>> JENNIFER  There is a learner guide created, it is a tool for you to extend your learning on the top ic.
Bring this topic to discussion in your library with your team or partners.
It can be customized so if you'd like to add your own questions or adapt it to work for your efforts do so.
It's really a tool for you to take that learning and take some next steps on this work.
I'm so excited to welcome our presenters for today.
We have Rachel Moran who is the senior research scientist at University of Washington at the center for an informed public.
Welcome, Rachel.
And Kristen Calvert comes to us as the programs and event administrator at the Dallas public library in Texas.
We're so excited to have both of you here.
I'm going to shift us on over and have Rachel get it started.
Welcome.
>> RACHEL: Thank you so much.
You have to excuse me, I have, what my colleagues every been calling a post-election cold, I under a little off but I'm excited to be here.
I'm excited to talk about this topic and excited to hear from Kristen and everyone in the chat.
We will be posing questions as we go along.
Feel free to post anything that you are thinking as we're talking into the chat, and we'll try to bring it into the conversation, either at the end or as we go through.
Thanks for that introduction.
I am Rachel, I'm a senior research sign Tish at center for an informed public.
I often start with this sort of graphic on my slides which an artist kindly did that was describing our election work several years ago.
But I think it aptly sometimes describes the media environment that we find ourselves in, everything feels like it's urgent and on fire and it's very confusing to navigate.
Everyone sort of trying their best but not always getting what they need to.
I think it is opt for a lot of the conversations that we will be having today.
I'm trying to press next slide but it's not -- there we go.
It's always good to start off by thinking about what is trust.
We throw around this word a lot.
But there is a lot of disagreement, we don't always have a shared definition about what we mean.
I know from an academic perspective we don't have a shared definition.
Researchers across different disciplines approach trust differently.
As psychologists think about trust as a predisposition that we might have that we cultivate from our kind of early experiences, Mayning that some people might be more trusting than others.
Or sometimes we say more gullible than others.
Sometimes that trust isn't well placed.
Others, I think, especially economists think about trust as a mechanism for reducing risk.
And sociologists tend to say the same thing.
We can't know everything about the world around us, we sort of have to divide all that knowledge up.
And we have to put trust in others that they share that knowledge back when we need it in an accurate and timely way.
That's a risky decision, it's not 100% sort of bulletproof.
Others look at the socio-demographic factors which we'll talk about, particularly within the U.S. context, when we think about trust and partisanship or polarization that we've seen over trust in institutions.
There's really interesting research that looks at how some countries are more trusting than others.
If more kind of community oriented countries tend to be more trusting, more Ied is particular countries like the U.S., like the U.K. where I'm from are less trusting.
Finally, we should mention that trust is often situationally specific.
Usually I say for this, you know, you trust your mechanic to fix your car but not to take out your appendix.
That trust is bounded in the situation that you are kind of asking for help in, that you need to look to others for.
Even though these are sort of different styles of definition, the one thing they tend to have in common is seeing trust as a relationship.
I think that's something that we will all be thinking a lot about.
Today, I'm sure you will think about in your work, of trust really being these relationships that we build within our community, within our workplace, and how we navigate that.
Sometimes there are tests of the trust, and they can kind of weather and with stand that sort of test.
But other times trust is lost in those relationship, they're lost alongside it.
One thing I like to ask, and feel free to put it in the chat.
How do you know that you're trusted?
Are there specific examples that you think of in your personal life or professional life where someone has entrusted you to do something, can you feel that trusting relationship.
I can think of some in my professional life, I think it is -- staff put in the chat people come back to you for advice.
That repetition of action is a really good example of a relationship of trust.
April, that's great as well, given autonomy, this idea that you are the expert in something is kind of sign of credibility and trust.
And really great things in the chat, people applying the knowledge that you have given them.
There's a body language, there's physical elements of trust that you can tell someone feels comfortable in your presence, indication of their trust.
There's lots of sort of different ways to feel trust in the same way there's lots of different ways to feel distrust.
Might be that it's opposite of what everyone is sort of saying in the chat.
That people won't feel like they can confide in you.
Or that you are feeling a tense body language when you talk to someone that you haven't established that relationship.
What I really want to talk about is two things.
I'm really interested here to hear from Kristen in her presentation and you all in the chat, sort of how these two questions play out in your day to day.
So one, why do we have this sort of crisis of distrust in authoritative information sources.
By authoritative information sources, I mean sort of the traditional information sources that we have tended to look to.
Maybe preinternet.
Traditional print media, even government, science, be aing deemia,  libraries.
These sort of information infrastructure that often exists on a local community develop, it has been disrupted as we think about how the internet came in and swept us all up in a different way of information-seeking.
If that is true F we do have this crisis of distrust, where are people going, what are they putting their trust into.
I really think it is useful thinking about it as a relationship, is that just because your relationship ends doesn't mean that that person stays single forever, they build a new relationship with someone else.
