San Diego City College Library’s Equity and Outreach Librarian, Marley Rodriquez, and Knights Community Roundtable host Vince Outlaw discuss Marley’s role at City and background, including her Master’s of Library and Information Science from UCLA, the impacts of book bans on the City College Library and the role of the library in addressing student concerns about the spread of misinformation among their college peers, on Monday, April 28, 2025.
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Additional show notes:
- Transforming Library Spaces and Student Engagement at City – Marley Rodriguez – San Diego City College – Sept. 6, 2024
- College Student Profile – San Diego City College: Fall 2023: Ethnicity 78% non-white, 11% LGBTQ+ sexual orientation, 1% non-binary gender identity
- American Library Association reports record number of unique book titles challenged in 2023 – ALA – March 14, 2024
- Students on Media Literacy and How Colleges Can Help, in 6 Charts – Inside Higher Ed – Jan. 15, 2025
- A Need for Digital Resources on Media Literacy for College Students – Inside Higher Ed – Feb. 23, 2025
- SDCC Library Events: Truth or Troll? Mastering the Art of Spotting Fake News (In-Person Workshop) – Wednesday, May 14, 2025, 11:30am – 12:30pm, Location: R209 Classroom
For past episodes of the Knights Community Round Table, visit here.
The Knights Community Round Table and CT Sound are part of City Times Media, award-winning, student-produced digital news, TV news, magazine, radio/podcast and indie film, all on one platform at San Diego City College. CTM offers hands-on experience for students using new and emerging technologies in state-of-the-art facilities.
To read more, visit SDCityTimes.com.
Transcript:
Vince Outlaw 0:00
City Times Sound presents the Knights Community Roundtable. In this interview based program, students engage with community leaders, college staff and fellow students to discuss topics that matter to us all.
Vince Outlaw 0:11
Welcome to the Knights Community Roundtable on City Times Sound where your voice is heard. I’m your host, Vince Outlaw. Today we’re joined by San Diego City College Library’s Equity and Outreach Librarian, Marley Rodriguez, to discuss the impacts of book bans on the City College Library and the role of the library in addressing student concerns about the spread of misinformation among their college peers. Welcome to the Knights Community Roundtable, Marley.
Marley Rodriguez 0:37
Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.
Vince Outlaw 0:40
Can you tell us a little about a bit about your responsibilities as the outreach and equity librarian? Yeah, sure.
Marley Rodriguez 0:45
So I was just hired last summer, in the summer of 2024 and my position was brand new. It’s created just in the last couple years, and we’re really excited to have this position. So as the equity and outreach librarian, I do a lot of everything, as do all of the librarians who work at San Diego City College. So we do things from reference at the reference desk at the library, answering students questions about their research needs. We teach information literacy sections or classes. We also teach library instruction sessions for individual classes. We do Collection Management and Development for all of the books, magazines, periodicals, textbooks that you see at the library. And then my role is a little specific in that I plan and manage all of the events and programming at the City College Library. So I do have a really fun job in that, in that sense, that I get to plan different events, engage the City College community in fun and exciting ways, while also promoting all of the different resources that the library has. And while the equity piece, I think every college librarian definitely plays a little bit of a role in we’re all very conscious of making sure our resources are accessible and equitable to all the students. My role is a little bit more involved in that, where I kind of act as a liaison to diversity, equity and inclusion issues on campus. So I make I take some extra steps to make sure that the library is equitable to all the students.
Vince Outlaw 2:20
And what are some of your qualifications for that job, or your experience in that since you were just hired last year?
Marley Rodriguez 2:27
Yeah, sure, so, I just graduated last year from UCLA with a master’s in library and information science. That is a degree required to be a librarian in any library, a school library, a public library, an academic library, to be a librarian, you need an MLIS degree. So I just graduated with that last summer, and previously, I was working in different academic libraries. Since I was 19, I went to community college up in Menifee, Mount San Jacinto Community College, and I worked at the library there for a year, and that is where I fell in love with academic libraries and working with the librarians there. So since then, I worked at UCLA library. While I was a student there, I did internships for Cal State, Long Beach library, Columbia libraries, so I’ve worked in various different academic libraries doing kind of what I’m doing now, right? Reference, instruction and outreach, excellent.
Vince Outlaw 3:24
So let’s talk a little bit about the subject of book bans. Yeah. So the American Library Association reported a 65% increase in challenges of unique book titles in 2023 compared to 2022 47% of those targeted books involved LGBTQIA plus and BIPOC individuals, which potentially impacts like 78% of the San Diego City College student population. According to our fall 2023 college student profile has the City College Library had requests to ban or limit certain titles available to students?
