her a "mover and shaker" of the library world. West is considered an "opinion maker" in the profession and presents frequently at conferences. In 2019 Jessamyn West gave the 30th Alice G. Smith Lecture for the School of Information at the University of South Florida in Tampa at the Robert W. Saunders Sr. Public Library titled, "Social justice is a library issue; libraries are a social justice issue".
She addressed challenges faced by people in rural communities on The Takeaway podcast on September 2019, "How Libraries Are Bridging the Digital Divide". She is a self-described anti-capitalist.

Librarian.net

Librarian.net, which she founded in 1999 after finding the domain name unused, has become a "widely read and cited" resource. West characterizes librarian.net as generally "anti-censorship, pro-freedom of speech, pro-porn, anti-globalization, anti-outsourcing, anti-Dr. Laura, pro-freak, pro-social responsibility, and just generally pro-information and in favor of the profession getting a better image."
Wired described her as "on the front lines in battling the USA PATRIOT Act," particularly the provisions that allow warrantless searches of library records. The act not only prohibits libraries from notifying the subjects of such searches, it prohibits them from disclosing to the public whether any such searches have been made. In protest, West created a number of notices that libraries can post which she suggests are "technically legal." One of them, for example, reads: "The FBI has not been here. Watch very closely for the removal of this sign." The Vermont Library Association provided copies of this sign to every public library in Vermont.
West was one of about three dozen "credentialed bloggers" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the first time that such an event issued press credentials to bloggers. She indicated in a New York Times feature on the group that her goal was making "the librarian voice in politics stronger and louder." Her first-day quip that the convention was "Burning Man for Democrats, without the nudity or drugs" was widely reported.
In 2007, West made a YouTube video of herself installing Ubuntu on two library computers, which attracted thousands of views and requests for free CDs from Canonical. DesktopLinux.com called it a "non-jaded, non-techie look at Ubuntu." Cory Doctorow, writing on the blog Boing Boing, dubbed her an "internet folk hero", and brought the video 14,000 views in a day and a half.

Lawsuit against Equifax

In September 2017 Equifax, a consumer credit reporting agency reported a cybersecurity breach affecting 145 million consumers. West, standing up for the individual's right to digital privacy, sued Equifax in small claims court in Vermont. Her successful action was covered in the New York Times. West has outlined the steps she took in a Medium essay, "Suing Equifax in Small Claims Court".
When notified that she had won her claim, West noted her intention was "the explicit mission of demonstrating that citizens are not powerless when it comes to their personal information."

Ebook pricing

In 2019 Jessamyn West's CNN Opinion essay, "Libraries are fighting to preserve your right to borrow e-books" drew wide attention for her stark assessment, "Librarians to publishers: Please take our money. Publishers to librarians: Drop dead." West analyzed the Macmillan decision at Information Today in an article, "Raw Deal in Ebook Pricing". West was interviewed by Jack Stewart at Marketplace and observed that this is an experiment that may not work out for Macmillan.

Works and publications

;Books
;Chapters in Books
;Articles