[Hidden-tech] Franklin Law Library - why were they shredded? most books weren't digitized - this is part of a global quiet shredding

[Lisa Hoag]

Hi All,
Just an update to offer a reply to these questions about the Franklin Law
Library and other county law libraries which can still be saved but are
seriously at risk. We are in the process of writing up a short report on
our research. Here are some responses for now:
They say that everything that has been shredded has been digitized, but I
have it from three separate reliable sources that most of what was shredded
has not been digitized. The original Franklin Law Library comprised 30,000
volumes. They definitely did not provide a budget to digitize 25,500
volumes of books. They have already closed and disappeared New Bedford and
Fitchburg's county law libraries. Lawrence, and Hampden have had partial
deaccessionings. This is also part of a global trend of shredding books in
libraries all over the world. Stand guard over your books, because our
cultural history is being shredded. If you do google searches, you will
find libraries all over the world quietly destroying books that we thought
were sitting safely in our libraries. Look at the Wikipedia pages for
Cultural Cleansing, and Lost Libraries. There are other citings (NPR - We
are in a book burning period again <https://tinyurl.com/n9r9pm6>)

Furthermore, digitizing is a Red Herring. Digitizing is NOT considered
archival. This is a direct statement from the director of the Social Law
Library in Boston, which is the oldest, and most important law library in
the country (it is by subscription, it is the library that our supreme
court justices use, but we, the citizens, are allowed only limited use.
Their books are not getting shredded). This statement is confirmed by many
scholarly reports and white papers on this subject. Here is one such:
http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-
the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/, and another; "Why Print
and Electronic Resources Are Essential to the Academic Law Library
<http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1784&context=facpub>"
by Georgetownn University Law Center.

Our Founders meant to have the history of our jurisprudence archived in
many places. Intentional redundancy is an important part of our Founders
plan for national security. On August 24, 1814, the British attacked and
burned Washington DC. They burned the Capital and the White House. Our
first Library of Congress, all 3000 volumes, was burned to ashes. The
seizing of DC by the British happened late in the War of 1812. Early in
1815, after the peace, there was a flurry of law library acts. The
inference is clear. Our Founders realized that we needed to have our
historic law books in many places so that we could recover, if an important
library was lost. The first Massachusetts act creating law libraries, Act
177 was signed into law on March 2, 1815. When our first law libraries were
created, books had been the proven archival method of storing important
information for many hundreds of years. Now fast forward to the present.
The internet is a 20 year experiment. Although it is an ideal medium for
enhancing access to our books and documents, IT IS NOT FIT FOR DUTY as a
method for archiving. Already there are reports of tampering with text
content, when the digital version is the only one left. Not to mention
server crashes, and then there are the intentional deletions of public
records by those who find them politically inconvenient. This has already
happened. The EPA libraries were shut down, and thousands of scientific
research documents were destroyed by the Bush Administration in 2006.
Furthermore, we were contacted by a publisher of a law library newsletter
that goes to recipients around the world. He told us that big legal
publishers lobby behind the scenes to get print libraries destroyed so that
they can then "charge through the nose" for database services, which become
an ongoing citizen expense. He has been reporting on this for 20 years. And
then, when one company is bought by another, certain databases become
innaccessible, or are removed, creating "swiss cheese
<http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1148&context=btlj>"
in the continuity of records. In this, as in many things, systems that have
long been in place that support, democratic stability, and the independence
and self sufficiency of citizens, are being forcibly replaced by systems
that render us dependent.

Generations of stewards of our cultural history have carefully curated, and
loyally handed on, our historic records from one generation to the next,
for two hundred years, for the benefit and security of future generations.
Now, one generation, not even of citizens, but of stewards, have decided
behind closed doors, without consulting the citizens who these books belong
to, that they have a right to destroy access to our history of
jurisprudence, for ALL FUTURE GENERATIONS.

