BDS and Library Technology
The latest iteration of settler-colonial violence against Palestinians by Israel and yesterday’s announced acquisition of Ex Libris by Clarivate raises the question of how Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) could play out in Canadian academic libraries (I’m not qualified to speak on the US landscape). Records Archivist David Staniunas raised the question in a tweet which read: “The Independent says overnight Israeli bombings have destroyed the library of the Islamic University of #Gaza Let me know when the boycott of Ex Libris / ProQuest happens”. The relation of BDS to library technology, for those who don’t know, is because Ex Libris is an Israeli company. In a great thread on the enclosure of publicly-funded university-developed library technology, Roxanne Shirazi noted that “Ex Libris was formed after Hebrew University of Jerusalem commercialized Aleph thru its technology transfer office.”
The BDS movement is modeled after the cultural (including sports) boycott of apartheid South Africa which began in the 1960s, which contributed to the pressure on the South African state to end apartheid in the 1990s. BDS, like all divestment movements, is unpopular among ruling classes because it often involves forgoing profits from investment (as in divestment from the oil industry); the BDS movement against Israel is also bound up with allegations of anti-semitism, for example in the pressure on universities to adopt the IHRA “working definition of antisemitism”, which tries to equate BDS itself with anti-semitism. As a group of Jewish faculty members at the University of Toronto have recently stated:
We add our voices to a growing international movement of Jewish scholars to insist that university policies to combat antisemitism are not used to stifle legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state, or the right to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We recognize that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a legitimate, non-violent form of protest. While not all of us endorse the BDS movement we oppose equating its support with antisemitism. We also are deeply disturbed by the upsurge of antisemitic acts in recent years which display painfully familiar forms of antisemitism.
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions would involve the rejection of contracts with Israeli companies. In a globalized world this has immediate consequences for academic libraries in Canada. In her 2020 article on “Web-Scale Discovery Service Adoption in Canadian Academic Libraries”, Sandra Wong notes that “Ex Libris has few competitors in the LSP and web-scale discovery service market”. Ex Libris (and now Clarivate) owns the Primo Central Web-Scale Discovery platform and knowledge base, the Aleph and Voyager ILSs, and the Alma Library Services Platform. Alma was recently selected as the LSP for (almost) all the OCUL group of libraries in Ontario; University of Toronto recently switched to Alma separately from OCUL; and Alma appears to be the dominant LSP in Canadian academic libraries today.
In addition, the SFX link resolver and article knowledge-base was chosen as the consortial solution by OCUL in 2004, and is (I think) the most widely used link-resolver and KB in Canadian academic libraries.
These products alone constitute a huge chunk of academic library technologies. Add to this the other technologies now under the Clarivate umbrella and a library-technology BDS movement could have some real teeth.
Unfortunately, other than OCUL and other regional consortia, Canadian academic libraries do not have a tradition of national collective action. Perhaps CAUT could be an organization that could help drive some kind of library BDS movement. Getting faculty onside would be another major challenge, as the LSP and link-resolver are ubiquitous and major pieces of the library discovery and access tool-chain. Changing that quickly would be a major disruption to students, faculty, researchers, and library workers. But both of these things are doable.
The major obstacle, I think, would be to convince (pressure, force) library leadership, university administration, and the university’s lawyers that BDS is the proper course of action here. It is hard not to feel some complicity with the Israeli state’s murder of Palestinians - including children - as long as we quietly and uncritically continue to widely license and deploy software from an Israeli company. This - BDS - is a particular kind of power that oppressors understand: threatening the bottom line of racial-capitalist corporations and, I think this is one of those rare occasions when we can actually see the power we might have as library workers to really help effect significant change in the world.
Solidarity to Palestinians.
Free Palestine.
EDIT: Lukas Koster sent me the “ELUNA SC Reflections on Juneteenth”, which suggests that perhaps the Ex Libris Users’ associations could be another way to coordinate a BDS movement.