Marley Rodriguez 4:04
That is a great question. We have been very fortunate that we have not had any requests to censor, censor any materials or ban any books that we have at the library. So yes, we have not had any of those types of issues. I would like to knock on wood, because I don’t want to bring it to us by putting it out there. But yeah, we haven’t had any issues since I’ve been here. And as far as I know, with at least within the last you know, since the pandemic, since we came back from the pandemic, I don’t believe there’s been any issues before that. I’m not 100% sure I haven’t heard of any challenge or bannings happening since the history of the library, but we, we might get into this a little bit more, but I will say it is more prevalent, I think, in public libraries.
Vince Outlaw 4:51
Yeah, so there that, that’s a good kind of intro that there, there’s, do you see a correlation in that rise in between in public school library titles that are being targeted and for school libraries.
Marley Rodriguez 5:07
Yeah. So I think one of the biggest differences in book bannings in libraries is who the library is serving what communities they serve. Right? So public libraries serve the entire community that they’re in the neighborhood, all of the people in the neighborhood, and a lot of the times that has to do with children. And so children that come to the library might be looking at books that the public library has chosen to put out, and some of their parents might not be happy with the titles that the library has selected. So in comparison with that, to academic libraries, academic libraries are really for the students here, and for the most part, I would say the students at City College and at all of the other universities and colleges in the US are over the age of 18, right? We’re all legal adults, and so our parents don’t have as much of a say in our lives. So you don’t really find that books are being challenged because of the parental forces, right? We all kind of agree that we’re all adults and get to read what we want and read what we don’t want to read. So I think that’s a little where the barrier or the gap in challenges comes in. So does the library
Vince Outlaw 6:27
have a formal definition of what a book ban is? You talked about? You seem to talk about censorship versus book ban. The difference between those.
Marley Rodriguez 6:38
I think book banning is when it actually is removed from the collection, right? It’s actually officially banned from that library, and then censorship, or a challenge is, I think, when the book has received some kind of pushback, right? It’s the beginning process of a book ban. It’s when someone you know, raises the awareness that I don’t really like this title or the subjects that are in this title, so I’m going to challenge it, or attempt to censor it, and then attempt to ban it. So I think banning it is that final stage when it is actually removed from the library’s collections.
Vince Outlaw 7:17
Does the city library or the Community College Library have books that are not banned, not censored, but separate, like separate collections for things that maybe fall under some of the the banners of that people have been using to ban books. Yeah,
Marley Rodriguez 7:38
so librarians tend to be very anti censorship, right, anti book banning. We’re pro intellectual freedom and believe that people should be able to write about and read about what they want to read. And so we often promote books in our collections that have been challenged or banned before in other libraries. So last year for Banned Books Week, which falls sometime in the fall, around October or September, ALA, which is the American Library Association, hosts a banned book week. And last year for Banned Books Week, we highlighted different titles at City College Library on our social media that have been challenged or banned in the past. So I can pull up some examples of those. But titles like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bluest Eye, titles like those kind of classics that feature some kind of content that people tend to not agree with.
Vince Outlaw 8:39
So maybe that’s a it’s a good time to tell us what the criteria for books that come into the city college library is, yeah.