Same thing is true with information seeking that, we would potentially go, we still need to find out the answers to things, we can't live in a bubble, so we have to seek information elsewhere.
We have seen this sort of rise of authoritative media resources, that's what I work into, partisan media sources as filling the gap, as building that trusting relationship when other institutions have been able to do it.
With that, also think about what we can do about it.
I'm sure youal have really good ways of thinking through programming, particularly, Kristen is going to speak on that too, of what we can do to rebuild some of those relationships.
So just as some sort of context, I often present this chart in my work.
I think it is a good sort of grounding.
Every year Gallup, which is sort of organization that polls the public yearly on things to do with media, they ask the same question and have done it since 1972, ask people in general how much do they trust institutions.
This one you see on the screen, also a link in the chat, asks about trust in mass media. 
You don't have to kind of look too hard or kind of spend a lot of time digging into this data to see the downward trend, it is not looking good, people's trust is diminishing.
The thing that we see increase is that section at the bottom where people say they have none at all.
That's quite stark to say, I don't trust them at all.
I think that's quite a provocative statement.
We're in a tough spot.
You can see over the past few years, since the pandemic A bit of up and down as people grapple with what it means to build an information environment for themselves that works for the information that they need.
On the whole it doesn't look good for journalists a lot of my work, I talk to journalists and they are very aware doing a climate in which people are constantly looking elsewhere.
This distrust is not, unfortunately not just about the news media, but extends beyond to different institutions.
As similar poll from Gallup, collated 14 different institutions.
You can see at the bottom they're asking everything from the church, military, Supreme Court, public schools even, television news, organized labor, all of these different institutions.
On the whole people's trust or confidence I think is another good word that we use when we think about trust is diminishing.
People are no longer engaging with some of those institutions, if they had done in the past, or when they have to obviously we can't ignore the government, they're increasingly skeptical of their ability to help.
There's just a couple more here to extend the conversation, obviously coming from be aing deemia,  I care a lot about the science and the trust in science and academia.
Now that is also taking a hit.
This is a poll from the Pugh research center several months ago, basically looking at the same sort of measurements of where the people trust in the institution, whether it has a positive febt on society.
And that unfortunately is diminishing.
People who think there is a mostly positive.
A lot of that has been unfortunately over the pandemic as you can see, people have become more aware of science.
And as science has become polarized, become part of the political conversations as well.
And on the right, maybe a glimmer of hope for us thinking about librarians.
That libraries actually remain, one of the institutions that's been able to weather the storm of distrust better than others.
It tends to sort of remain as one of the more trusted professions alongside interestingly veterinarians, veterinarians and librarians are the most trustworthy professions.
That's not to say that libraries have been immune to the broader distress, or the broader patterns that are driving that distrust.
Poe polarization, the politicization.
This information is from every library institute.
Parents, guardians with children, to ask them about what though think about the library.
And what trust they have in the library to curate appropriate materials.
As you can see, it is actually quite high.
So I always love when I get a chance to sort of be in front of librarians to ask what is going right.
Feel free to put it in the chat, why are libraries, despite some of the hurdles that we'll talk about today, still have that trust, or are faring better than others at least.
We're thinking about being trusted or authoritative.
Interpersonal relationships, that's great, more out in front of the community an lot of other institutions.
We forget institutions are made up of people.
A lot of people maybe don't have interactions but they do with librarians, at the forefront there.
Then there's, you know a lot about neutrality, integration, I like this idea that Taylor put in about a gentle stereotype that the job is virtuous.
We'll talk a little bit about some of the public impressions of libraries and how that maybe plays into these relationships that we have.
Maybe it's this idealization as Jay put in the chat, too.
What is driving this distrust?
I don't think any of this is going to be new to anyone sitting here today.
Obviously within the profession that you are in, but also just having an interest in the topic, unfortunately these are all very real.
I like to start off by just mentioning that even though this is often sort of a small part of what is driving distrust we have to attend to the role of credible critique.
That often our institutions fail in certain ways or don't rep all communities adequately, or serve all communities adequately.
There is a small role there for really legitimate critique that helps us build stronger institutions, and is the feedback that we need to retain those relationships of trust.
We often call it the sort of healthy skepticism.
As we want people to become more media literate that, may be in a way a little bit more distrusting.
But that distrust tends to be a short term effect that leads people to greater relationships of trust in the long run as those institutions improve with feedback.
As we learn more about each other.
As I've mentioned before, we have this sort of increasing polarization within the U.S., and that's linked a lot with this sort of very partisan identity.
A lot of the distrust measurements that we were just seeing in the Pugh and Gallup space, ask people what is their identity.
We see people right-leaning, conservative, tend to have higher levels of distrust in institutions.
There is a marked interest in distrust.
Some of that we attribute to desire information campaigns, this is the big area of my work.
