Books, Digital Resources, and the Right to Read A Community Library’s Response

At the terrace of a building across the lane, a child appears. We hear him before we see him, as he peers down into the library’s courtyard and calls out, “Hello!”
The librarian sorting books in the shade of the trees looks up each time. “Hello!”
This back and forth goes on for some time. The ritual of calling out across the lane resumes later in the day, and the next morning.
Each time someone calls out, the library responds.

This was in the winter of 2020 in Khirki Extension, New Delhi. The library branch was not then open. After having to vacate our old building, the new one was still being built. Its shelves were taking shape, books being placed on them rapidly by librarians, so that members could access their right to read.

In March of that year, as the first nationwide lockdown was announced, we at TCLP had been forced to temporarily close our free community libraries. We worked immediately to build a new one that would be digital, that would be low-internet use, and as far accessible as it could be as an online library. We continued to agitate for the right to read in and through the internet, and responded to the changing and pressing needs of members as the pandemic wore on.

We have been running our digital library for three years now, and it is linked inextricably with the physical libraries. This relationship has been assailed with questions and challenges. In responding to these tensions, we have also had moments of sheer collective strength.

This practice of responding constantly to the changing needs of members is what gives direction to the work of a library.

Right to Read and the Internet

Free libraries, owned and run by communities, are a response to the way in which the right to read has been denied to people for centuries, and continues to be denied today. The denial of reading – reading being not only the ability to decode documents of the past and the present, but also the ability to think through books about yourself and the world – is part of a larger structure of oppression that operates to keep people powerless in the face of inequality.

Free community libraries fight against this denial. They actively agitate against it and model a more equal world. They do so by centering dalit, bahujan, working class, female and queer readers and their own stories amidst this historical oppression.

In a world that is relying increasingly on technology, where digital media is embedding itself into the daily lives of many at a rapidly increasing rate, a library must respond in a way that centres access and justice. Access to the internet is itself exclusionary and gendered. It is marked by limited smartphone availability, network connectivity and prohibitive data costs.

Further, whose stories are heard and amplified on social media and digital platforms? Whose stories are narrated and archived for posterity? Who gets to access these stories and histories? When we think of the right to access the internet, we must examine how the same exclusionary structures that deny the right to read do not disappear when we move online. They only take on new forms.

As librarians, one way to understand the relationship between books in the physical sense and as digital resources is to ask ourselves what we are working toward. A response to this is that we work so that everyone can use libraries and access books. And this includes particularly those who are oppressed on the basis of caste, class, gender identity, religion, disability and other structures. We are, in other words, working toward a more just and equitable world.

Then how can our online library and digital programing strengthen our work toward this better world? How can we apply the core value of welcoming all to the digital resources that we build?

Keeping these questions at the centre, we work with library members to share news, media and literature on online library channels. Three times a week, members receive read-aloud videos and audios, links, library news, national news, and community videos for all ages on their phones. If you can’t come to the library to listen to a story that day, you will have a video or audio on your phone of one of your librarians reading it out.

Material is shared in a variety of formats to strengthen accessibility, and text captions contextualize the posts. The tool we use most widely as our online library channel is WhatsApp. It is a platform that very nearly all those with smartphones were already familiar with and accessed regularly. It also puts limitations on file size. This ensures that the library is cognizant of the amount of internet data that our members would use while accessing the online library posts.

When members cannot come to the library in person, they are able to access the digital library platforms. These include a website and a YouTube channel, for reading. In this way, our digital library – called Duniya Sabki – strengthens access.

During the multiple lockdowns in DelhiNCR, members frequently shared over call or text about listening with great interest to the Duniya Sabki channels. A member told a librarian over call that she and her whole family would sit down at night to listen to an audio story by Premchand together. Many members stayed connected from their villages. Schoolteachers heard about the channel from each other and stayed connected. They forwarded the audio-video stories and resources to their class WhatsApp groups.

Now that physical libraries are open and bustling, librarians often find themselves with members who want to discuss something they saw on the channel. Recently a librarian was pulled aside by a nine-year old member who summarized to her an entire story that she had recorded for the digital library. “In that story, you read out how the man sneezes so loud that everyone gets blown away. Sometimes, my sneezes are really loud too.”

As we celebrated the farewell of another librarian from one physical branch to another, a young member moved to the front of the gathering and said, “You are amazing. You read such good stories with us. And your video of Makdi Ki Kahani was the best. I watched that one so many times.”

Another day, an adult walked into the library for more information after someone forwarded him the library’s post about an Aadhaar camp nearby. He wasn’t a member of the digital or physical library. But he knew someone who was.

Charting Pathways for a Digital Library

Members have charted, from the very beginning, the trajectory of the digital library. All are regularly invited to put in requests for the kind of stories, media or resources they want on their digital library. This is a regular exercise in revising and testing the limits of the digital. It also helps understand how the online library works in tandem with the physical branches.

In keeping with the vision of the free library movement, audio-video resources developed by us respond to the needs and interests of our members. Often we centre anti-caste narratives and dalit-bahujan literature, women and queer rights, adivasi struggles, disability inclusion, and people-led movements for justice across India and the world.