Marley Rodriguez 8:47
So we actually have a collection management policy that we worked on, or that librarians, previously, to me, working here, have worked on, and we’re looking to update that policy, actually to incorporate band or book banning and book challenging. So per our collection management guidelines, we collect books that are relevant to the curriculum here at City College. So we take a look at the classes that are being taught, the subjects that are being talked about in those classes, and we build the library collection based on those topics and subjects. So for example, like The Handmaid’s Tale might have been taught in an English 205 class here, and that is why we have it in the library’s collection. So we do collect based on the curriculum, and then we’re also leaning into collecting a little bit more towards popular titles, so things that you might see more often at a public library, but we’re just looking to get students at City College interested in reading. So anything that they’re interested in reading we are trying to collect as well. So
Vince Outlaw 9:58
Is there anything that student. Students should know or learn as they’re beginning to be, the adults in the community and the people that are maybe looking at public libraries more that they should be thinking about in this area as their role in this whole area, whether it’s advocating for banned books or or not, or you know, what that should they be thinking about on the bigger issues? Yeah,
Marley Rodriguez 10:30
on the bigger scale, I mean, censorship and book banning is really taking away the power of knowledge and information. So if we lived in a world where all of the books that people wanted to ban were banned, we would lack information on perspectives different from ours, right? Like LGBTQ plus perspectives, bipoc perspectives, people that have been abused their perspectives, right? So those are some of the themes that tend to be challenged the most, and so if we lived in that world, then those people and those perspectives that continue to exist would just not be talked about and not be known to people. So then we would lack knowledge of how to interact with these people and how to treat these people and empathy towards them, right? So on a bigger scale, lacking that kind of knowledge is really detrimental to us as a society, to play, to be in community with one another, right? So that’s the important part of I think, reading books, and especially reading the books that are challenged because the books are challenged because people don’t want other people to interact with that community. But I think that we should interact with these communities, and we should pay attention to them. So, yeah, on a bigger scale, going to your library and picking out books that have been challenged before and reading them, seeing what the hype is all about, right? Like there, there’s people talking about these books for a reason. So if you pick them up and read them and you find that you gain a new perspective on a certain aspect of life, then that’s wonderful. That’s the goal of reading, right? Yeah, this
Vince Outlaw 12:18
is sort of a related but this is kind of in my own, own realm of interaction with people who say there should be no sexually explicit they use that, that particular term, no sexually explicit books in at least public libraries, I think they’re they’re talking about are either elementary school or anything like that. And so they, there seems to be a big bucket for sexually explicit that includes some of the things you were just talking about, about abuse and things like that,
Marley Rodriguez 12:48
right? You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, so I just took, before I graduated, I took a YA literature class at UCLA, where we read young adult books and talked about some of the content that was in them, and a lot of the times this content that is labeled as a sexually explicit is content that is trying to bring awareness to perspectives that children and young adults are going through right like unfortunately, there are children that are sexually abused and there are LGBTQ teens trying to find out who they are, and by reading books where they can see themselves and their perspectives in them is really important for them, healing or finding their own identity. So a lot of the times when those books are labeled as sexually explicit, the nuance is really taken out of that, where it might be talking about an issue that is really important to some people.
Vince Outlaw 13:45
Okay, before we shift gears, is there anything in this area of book banning that we haven’t talked about or that you think might be of use to students or others?
Marley Rodriguez 13:58
I don’t know if I mentioned this already, or I touched on it, but the City College Library here is working on a challenge policy. As we enter the times of this administration and this presidential administration, we are working on a challenge policy and a book banning policy in case we do get book challenges that come into our library, because, like you said, we have seen an increase in book bannings and challenges, not just in public libraries and academic libraries as well. So City College Library does want to be prepared,
Vince Outlaw 14:34
just in case that does happen, and what’s the status of that development.
Marley Rodriguez 14:38
So it’s in progress. Hopefully we will have the policy set in stone by the fall of this year.
Vince Outlaw 14:45
and who’s heading that up?
Marley Rodriguez 14:47
Yeah, so at City College Library, we currently have four librarians, and we’re had some we’re having and had some retirements as well. So currently, the. Department chair and the cataloging librarian, Leann Mulholland, is working on the challenge policy in conjunction with myself and the other librarians at City College.
Vince Outlaw 15:08
Great. Yeah, okay, well, thank you for that. I want to shift gears into another subject that really seems to impact students here at City College, and it’s news literacy, also known as media literacy, maybe in a library context, it’s called information literacy, and you may have some other other terms for it, but 62% of two and four year college students express some or a lot of concern about the spread of information among their peer group, according to an Inside Higher Ed student, Student Voice Flash Survey from December of 2024, so it seems pretty, you know, recent What do you hear from students about concerns regarding the spread of information or combating it? Yeah,
Marley Rodriguez 15:57
I think it varies all of the time. We work really hard at the library to offer spaces for students to delve into the subject of information literacy. So what I hear from students is that sometimes they are not sure where to get information from, whether it be for their classes, where they need reliable and credible sources, or in their day to day life, when they’re just looking for information on the internet. Nowadays, with all of the social media and all of the news outlets that are out there, it is incredibly hard to find credible sources and to distinguish what a credible and non credible source is, right? So I find that students, and to no fault of their own right, sometimes lack the skills that you need to be able to distinguish those sources, and the library is the perfect place, I think, to really develop those skills so we can distinguish those types of information and sources. Great.
Vince Outlaw 16:59
So tell me a little bit then about what the library offers here at City College for students that may have questions about even particular sources or or even particular stories, how they should be thinking about the information that they come across, whether, as you said, it’s In in books, or for, you know, something, a research thing, or probably more likely. And what I’m concerned of is this news literacy, being literate. What are some of the things that the City College Library does to help with that?