NELLCO - New England Law Library Consortium, has proudly announced their
project to centralize all the law libraries, which means that they are
keeping one copy of every book in one huge storage facility, and destroying
the rest of the copies. They apparently have forgotten the history of why
they were created. Already this idea of redundancy has proven important.
When a law library in Georgia had lost ll its records in the Civil War,
Franklin Law Library, which had retained some of those important Georgia
records, was able to deaccession our copy, and restore it to Georgia. If we
now lose our one lone copy of these books, how will we be able to recover
as our Founders intended?

The public relations story about why the books are being destroyed is "We
need to shred the books to make room for the court services departments
which get use." They have used distorted data to claim that no one uses the
law libraries. This is categorically not true. Franklin Law Library before
it was robbed of all but 15% of its books, was the most used law library
per capita in all of Massachusetts. We have seen this statistic, but we are
being blocked from gaining access to this data. Maria Fournier, Head of the
Court Services Department has used a distorted statistic from ONE MONTH,
the month of January 2017, in a highly dysfunctional temporary location of
the law library, where the internet and computers didn't work most of the
time, and usage had drastically fallen off due to the dysfunction of the
space, in the last month before the law library was to open in its new
space, to indicate that the law library wasn't being used. So of course
they are trying to block the citizens from getting the real statistics. And
by the way, Massachusetts is the only state in the country, where the
Judiciary, The Executive, and the Legislature are all exempt from the
public records law.

The Head Law Library Coordinator for Massachusetts, is also Head of the
Court Service Centers for Massachusetts. She is destroying the citizens law
books (they are "property of the Commonwealth") to make way for court
service centers without any public notice (which the judiciary is not
required to give, having deemed themselves not answerable to the citizens).
To have one person destroying one department that they head to make
provision for the other department that they head is a definite conflict of
interest, which is prohibited by the 1983 Guidelines for the Delivery of
Law Library Services, which  prohibits Law Librarians from acting with a
known conflict of interest.

Furthermore, The Head Law Library Coordinator, Shereice Perry has literally
ordered all the head law librarians for ALL the county law libraries to
refuse to talk to us. Even about things that are clearly part of the public
record, such as, "When did your court service center open?" or "When did
your deaccessioning of books occur?", or "Can we get a complete list of the
books that used to belong to the citizens, before the deaccessionings?" We
are directed to contact Shereice Perry, Head Law Library Coordinator, who
is the one who authorized the shredding of our books. Shereice Perry has
refused to return any of our phone calls.

Through a lot of research about the books that were destroyed, we are
beginning to learn that there are many citizens rights which are clearly
outlined in the older books, that are being obscured or eliminated from the
newer publications.

Court service centers are about helping people fill out bureaucratic forms.
Public law libraries are about helping people educate themselves and gain
an understanding of the laws and legal situations that affect them.

Why destroy the books!? First, in years past, deaccessioned books were
offered back to the public and donated. They were not destroyed. Second,
the idea that it is OK to destroy all but 15% of a 200 year old collection
of books is radical and extreme. Third, one citizen offered to take all the
books, and find new homes for them. He volunteered to get a moving van and
rescue the books. The judiciary refused to return his phone calls for a
week. That was the week that they were busy grinding up our 200 year old
library for 2¢/lb., books that are Our Property. It is as if they were
absolutely determined to destroy the books.

We are three citizens doing this singlehandedly and we are exhausted. I
personally have called every branch of government in Massachusetts for the
last two months, trying to find one independent oversight department of
Massachusetts where we can lodge a complaint and ask that a public process
be conducted before any further deaccessionings and book shreddings occur.
I must have made over 100 phone calls. What I have discovered is that there
is no such branch of government. Our judiciary is acting as a law unto
itself, not answerable to the citizens. Unlike other historic records that
are governed by the Secretary of State's office, which are subject to open
meeting laws, and request forms for permission to destroy historic records,
these historic records contained within our County Law Libraries are
governed under a heirarchical impregnable silo that our juduciary has
become. This is  the chain of command: Chief Justice Gants of the Supreme
Judicial Court, Jonathan Williams, Head Court Administrator Executive
Office of the Trial Courts and Paula Carey Chief Justice of the Trial
Courts, Maria Fournier, Head of Court Services Department, Shereice Perry,
Head Law Library Coordinator, and all individual County Head Law Librarians
under this heirarchy. The head law librarians don't want to destroy the
books, but they are being ordered to by their direct superiors. None of
their direct superiors have any training in professional library science or
archival expertise. This new crop of administrators have all come in since
2012. We have had word that before that, the law libraries had a collegial
supportive culture where people helped each other. Now since these new
department heads have come into power, the atmosphere, we've been told, is
adversarial, hostile, threatening. Law librarians seeking help are ignored.
Their concerns are brushed aside.