But we have seen just generally sort of like increase in miss information and disinformation.
Targeted at particular institutions whether that was scientific individuals during the pandemic, like Dr. Fauci, or with the book banning campaigns, very much rooted in misinformation and disinformation.
People aren't aware of the content that's in books themselves, they're actively calling for being banned, but just calling for it because it plays into their world few or partisan identity.
A couple of people have put this in the chat, about how we have more access to things than ever.
We hope that that makes us better, that we have more access and more demockery Tization.
What we see is that it leads to disinformation overwhelm and we have to extend more individual resources to get engaged actively with information.
This is not an easy thing to want to do. 
It's far easier to go online and find something that confirms that confirmation bias, what you already thought rather than going to the library and ask a genuine question.
And engage maybe get an answer there.
That challenges you in some way.
And then this last point, something talking about a lot, the lack of relationship building in the individual community levels.
This is maybe note as of the case for librarians, you have personal access to people, just in the nature of your role.
And that we are seeing in other institutions particularly academia and science that we don't have, we're note talking with people all the time, we don't have much public presence.
We don't necessarily build that relationship, people understand our goals and our methods and trust us in that work.
Where do people go when they don't trust traditional sources of information.
Not a hard one, they go online.
We raw huge role for podcasters, providers of information, and trusted providers of information, I often talk about I think we kind of conceptualize the popularity of Joe Rowe began the podcaster wrong.
People distrust the news media and they go to Joe Rowe began.
He's good at trust building, he's leveraged technology and to build audiences that agree with him and has done trust building in a good way.
He benefits from distrust and harnesses trust himself.
We will grapple with that over years to come as we think about the new media influences that take up a lot of attention.
What is the consequence when people go online and don't trust authoritative sources?
As we talked about a second ago, we hope that this increased access to things would give us a little bit more.
Allow things to be easier.
We don't have the informational gate keeping that we have with traditional authoritative sources of information.
Training, ethics, provision of services to individuals, the online environment doesn't need to undertake.
And not only does it need to, some people prefer the information to not have gone through that kind of rigor.
Partially might be that they have this idea that any sort of informational gate keeping is censorship, not giving the true real picture, both sides of everything.
They might think that the institutions have traditionally done this work are elitist.
Might be a fair critique.
But also means that these alternative sources that aren't professionalized in the same way feel more compelling even though they don't have the skills or maybe the resources necessary to provide information that is authoritative.
So because I'm kind of running out of time, I think that Kristen can probably talk more about this.
What can we do about it?
I saw a study where we brought together local journalists, educators and librarians in belling ham, north of Seattle, in Washington State.
And we had a really interesting conversation about trust building thinks that everyone has slightly different resources when it comes to trust building, slightly different role when it comes to the provision of information.
But had been facing many of the same problems of distrust.
And some of those at the extreme where they faced harassment, verbal abuse in libraries, local journalists had felt that, too.
The educators were worried about similar things.
We had a conversation that we shared what we thought was the route forward when it comes to trust building.
This is a key takeaway that we had.
As a librarian you're one pillar in the local information ecosystem and look to others, educators and local librarians and others for support when it comes to trust building.
Some of this is about identifying potential causes for concern in our focus group a lot of the individuals talked about kind of some of the managers information they had seen on local Facebook groups and things like that.
Some of them were quite active community members in those groups and could feed that information to the fellow information providers and giving them a heads up about what people in the local community thought about, talking about and trusting when it came to local information.
Some of it was about transparency, role definition, increasingly the public are not necessarily aware of what journalists and librarians and teachers can and can't do, do or don't do in their role.
Instead, there's this sort of vacuum in which misinformation fills easily.
Some of that is transparency what it means to be a librarian.
What it is that you are striving to do.
That might seem obvious to you but not necessarily at the forefront of public mind anymore.
This next one links back to what we were thinking about, of being not only -- putting yourself in the spaces where some of this misinformation, this distrust is brewing.
Just to give you a heads up about what is there.
And also being a face of community member in those groups is also useful.
Finally what I'll say as we kind of think about heading into a new presidency, a lot of in-built polarization around that, some people just won't change their minds.
And so when we think about within sort of media literacy spaces sometimes we think about identifying what we call the movable middle. 
That's the people who are maybe slightly distrusting but open to having a conversation.
As opposed to trying to change the minds of those people who are really dug in, to a certain identity, to a certain way of thinking.
Maybe just thinking about tailoring resources to the movable middle so we can start building trust more broadly rather than going after that kind of minority of people who aren't necessarily going to change their mind or be open to that relationship.
I'll ends at that.
But there is a lot going on in the chat, I'm excited to dig in.
>> Jennifer: Yes, thank you Rachel.
Really great conversation going on in chat.
I really appreciate folks putting their thoughts there.
You touched on this one question somebody asked why would a patron prefer a worse source.