Marley Rodriguez 17:35
Yeah, so I would say that I touching back on what I said earlier, that librarians have to get an MLAs degree to become a librarian, and so that kind of, I think, puts us at the forefront of information literacy and making us information experts, right? So the City College Library offers library instruction sessions that are taught to an entire class, so students usually will go come in with their professor who booked the session through our website. And in those sessions, we touch on evaluating resources for credibility, and we also touch on looking in our databases to find peer reviewed articles and books, right? But if students are really interested in becoming information literate and gaining those skills to better develop their news literacy skills, we also offer drop in workshops that happen each semester, and one of the workshops is new this year, and is titled truth or troll. And so that is the workshop where students can really start to develop those skills to parse out credible information and non credible information in news, on the internet, on social media, in all of those sources that they see in their day to day life, right? So it’s not just looking at library resources in the truth or true workshop, we really get into your everyday information resources.
Vince Outlaw 19:08
So are there student needs in information literacy or news literacy that are particular to the SDCC student body, which includes in multilingual students, bi national students, as we discussed before, a large non white majority are or other, you know, things that impact what the library does. Or in general, News Literacy. I’m thinking one of the things that pops into my head, is over the last election, there was a lot of discussion about how Spanish language social media had a and I don’t know how true or not this is, because I’m not a, you know, a big reader or listener of social media in Spanish. Language, but that there was lots of misinformation, even though there was a everywhere else. And I don’t want to get caught into some trope of this is, you know, a Spanish language problem as opposed to the general problem. But I’m wondering if there, if you’ve come across or if you know of specific things for our student body, yeah, you know, that’s a special student body than would be at some other school in the Midwest. Yeah, that’s
Marley Rodriguez 20:25
a great question. I think as far as the skill set that students are developing or need to develop, regarding information literacy, is really the same across cultures here at City College, so in the workshop, if we talk about, you know, how to distinguish a credible source from a non credible source, you should be able to take that and use it and apply it to Spanish speaking media or Spanish language media as well, right? So it the the skills that we have students develop are cross cultural, but I do think in particular to San Diego City College and the student population here. There’s a lot of misinformation about different people and cultures in San Diego, right? We live so close to the border that there are, there is misinformation on what is happening at the border, right? So we do try to talk about these new sources that are close to home, and differentiating between credible and non credible sources within those topics that are close to home. Okay,
Vince Outlaw 21:24
yeah, so the this Truth or Troll event is coming up. Can you just tell us once more kind of what people will learn? It’s called Truth or troll mastering the art of spotting fake news, and it’s on the San Diego City College Library events site, which we’ll put a link to and tell us a little bit about it. When, where, how people sign up for it,
Marley Rodriguez 21:48
sure. Yeah. So we ran these information literacy workshops twice per semester, once online, synchronously on Zoom, and then we’re running them again coming up. Actually, this week is scholarly showdown, the first of the series, and those are going to be in person. So truth or troll, that workshop is happening on Wednesday, May 14, at 11:30am in the library, in our instruction classroom. And in that session, students are going to learn how to evaluate resources for credibility. So we go over some of the ways that you can do that with methods such as a crap method. Crap is an acronym that stands for different words that help you remember how to evaluate a source for credibility. So we talk about the crap method, and then students will get a chance to look at selected resources that we have picked out and try to figure out how credible they are. So it is really great hands on workshop where students get to develop those skills to spot the fake news or spot non credible information.
Vince Outlaw 22:58
And do people have to sign up ahead of time? Or what’s the what’s How do they do this? So
Marley Rodriguez 23:04
the in person workshops are completely drop in, so feel free to come into the library Wednesday, May 14, at 1130 and just come right on into our 209 which is our library instruction classroom. And yes, you do not have to sign up. And we also have an incentive going, where, if you attend all three workshops, you will be entered for a chance to win $100 campus bookstore gift card. So keep that in mind. Like I said, the series is starting again this Wednesday, April 30, and it will be that for the next three weeks, and if you attend all three you get entered for that chance to win the gift card.
Vince Outlaw 23:40
Great. Any other things that we haven’t talked about in this news literacy that come to mind for you or for our students?
Marley Rodriguez 23:49
I don’t think so. Yeah, I think we covered everything. Okay, great.
Vince Outlaw 23:52
Well, I really appreciate you coming and talking to us about this, and good luck with the upcoming sessions and and again. Thank you for coming to City Times Sound.
Marley Rodriguez 24:03
Thank you so much for having me.
Vince Outlaw 24:05
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