For Gen Z, the Library Is Political

The Parkway Central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia / Photograph by R. Kennedy for Visit Philadelphia

Librarianship, at its core, isn’t just about books, says Sophie Tessier, a 26-year-old reference librarian at a law library in Philadelphia. For Tessler, it’s about “how [we can] remove barriers to safety, barriers to access, barriers to information.” Tessier has worked in public libraries in the past, but even in her current position she says the crux of her job is figuring out how to make things easier for people. More than just a career, Tessier sees librarianship as a pathway to connecting her professional life and her political beliefs.

And she isn’t the only one who feels this way. Among an age group that’s known for an increase in political engagement and a decrease in intellectual engagement, there’s a subset of Gen Z that’s trying, through their careers, to utilize the former in order to help stymie the spread of the latter.

Being a librarian allowed Baruch Levine, a 28-year-old reference librarian at Haverford Township Free Library, to “engage my principles while at work,” something that really drew him to the profession. He was excited about the ability to do research in a way that felt driven by those principles.

Levine says that even the most basic core of libraries is a system that promotes values he believes in. The library is “based on communal principles of ownership and the idea that people should have access to certain things based on the fact that they exist. Especially as time has gone on, there are fewer and fewer spaces where that is honored … the structure itself, having taxpayer money lead to everybody communally sharing access to museum passes, books, music — that on its own is something that vibes with what I think the world needs more of.”

“It used to be that being a librarian was that you provided a neutral space so that people can make their own decisions,” says Lauren Phegley, a 27-year-old research data engineer working at the University of Pennsylvania. “There has been a change in the understanding that nothing is neutral, and we cannot pretend that we are neutral, and the very fact that we exist is not neutral.”

To these young librarians, the library isn’t just a place for people to check out books — it’s a political hub, and a gateway to cultural engagement, digital literacy, and community-building. It’s also, most importantly, a beacon of education and information in innumerable forms, something that these librarians feel incredibly passionately about.

Phegley, for example, has a background in criminal justice. She says that working with a jumble of unorganized data on a project in school brought her to thinking about the ways in which that data could have been organized better, and that brought her to her current job at Penn.

“I wanted to work with government databases and do knowledge management, working to connect information to help assist people who are going through the criminal justice process,” she explains about her initial foray into librarianship. And in tangling with the knot of data she found in that work, Phegley realized that she wanted to ensure that others doing the type of work and research she’d been doing were able to do so with ease and accuracy.

That isn’t to say, of course, that reading takes a backseat for these librarians. Phegley and so many current librarians have fond memories of curling up with a book in the corner of a library as a kid, and believe powerfully in the ability of literature to transform young lives.

“Books can bring such a sense of hope,” says Cedar Fleming, 27, who works in the children’s department at the Free Library of Philadelphia. “Being the person who puts a book into a kid’s hands, and it changes their life … that feeling is like nothing else I could describe. And that’s why I stay in it.”

Plus, there’s something special in this hyper-digital age about being able to hold a library’s contents in your hands and engage with them physically. Rae Blanchard, a 24-year-old project archivist at the Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections at Drexel University, thinks that part of the appeal of libraries is “the trend that’s the return from digital media to physical things, like collecting vinyl,” something of a pendulum swing in a hyper-digital age.

That aside, though, the notion of libraries as book repositories and librarians as card-catalogue-stewards is one that this group of librarians is pushing back against with vigor.

Digital literacy is a part of library services that the younger generation finds not only important, but completely necessary. Jajwalya Karajgikar, a 29-year-old applied data sciences librarian at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at the University of Pennsylvania, says that digital literacy and teaching younger generations the skills to engage smartly and safely in the digital world is one of the most important parts of being a librarian, particularly her job.

“People do think of libraries still as a place for books,” says Karajgikar. “But information literacy is something that libraries have [always] been the hub for … information literacy, media literacy, AI literacy, technological literacy, it’s an extension of all that.”

Tessier agrees. “Libraries have embraced technological literacy instruction for a while,” she says, noting that in every librarian job she’s had, she has in some capacity focused on instructing digital literacy. “As we rapidly evolve into this hybrid era, we are also neglecting to remember that a lot of people can’t keep up with that.” She believes that this is another way in which libraries can and should promote equity, in guiding folks of all ages how to best navigate the technological world we’re all living in.

And it really is all ages. Numerous librarians noted that just because Gen Z and Gen Alpha have grown up with technology, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the best technological literacy. It’s still something that needs to be taught, and Tessier stresses that the introduction of tech into the library should keep an educational focus with it.

If technology represents librarianship of the future, Philadelphia often embodies librarianship of the past.

Photograph courtesy of Visit Philadelphia

Philadelphia is a particularly interesting place to work, not only as a librarian, but as a librarian with a particular interest in the political elements of librarianship. As a city steeped in history, it’s a not insignificant part of working here. It doesn’t hurt that Drexel University has an ALA-accredited program, meaning that graduates with Drexel’s MLIS mark themselves as qualified, competitive applicants entering the job market.

This means that Philadelphia is full to bursting with interesting librarianship and ways to connect with history. “There’s always so much going on!” gushes Karajgikar. “This city in particular has a lot of chutzpah in how you can bring things together and bring people together.”

Unique libraries are part of that. Some specialize in zines; others can be a “space for curating technological and traditional libraries in a hackerspace,” in Karajgikar’s words; still others are dedicated to preserving activist history by archiving protests and the rich legacy of grassroots movements that have sprouted throughout Philadelphia’s nearly 350 years.

As an archivist, Blanchard quite literally holds Philadelphia’s history in her hands every single day. In large part, her job deals with the storied history and politics of women in medicine. This means that every day, she examines the literal shelving units upon shelving units of history that make up one niche of this one topic.

“It’s difficult to come to terms with how much has come before us and how much will live after us,” Blanchard says.

Additionally, Blanchard believes that being an archivist helps give her perspective on the fact that “we are quite literally repeating history” at this moment in time; connecting her job with the current climate is not in the slightest difficult.

This access to information, too, is political. These young librarians believe that an ability to navigate the literary and digital worlds is paramount to equity in and out of the library. As Tessier puts it: The library is an “equitable, no-barrier space for anybody and everybody,” and equitable, no-barrier access to the educational services the library provides is a large part of that.

Similarly, the library provides a space for a community to truly come together. “Something that Gen Z is really about is connection,” says Fleming. He says that libraries are a space where their inherent purpose is to bring people together in a place where they can connect with their community.

Tessier agrees that the library can be a wonderful space for community — if people take advantage of the programming. With young people in particular, she said that in her roles in public libraries in the past, she’s spent “a lot of time trying to figure out how to draw young people into the programming.”

But that shouldn’t be the case, she argues. Tessier believes that there is so much to do and learn at the library for individuals, and for folks seeking community, there’s no better place to find like-minded peers who are also searching for companionship. For a friend who was struggling to find friends in a new city, Tessier kept pitching: “You should go to your library!”