So the things on Google not being reliable, but the patron said I want that unreliable Google search.
Lots of folks chimed in, some said it's easier to use, it gives them the answers they want to hear, that bias confirmation bias.
It's free.
They don't have to spend time looking for it.
The immediacy of it, no one wants to wait to find their answer.
Can you talk a little bit about what you have seen in terms of --
>> Rachel yes, already really rich discussion in the chat, everyone is on the money with their different responses to this.
What I will also say, sometimes we think that information seeking is about finding the best and the most correct answer.
Sometimes information seeking is a little more selfish.
You want to kind of show that you are smart, you want to show others that you are informed or different.
So those goals are going to be very different.
So that might be what draws you to last authoritative information sources, it proves the point that you were looking for, confirmation bias element.
But it adds to your identity in awith a that is more compelling than the truth which is fairly boring and fairly mundane.
I want to point to the answer in the chat, the cost fallacy.
I think that is incredibly the case.
Maybe something that we have -- 
we saw a lot over Covid when people took very specific entrenched opinions over vaccines in ways that they probably hadn't before.
As adults we don't necessarily take vaccines as often as the childhood batch of vaccines that we take.
The people then make this part of their identity and it feels like there's a fallacy that that's part of who they are, invested in it.
If they were to change their mind the cost is too high.
I think a lot of our relationship building is sort of lowering that cost of changing your mind a bit too, making that kind of having questions about something is always a positive thing.
Might not always lead to you the right answer but it lowers the tone or lowers the bar for being able to change your mind. 
>> Jennifer: That term is definitely new to me.
Learning more.
The other question that jumped out was can we talk about the connection between who is recorded as trustworthy and the ease of trust building.
You talk about Joe Rowe began, seemingly straight white male, rarely are people checking folks in this dome graphic.
It is easy to build trust when people are not questioning a person's credibility in the same way folks who do not fit those demographics are constantly questioned in their credentials, they're dismissed.
>> RACHEL: That's a great point, we think about the difference between trustworthy and trusted.
Because something is trusted doesn't mean that it's trustworthy.
We're seeing that more and more.
Cassandra, your statement speaks a lot to that.
I think one of the big things that we see with social media, and I do a lot of work on social media that looks at an tie vaccine rhetoric, or the role of health and wellness influencers, anti-vaccine.
This provides a route to power social relationship building, one-sided relationship with people online.
It means that we build trust in them that isn't necessarily a situationally specific as it was before, as we talked about at the beginning, means that I get to know this health and wellness influencers, I like the yoga pants though wear or a recipe they share.
Then they share misinformation about sort of medicines or vaccines.
I'm more likely to believe that, because they have that kind of inbuilt relationship.
But it's misused in a sense.
I think it is a good relaneder minder that all of the things that we talk about with relationship building can be used for good and can also be used for bad.
We're seeing high level of success, amongst people who don't have the correct expectation, using the social media and internet to cultivate a personal that could be says a sense of expertise which they don't have or foregoes that entirely and tries to build this para-social relationship to act instead of that credibility.
We have a lot to do getting people back to a space where they attach that trustworthiness to traditional markers of credibility, whether it's professionalism, or moral code, or ethics, experience and resource rather than just being like I like this person.
Or they represent my political views.
>> Jennifer: Very good.
I just wanted to mention somebody shared that they, since October 1, have had a critical thinking book display that includes critical thinking, logic, crowd psychology, and books that fact check common myths and various subjects.
It's been popular, people love that idea.
>> RACHEL: That's great, I like that idea.
>> Jennifer: Talking about social media, on the other hand social media can put users in contact with primary sources and populations that are generally ignored or stereotyped by mainstream media.
We talked about BIPOC news and how people get news that isn't mainstream media, so I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. 
>> RACHEL: That's a good point.
It speaks to someone else on who asked later in the chat about how do you kind of consider what news sources are professional, trustworthy.
And this has been, you know, those assessments are complicated in this media environment.
And the environment where we have seen a diminishing of resources for things like nonEnglish language, immigrant media, and BIPOC media, where they have been forced to either close shop or go online and embrace different formats and use the internet as a platform to get news out to the community.
Which is great.
But downside of that, it complicates our ability to be like you need to look for, if you see the story in the "New York Times" or "washington post" or three or four places it's definitely true.
If you can't it's not.
That's not necessarily the case.
I think what it means is that we have to be a little bit more expansive, how we're asking people to engage in media literacy.
I know people have talked about different methods like the sift method that we use at center for informed public, where we ask people to stop and consider different elements of the information they're reading that, kind of the source credibility and the informational quality and the position presented.
Unfortunately, that is a skill that we have to develop.
It is resource intensive.
It's not something that everyone wants to do. 
It's not something that everyone is doing.
So it's difficult.
