Since December 2023, I’ve been pulling local government documents—usually issued by cities, towns, and regional authorities—from our library stacks, preparing them for our digitization partners, and then reshelving them once again. In the process of playing this middle-man student assistant role for the California Local Documents Digitization Project, I’ve learned so much about the importance of archival work, librarians, and community.
Although there is an undeniable charm to physical books—dog-eared pages, annotations left behind by strangers, their time-worn glory and all—there’s also no denying that technology has become increasingly important for storing and disseminating information. At face value, this project represents one crucial step toward adapting to a fast-approaching digital age. But the significance of this inherently political work goes far beyond technological advancement alone.
During this book-burning era of dismissed Librarians of Congress, federal employees ordered to shred classified documents, and thousands of government web pages scrubbed from the internet, the act of freely sharing government archives with anyone who wants to see them is exactly how we resist. In fact, striving for unrestricted access to public knowledge and demanding transparency from the inner workings of government—liberties not easily granted to us but hard-earned by the American people—is actually pretty patriotic, if you stop and think about it.
And yet, although these digitization efforts are part of a larger political struggle for independent information, the day-to-day work is anything but contentious. From mindlessly de-stapling documents to weeding through bookshelves—sometimes with the sound of Strawberry Creek rushing past if the windows are cracked open—my work at the library feels peaceful more than anything else. The people here are kind and always look out for one another; sometimes we lose track of time catching up on current events and our personal lives. But maybe that time isn’t wasted at all—maybe the community we’ve built along the way is the quiet, steady kind of resistance that matters most.