I will leave you with these Constitutional Rights which are from the
Massachusetts Declaration of Rights in our Massachusetts Constitution. I
stongly encourage you to read the rest:
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/Constitution

PART THE FIRST A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Art. IV. The people of this commonwealth have the sole and exclusive right
of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent State, and
do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power,
jurisdiction, and right which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them
expressly delegated to the United States of America in Congress assembled.

Art. V. All power residing originally in the people, and being derived from
them, the several magistrates and officers of government vested with
authority, whether legislative, executive, or judicial, are the substitutes
and agents, and are at all times accountable to them.

>From Black's Law Dictionary, 4th Edition:
CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT. A right guaranteed to the citizens by the
Constitution and so guaranteed as to prevent legislative interference
therewith. Delaney v. Plunkett, 146 Ga. 547, 91 S.E. 561, 567, L.R.A.1917D,
926, Ann.Cas.1917E, 685.

I can tell you that after two months of calling every branch of
Massachusetts government that I can think of, I still have found no branch
of government who sees themselves as answerable to protect the Citizens
history of jurisprudence from destruction. What I have experienced instead
is pretty much wholesale bureaucratic obstruction of the Peoples concerns.
I even had one lawyer in the judiciary, who was denying our request for
public records tell me, when I quoted articles 4 and 5 of our Declaration
of Rights, "well that's so etherial". When I mentioned that it was the only
source from which legitimate authority to govern originates, he said, "Well
OK, yah, it Is our constitution…" He also said about John Adams, "well some
guy three hundred years ago couldn't have known about the internet".

Three citizens alone can do a lot, but they can't nearly do it all. I
haven't worked at my own career for two months, and after two months we
still only three citizens. This is not sustainable. I can tell you that I
want my life back. Three citizens can't indefinitely take on the entire
judiciary, and those who are shredding are books know this and are counting
on attrition. Without a great public outcry, we will lose our cultural
heritage. Do we really want to sleepwalk-self-shred our way back to the
stone age? So how do we as a people bring our government back into
conformity with the intent, spirit, and letter of the Massachusetts
Constitution that John Adams wrote for us? Losing all our constitutional
rights is not a sane option. You are part of We The People. Without all of
us we are done. What do you advise?

Sincerely,

Lisa Hoag

On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 4:38 PM, Lisa Hoag <1world4all at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Hidden Tech Folk,
> There will be a Talking Stick Circle on May 15th, to discuss citizen
> concerns about the destruction of most of Franklin Law Library, which
> will be
> facilitated by Lucinda Brown who heads the Restorative Justice Program
> for Franklin County Courthouse. This will be in the afternoon, though
> the exact time has yet to be determined. The purpose will be to gather
> and identify citizen concerns about destruction of our county law
> library.
> We are hoping to have a good number of citizens at this first in a
> series of meetings to address citizen concerns. Would anyone here be
> willing to attend to help us represent the citizens, especially folks
> who live in Franklin County? For this and for my prior email looking
> for citizen stories about use of the law
> library, you may email me here; you may also call me at 544-7894.
>
> Warm Regards,
>
> Lisa
>
> --
> Lisa Hoag Designs
> PO Box 983
> Wendell, MA 01379
> http://www.lisahoagdesigns.com
>



-- 
Lisa Hoag Designs
PO Box 983
Wendell, MA 01379
http://www.lisahoagdesigns.com
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