I think it complicates having more diverse media environment is in many way as good thing but it does mean that the own us is more on the audience to try and pass through what feels like quality to them.
>> Jennifer: Fantastic.
Other great comments, we can circle back around.
I think we'll shift on over and hear from Kristen's experience in this area.
Keep your questions and comments coming, we really appreciate this kind of sharing and conversation.
It's helping the team learn as whole.
Don't hesitate to chime in there.
Welcome, Kristen, let's move on with your portion.
>> KRISTEN: Hey, everybody, good afternoon, thank to you Rachel, I really feel like I learned a lot and had a lot of questions.
After hearing from her and also really enjoyed seeing everything you were typing in the chat.
Please continue to do that as well.
A little about me before I dive in to my slides, I'm Kristen Calvert, I am our essential library and events administrator for Dallas public library which is a pretty big urban library system.
In a very rode state.
Interesting area to be in, when we talk about things like book bans and things like that for sure.
A very red state.
In my time as library professional I have worked in smaller urban libraries, also in Florida, so another interesting place to work as a librarian at this time.
I've also spent time working with the American library association as like a media literacy stakeholder over the course of trying to figure out how public libraries should engage with media literacy and share that.
A lot of the talking that I'm going to do about different programs and partnerships and things like that, from some of the work I've done with them, I'm excited to share that.
Before we get there, starting how trust is being eroded.
Rachel touched on this a little bit, you were talking about it in the chat, as well.
I was really excited to see those -- that Pugh research, maintaining the trust.
That is so true.
But I think more and more it is a fear of ours, that when we talk about things like book bans and stuff like that, there is erosion of trust for public libraries, libraries of all types.
People, some people are starting to view that as partisan in some sense, we feel like there's a partisan view of it when we see clearly the line that's delineated, people who are asking for censorship in libraries and things like that, that we as information professionals are against.
That all seems to come pretty much from one side of the political spectrum.
So you kind of get that feeling of partisanship maybe if not everybody in a research study says that they feel that way.
And there is an attack on libraries, there's an attack on librarians as information professionals, as being the experts on what should and shouldn't be in libraries, being able to do collection development and things like that.
That in itself erodes trust.
There's a less feeling of at least it feels like when you see the media and you see the attack on folks who are doing the same thing you are doing, maybe some of you that are here, there's an erosion of trust not just coming from them, like the public not trusting us, but the other way around, it's harder to trust the people that you are serving as well.
And that erosion of trust because of policies and things like that, and that's been, I mean, we're talking bad, especially bad in Texas and Florida.
There is a city of granBerry is not far from Dallas B an hour away.
And there's been librarians who are under criminal charges and being investigated and things like that for having books in school libraries.
That all needs to professional exhaustion.
We have in Texas one of the biggest conferences, library conferences in the United States, probably the biggest state conference is in Texas.
And I went to that conference last year and I heard from librarians all across the state.
Our peers saying that some of them had to quit their jobs and go to do something else, take a break for a while because of the way their school district was, how hard it is to get new materials into the library and all of those sorts of things.
That is truly going to cause harm, that sense of trust on both sides, again.
You scare people who are doing their jobs well, for the public, public servants enough they won't continue to do that and that erodes the profession.
I know I'm preaching to the choir but these are the ways that this is happening to some degree.
And finally the lack of media literacy education that we see is another way that trust is eroding.
A lot of this points, the points that Rachel made in her talk, talking about in the chat.
We don't have a stable or required media literacy education when people are in school or anything like that.
Then we're missing these fundamental skills that we need for people to successfully use the internet well or know where to go to get accurate information, know how to disseminate between sources.
All of these factors play together to erode trust.
And that means it's complicated to build trust back.
How do we -- let's talk about building trust.
First of all, it's really a community effort.
And I was talking at an ALA conference a couple of years back about media literacy and how libraries should play a role in it and what that means.
At the end of the conference somebody asked a really good question, something that stuck with me about how do we be that trusted source for people when that trust is being eroded.
We're looking at that, we know that it's not something we can do by ourselves.
It's something that we have to do working with others.
First we really need to take that look at why trust has been eroded and who it's been eroded.
Then build from there.
Make our partners with those folks that need to rebuild that trust too, and help people engage in that place.
Even though there's that partisanship like Rachel showed with the Pugh research, there's quite a bit of trust in the public library as an institution.
If we're talking about who we need to work with, thinking about journalists, we talked about how journalists there's erosion of trust there.
Government institutions, things like that, how do we help facilitate rebuilding those things.
When we -- we have to look at how we do that too.
We talked about those things, but we know that we don't have a good foundation in media literacy skills as a constituent of Americans.
A lot of folks, because of the way Google works, does this exist in echo chambers?
We also have those unregulated algorithms bringing back search results.
Now somebody mentioned the A.I. 
summary at the top of a page which we know as information professionals does not always provide good information.
But not everybody knows that.