On the occasion of Manusmriti Dahan Diwas, the day Babasaheb Ambedkar burnt the book that codifies caste atrocities and the oppression of women, a colleague and I borrowed a book from the library’s ‘Against Caste’ shelf and read up on it. We watched videos about this historic event and its continued impact, and a clip from a film on Ambedkar’s life that re-enacted the day of the first burning.

Together, we put together an audio recording in which we connected this rejection of caste and gender discrimination with the work of the library movement. There is no space for caste and gender discrimination in the world we are building together. This was shared across our library channels, of which more than 2,400 families are a part.

This is one instance of how digital and physical resources work together to strengthen the library’s vision. There are many more. Members of all ages often record their own experiences to share with the community – experiences of reading, of achievement, of struggle – so that the digital library is a space of resonance. It is a space through which we organize around shared rights and shared experiences.

To be asked to choose, then, between books and digital resources and to think of the two as a dichotomy is a forced opposition of things. Both of these must work together to support each other for the goal of real access and presence. Digital libraries and media cannot replace physical books and ‘offline’ libraries. To imagine a world where that happens is an exclusionary one where reading is the estate of a few. Nor can we dismiss digital resources and media as unnecessary or irrelevant. In our laptop learning program, we often ask members who the internet belongs to. The response is resounding and immediate: ‘Everyone.’

Recently, a member walked in and shared that on the way to the library she had seen children, adults, and people of different ages taking turns to play a game on one phone. “I saw that and I thought, it’s true about what we say in the library – that everyone should have the right to use technology.”

Digital Rights in and Through Libraries

Essential government services are becoming increasingly digitized. These include vaccine booking systems, labour card registrations and central university admissions. Those who are already excluded from healthcare, education and other systems are at a greater risk. These online platforms should be rightfully accessible to everyone.

But they are made for only a certain kind of person. This is someone who is a fluent reader, non-disabled, English speaking, well-versed in digital technology, with a faultless internet connection, who is able to confidently approach these systems because they have already served him well in the past. Those who are left out of this conception of a user of government services are inevitably those already oppressed on the basis of caste, class, gender and disability.

Our response here as librarians is twofold. First, we must create a space where communities can collectively speak out against these exclusionary systems. Second, we must create spaces in the libraries where members can be supported to access these platforms. Our laptop access program in the TCLP branch libraries, for instance, gives members free access for leisure, entertainment, education, or accessing any such portal. We support members to learn to use laptops through a supportive interface with links and audio notes about different platforms, and also through workshops, where we together think critically about digital and social media. What we work toward, then, is not only digital access, but also the different forms of digital presence.

During the lockdowns in Delhi-NCR, we ran online reading intervention classes with library members. Classes were held online. We delivered physical books to members for reading during and after classes. We also shared links to online websites and free resources.

For this particular intervention, our members were aged between eight and fifteen. They had limited access to the internet and were on their way to becoming fluent readers. They often asked why websites and apps with all the pretensions of being free and open to all actually allowed access only when one registered. Members were met with pages requesting they share their full names, their phone numbers, their email addresses, and more. Members asked, consistently – “Why are they asking us this? Why do we need to share this information?” These are pointed questions at both the lack of transparency about data privacy and the inaccessibility of the user registration step itself. They take us to larger questions about the ways in which companies and governments make certain choices with regard to technology that are both biased and exclusionary.

Library practitioners and activists must critically examine the increasing digitization in their own contexts, as it brings with it growing privacy, surveillance, and data concerns. As with systems like Aadhaar, we must make information about these very real concerns available while acknowledging that it is a necessity for many.

We cannot afford to disengage. This is a tension that we cannot resolve. We must acknowledge and work with this tension. For example, when we share information about a nearby Aadhaar camp with our members via our digital library channels, we would not only look at what the process is, but also how exclusionary it is. Further, we invite stories that are related to this exclusion. How can we build archives of these stories as we agitate against such systems?

We still run reading intervention classes. However, these now operate fully out of our physical library branches. It is a common sight to see members leave one room after their English reading intervention class and enter another for using the laptop access program to practise their language skills through one of the free resources we have curated. It is also common to see members watching music videos – at times singing along to the videos made by rappers from their own library community. Our digital resources and our books seem to be in constant conversation with each other.

Our laptop and internet learning curriculum in the libraries is a direct response to members of all ages who have expressed the need for it. We work with an ever-evolving set of questions. How can we challenge the inequities and injustices of the world as they take on new forms when we move online? How can we agitate for a free and just online world, while also building a space where the internet can be used by library members powerfully for leisure, for education and for expression? How can our digital library curriculum support members to begin using the internet with the sense and strength of a collective community?

These are questions to which the answers are not easy, nor are they singular. As we continue to run libraries and work to build greater access and presence, we will respond to the changing, and difficult, realities of our time. A library is precisely that – a space that is always present for its community and members. A space that responds, while keeping the goal of justice and greater access at the centre.