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Edina’s activist librarian keeps on agitating by Andrew Wig

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Feb 17th, 2020
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  1. Edina’s activist librarian keeps on agitating
  2. Andrew Wig Feb 13, 2020 Updated Feb 14, 2020 0
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  4. Since retiring as a librarian in 1999, Sandy Berman has kept up the causes he holds most dear, including his campaign to abolish library fines. (Photo by Michael Braun, braunmike@comcast.net)
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  7. Libraries are supposed to be quiet. Librarians? Not so much, if you ask Sandy Berman.
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  9. The longtime Edina resident is long-retired from a career as an activist librarian, but he’s made sure to maintain his ways as a chronic agitator. “It’s kind of like a compulsion, maybe even psychopathological,” Berman explained last month as he sat down to reflect on a career that has been officially over since 1999.
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  11. Since then, he has maintained the practice he calls “selective dissemination,” mailing care packages full of readings and correspondence to library professionals, activists, legislators and journalists.
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  13. “I can’t bear to keep something to myself that I know can be shared by with somebody else,” Berman said.
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  15. Since leaving his job as head cataloger with the Hennepin County Library system, he’s continued to push for the abolition of library fines, which he sees as an equity issue. And, he continues to do battle over language itself, knowing all too well that the words people use matter.
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  17. Particularly needling him is the subject heading, “illegal aliens,” which remains in the Library of Congress catalog – a system used by libraries across the country – despite efforts to remove it. The Library of Congress moved to drop the term in 2016, but that plan was overturned by Congress, so it remains an official subject heading to this day.
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  19. Hennepin County Library has removed the term as a subject heading within its own catalog, despite the complications that arise in diverging from the Library of Congress in such fashion, according to Gail Mueller Schultz, manager of collection and technical services for the county system.
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  21. So, Berman can notch a small victory in his life as an activist retiree, one in which he still looms large in the field of information sciences.
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  23. He’s won numerous awards from professional organizations and late last year received Edina’s Tom Oye Award, which the city’s Human Rights & Relations Commission bestows upon socially conscious change-makers every year.
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  25. “He is probably the most well-known person associated with Hennepin County Library,” said Lynn Stetler, who worked for Berman for 20 years.
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  27. Berman’s most fervent followers call themselves “Sandynistas,” a term he did not coin, he is quick to note. The legend behind that monicker got its start in southern California, where Berman spent his formative years. He met his late wife, Lorraine, while both were working at a UCLA library. They got married in 1968 and were an interracial couple near the height of the civil rights movement.
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  29. Along with his wife’s two children from a previous marriage, Berman moved to Zambia where he had secured a librarian job. There, his fight against the sanctification of harmful language took root.
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  31. He learned from the South African exiles he worked with that the term “kaffir,” a subject heading in their library’s catalog, was the equivalent of the “N-word” in their home country. Berman made sure that got changed before taking another job in Uganda.
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  33. A problem with authority
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  35. Berman and his family moved to Edina in 1973 as the librarian took a job in the Hennepin County Library system. After spending decades there building his anti-authoritarian profile, he left the library amid clashes with the administration over library fines and the cataloging system. He had been moved to what he called a menial role akin to “the toilet cleaning job,” which he said led to a “forced retirement.”
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  37. It wasn’t the first time he left a job over a disagreement with management. Before Berman met his wife and moved to Africa, he worked as a civilian librarian for the U.S. Army in Germany.
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  39. Aside from his regular library duties, Berman put out a publication called Yin/Yang, featuring poetry, photography and essays by soldiers. “This was like a precursor – we didn’t know it at the time – of what became the GI underground press,” he explained.
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  41. But Yin/Yang wasn’t underground enough to avoid attention from the brass. The first edition “got me a visit from a lieutenant colonel,” Berman said.
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  43. That authority figure told him to tone down the material. “What he didn’t realize is he was sitting on top of the drawer with the master sheets for the next issue,” Berman remembered.
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  45. They released that issue, “and then I quit.” Later, the pattern would continue as he left a role as editor of a bimonthly cataloging bulletin meant for library professionals due, he said, to “unnecessary interference” with the publication’s content.
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  47. So, Berman has quit his share of jobs, but never his work.
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  49. After retirement, Berman defended labor movements as he stood on picket lines with bus drivers and nurses. He stood outside county libraries with petitions to abolish late fees. He continued to critique the ways libraries operate, holding to account the institutions that were once the gatekeepers of the world’s information.
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  51. He criticizes library systems as “too overloaded with high-level administration” and harps on concerns over “free speech and governance and classism,” especially on behalf of rank-and-file library employees.
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  53. “He hated being a supervisor. That was not what he was meant to do,” said Stetler, who was serving as president of Local 2822, which includes Hennepin County Library workers, when she retired in 2017. “ … He’s very well thought of by current employees as well as retirees.”
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  55. Berman, she said, is “one of the most determined people I’ve ever met in my life, but he’s also one of the most caring people. … He is going to be fighting until he drops dead. It’s just his nature.”
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  57. Berman admits that at his age, he’s slowing down, but whether it’s making libraries more accessible by abolishing fines or by erasing antiquated words imbued with hate, what Berman keeps fighting for is change.
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  59. “It has to come from somewhere,” he said.
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