They might take it as a factual source themselves.
We know that that's not factual a lot of the time.
We also need to think about where this mistrust comes from.
And a lot of that is stemmed in fear.
We know that whether you are on the red side or the blue side, are you afraid of what the other side is going to do.
That comes from some of these sources where the media has gone, and how do we help people understand how do they get information with helping them kind of take ownership of that fear and step forward through it.
There's a lot of ways to do this.
I think the best, you have to think creatively through some of these things, whether it's programs, partnerships, doing exhibits and displays, somebody talked about great book displays they were doing that were very popular.
For me when I was thinking through how to give this presentation, the idea I kept coming back to and wanting to share with you all, because it goes through a lot of these different elements of partnerships, how to build some of these things, was this event that we had not very long ago which was this August we hosted what we called a unity concert.
We are lucky enough to have a lot of space.
The Dallas public library central library location is the fourth biggest public library building in the country.
So it is 650,000 square feet, eight floors of public space.
We were able to move some things around on the first floor in the middle of August which is very hot in August, and have a rock concert at the library.
We used that as a community engagement opportunity to get people to be able to have opportunities to build relationship srelationships with the media, without different partners, with others, with sources that we felt like they needed to rebuild some trust in.
Leading up to the election.
I'm going to walk through the different elements of this with the idea that even though we are this big urban library system A lot of this can be done in rural spaces based on what partners you have and who you can work with and what kind of resources that you have to put into it.
This idea for me stemmed from when I worked in a small town in Florida as librarian.
We had a community fair at our library.
Where we invited different partners as a part of that.
Different, like, local businesses and things like that.
People were able to interact with them but also have fun at the same time.
That's where this idea came.
From I was able to build on it a few years later in Texas.
So nonpartisan partnerships was a big part of this.
We wanted to leading up to the election, it was August, have an opportunity, and it was also our budget time as a city of Dallas which the library is a part of.
So there are all of these public town halls going on about the budget.
We wanted to give people an opportunity to interact with all of these things.
One of the things we wanted to make sure was some nonpartisan voter sources.
People have less faith in voting systems and that their vote counts, et cetera, that there's election fraud, whatever it is.
Than a few years ago.
We wanted to give people a chance to interact and feel comfortable voting.
I know even when I go vote it doesn't happen often enough that I feel like I am 100% comfortable with the process.
I forgot recently, not this time -- most recent election but I think the primary that I couldn't have my phone on me and I didn't have any pockets.
I had to figure out what was I going to do with my phone.
So just to help people feel more comfortable with the process they may not go through, even to understand how the ballot box works and how you scan your vote and things like that, what you need to do to vote.
One of my very favorite partner groups for things like these when I think about voting is the league of women voters.
There's usually local chapters everywhere.
I work with them in Florida and in Texas.
You should if you don't have their guides in your libraries leading up to elections.
This can be a huge thing to give out to folks for nonpartisan information on local candidates.
Even if that's not available, they also have resources online that you can hook people up with.
So this was also like I said, a chance for us to talk and work through community engagement.
I mention it was a budget on town hall opportunity, people had an opportunity to meet with different city departments that they might be really annoyed and frustrated with.
It's usually not the library thank goodness.
But code, streets, those are ones that people are often mad about in the city of Dallas.
This is a chance that you can come and talk to those people hand in hand, can you find out what different departments do, the importance of them, and engage in that process and understanding your local government.
We also always invite our neighborhood patrol officers with the local Police Department there.
Their job is community engagement.
It's a great opportunity for folks to establish some kind of trust with local police.
We know that's a really hard relationship on a lot of different levels.
It's got to start with a place of trust.
A lot of times where we are, as library professionals, we aren't going to have a lot of control over what the police are doing or what the climate is on that in your city.
Having a place of trust, being able to talk to people 1-on-1, can ultimately be beneficial in those relationships.
And then we also made sure there was some space for local journalists here.
Local media is really important to helping people have trust in media in general.
And we talked about, when Rachel was talking she mentioned you see that slide that had erosion of trust in media.
People feel the most trust with their local journalists it turns out.
Americans who feel a strong sense of connection to their community are more likely to engage with local news.
Again being able to kind of facilitate that connection was very important to us.
At the same time rural areas are less likely to -- more likely, I'm sorry, to be news deserts.
Places that don't have a news media outlet or something like that.
This is where it comes in that people are more likely to get news from uncredible sources.
They're more likely to turn to next door, or Facebook or something like that to get news in areas that have local news outlets.
It is important as possible, to keep local news outlets, going in rural areas as well as help build relationships with them.
Looking at Pugh research, 228 counties are at an elevated risk of becoming news deserts in the next five years.
Most of those watch list counties are located in high poverty areas in the south and midwest.
Then they also are most likely to serve communities with significant African-American, Hispanic and Native American populations.
A lot of correlation between the high risk areas and also areas that are, tend to be underserved to begin with.
Anything you can do to kind of help establish that relationship is important.
That is not always an easy thing to do.
I like to say people don't always come to the things that we know that they need to come to.
Those are the things they may already think they have enough information about.
It is really important for us to find ways to bring this to them, to bring these opportunities to people, this is probably not the best wording but we will be sneaky and trick them into getting the information that they need.
That's what some of this is doing.
We were having this rock concert at the library, kids could have snow cones, miniature horse, all of this fun stuff.
Then we snuck in all of the civic engagement at the same time.
We're celebrating your ability to be involved in the Democratic process, to know what your city is doing.
But we're going to do it under the guise of fun.
So we also wanted to provide educational opportunities with this.
And I am not the biggest supporter always of a traditional panel discussion because, again, when you pose something as a way to sit down and talk about things or hear a lecture they're not always going to come to that kind of stuff.
They may not know that though need it.
We got the opportunity to host this Smithsonian exhibit on bias, "the bias inside us" for free A traveling exhibition, it's been all over the United States.
They love putting this in places that are not traditional museums a lot of populations have bad relationship with museums and some people may not have the money to get in and gain access either.
We were lucky enough to host it for a month.
We had this going on during the unity concert.
It was me trying to get people to come in and learn something under the guise of fun.
So this was a really great opportunity for people to engage in a unique way.
Obviously I know this is not something that is open to everybody, although I do encourage you to look at the Smithsonian institute traveling exhibition page to see about any of those opportunities that might be a possibility for your library.
It doesn't cost anything at all.
Consider if you could host something like this.
If you have the space in your library.
Or use a rec center nearby.
This gave people the chance to really think about their inherent bias and how that might imply to decisions they're making or just who they are and how they walk through the world today.
Then just briefly go through other ideas, I know we want to talk a little bit more and have some more questions before we finish off.
This is a picture from something we did as a community outreach opportunity where we had local journalist group work with people who were coming to the outreach and they created their own newspaper.
Folks who came to it thought through what should go in the news, how it should be placed, created a newspaper then we printed copies of the newspaper and put it in the box and gave them out in the library.
It had a multi faceted purpose, people engaged and cree it a community newspaper which hopefully helps you understand the importance of local news.
Then we were able to put it out and talk about it more while people were walking in the library.
If nothing else hopefully that gets people thinking about what goes in to the news, who makes it, what their priorities are, and all of those things we think about when we talk about media literacy.
We also, and this is a hugely important thing, try to meet people where they are.
This is the banned books tour, 2023.
It went out, all over the United States, to cities and states the people who put this on felt like needed the information.
Obviously it went through Texas and Florida as a couple of their stops.
They connected with Dallas as part of this.
Something that happens to us a lot is people will come and meet with me and say are you okay, how are you doing.
And they're really worried about us being in Texas with all of the fans and the censorship that feels like a lot of attack.
The city of Dallas doesn't feel a lot of that head-on, because we do have, kind of this island of blue is really the best way to describe it in the sea of red.
We're not feeling the attacks.
But we know our neighbors in the areas between Dallas and fort worth, and all around, feel that pretty heavily.
So when this banned books tour reached out we had to think through where can we put this, that it makes sense.
It's not something that we're seeing a lot of need for directly in Dallas.
But when we reached out to other cities with their own library systems nearby, because of the political climate they didn't feel like they could engage with us.
We found an area of Dallas that was -- had some borders that criss-cross pretty heavily with areas that we're experiencing, were experiencing those book bans.
We set it up there.
This was an opportunity where teachers were able to come and get books for their classrooms and things like that.
They work directly with local schools to really have some engagement here.
It's just an example, again, of meeting people where they are.
If you are in a smaller city maybe reaching out to a bigger neighbor to see what resources they have or a way there are partnerships, they can partner with yous as a real opportunity.
Staying in touch with your library neighbors can have a huge impact.
And then another thing we've been able to do is work with pen America quite a bit on different programming opportunities, again Texas is one of those high impact states that they're tar getting.
Something they came out with recently that I wanted to take a moment to share with you, their trusted messenger guidebook.
They have this whole idea for this trusted messenger program.
Because there are a lot of folks are not -- a lot of folks who are coming in your libraries are the ones who probably already trust you.
You maybe are not going to speak to a lot of those people who have extremely biassed views and don't trust the library.
You might get to speak to people who those people trust.
You might be talking to somebody who is going to have a conversation with somebody who is very heavily involved in conspiracy theorys.
You can help them get more comfortable having that conversation.
So the trusted messenger guidebook is a good way to do that.
PEN America is having, in cities all over, workshops whenner they work with people they call trusted messengers.
They mean barbers, and things like that.
People in those types of roles to help teach them how to have conversations with disinformation and misinformation.
Then we also have a disinformation crime scene.
This came from the idea that we hosted a crime scene event and it was just a traditional crime scene event.
People came to it, it was popular and we were like how can we give this a media literacy twist.
The clues don't add up to the crime, it was a sneaky way to teach media literacy skills.
A way to build them.
Trick people into learning media literacy.
That wraps up my part of it with five minutes left.
>> Jennifer: 
Fantastic, great to see you, Kristen, the great work you have been doing with your team and the community's response to it really super exciting to learn about.
There were definitely additional questions and comments, people are sharing resources in chat, reminder that I'll pull all of those great links out and add it to the event page.
I want to touch on a few of the other questions and comments that came through.
I thought this was a really poignant comment, someone said I'm struggling with the idea of putting the burden of re-establishing trust solely on to librarians.
Especially those of us who are part of the marginalized groups being attacked by community members.
It feels like setting reasonable boundaries to protect vulnerable people against targeting or debates about whether they deserve access or equal rights seen as proof of partisanship.
Kristen, I'd like to start with you, if you have thoughts about how maybe within your culture, your team's culture, how you all have been talking about the role of us being the ones to re-establish that trust.
Let's start with you.
>> KRISTEN: It comes back to partnerships for me.
A lot of professional exhaustion comes in there, it is exhausting to feel like you're in that role and you have to build that trust and things like. 
That it makes us want to quit.
At the same time, like, it doesn't just fall on you but it falls on libraries in a lot of ways.
We are still that trusted institution and that's part of why we're here.
Being able to work with those partners and giving them the opportunity and the platform of this neutral space can take some of that burden off of you while you are still able to help be that place for sharing ideas and helping educate and inform the public.
>> Jennifer: Rachel, do you have thoughts on what you have seen and heard in the community around the responsibility being solely on librarians?
>> RACHEL: I agree with what Kristen said about the importance of partnerships.
It helps you kind of being able to have a prewarning system of what is out there, that librarians might need to be concerned about.
We have, we find with academia we struggle with the same thing, the burnout, a lot of our students and our researchers are drawn to this kind of work because of identities that they hold which makes them the most talented best people to be speaking on these topics, but also means that it holds a particular burden for them.
That burnout is very real.
We try and come up with strategies to help us, weather the storms, it's something that I ask when I talk how do you do this.
The resource sharing of the resources and the strategies that we have come up with that help us deescalate those conversations when we face them.
What have we found useful to put people on to a resource that doesn't necessarily require that person to first hand take on that difficult task.
I think it requires that we continue these conversations and build these partnerships across different institutions.
>> Jennifer: Excellent.
Let's see, another really interesting thought around sort of what's our role when there are misinformation or where there's maybe examples of racism or bias in mainstream legacy news sources.
What is the role -- what roles can we play in facilitating, that's really media literacy, critical media literacy.
I'm curious any of the work you've done, maybe Kristen, I don't know if some of the conversations or events dive in to examining legacy media, and then certainly I think this really touches on sort of the scope of news and information that has manifest, thanks to the internet.
But just sort of how do we get to that conversation around critical thinking, around maybe some of those so-called trusted sources.
>> KRISTEN: Yes, I talked a lot about ways to sneak in those lessons, and other things that we're doing.
We also try to make that a part of our basic computer classes and stuff like that.
To just do general media literacy as part of that less on.
If you are handing somebody the keys to the internet and this is how you make your e-mail and this how you get on Facebook and stuff like that, they need to understand what they're looking at as well as the fact that they're now a content creator and have the ability to share things that are not true.
To me that goes hand in hand, it's something that we should generally be doing.
We're working on a series on A.I. as well trying to keep up with that, new thing that's overwhelming to all of us, we're trying to figure out what the role is.
It really, just comes back to trying to make that a piece of that.
And I know it is tiring, but making it a part of your conversations at the reference desk too.
It's really easy to shut something down and say I'm not going to talk about politics, this is my work.
But if you can find a way to bring it back to media literacy instead, you have the opportunity to engage with somebody and maybe help them have a little bit of a breakthrough moment.
>> Jennifer: Wonderful.
Well we are at the top of the hour.
I'm so thrilled by the conversations that have emerged in chat as well as these great presentations.
Thank to you Rachel and Kristin.
As a reminder, if you have additional questions they've provided their contact information, you can reach out.
We'll continue to be working with the center for the informed public so stay tuned for additional resources.
And opportunities coming there.
Thank you both so much, everyone, we are so grateful that you are able to be here.
Reminder that I'll send you an e-mail once everything is posted to the event page and I'll also automatically send you a certificate for attending.
We'll send to you a short survey as you leave, the link is also in the e-mail.
If you need to turn around and get back to the desk know that we really want your feedback through the survey.
If you are watching the recorded version there's a survey at the bottom of the event page there as well.
Thank you all so much.
Everyone have a great rest of your week.
And we'll see you next time online.
Thank you.