♪♪♪ - Founded at the dawn of California statehood in 1850.

The California State Library is more than just a repository of books and documents.

It's a living archive of our shared history.

Joining us today is Greg Lucas, California State Librarian.

Greg, welcome to the show.

- Thanks, Scott.

- The question that is just completely top of mind is this, what is the California State Library?

- Well, it's a lot of different things.

I explain to people that there's kind of an internal function and an external function.

Internally, we are responsible for making sure the state of California as all of the databases, all of the online research that our biologists and lawyers and wildlife managers need to successfully execute the state's policies.

And externally, we provide grants to local public libraries.

Sadly, a large chunk of that money has come in the past from the federal government and is likely not to continue coming under the current administration.

- So the, the library itself, I know that there's a, a physical building of it, but it sounds a little bit more amorphous that, is it only in one location?

Is it throughout the state of California?

I'm just trying to figure out how I, as the average citizen, whether I'm in Sacramento or San Diego, what's my... what's my access point?

- Well, that's funny that you say that.

I mean, when I got this job, I was appointed by Jerry Brown 11 years ago.

I guess I was bragging to my daughter about all the amazing stuff that we have at the state library.

And I said, you know, and if you come to our reading room between 9:30 and 4:30 in the afternoon, like, we'll, we'll bring it out and you can look at it.

And, she's looking at me like, are you kidding?

Like, that's not access.

And so we've spent -- so yes, there's two physical buildings in Sacramento, and there's an older building.

And so I'm in that building with the other antiques.

And then there's a more modern building across the street where a lot of the physical materials we're in charge of are kept.

But we've made a really conscious effort to make things more accessible digitally through our website.

'cause it doesn't, like, it's not our library.

Like it's, it's your library.

It's California's library.

- Well, you talk about some of the cool stuff that the library has in it.

Give us just a taste of that, because for many of us, we know that it exists.

We've heard the name, but, but we don't know what's inside of it.

So, so what is it we're missing out on?

- Well, where to begin?

I -- because I'm kind of weird.

I...

I think one of the most extraordinary things we have is Tiburcio Vasquez's Mustache.

And Tiburcio Vasquez was kind of a thug criminal of the 19th century and smart guy.

He is about to be hanged.

And so the night before, he gives interviews to the LA Times and the Chronicle about how he's a victim and he's oppressed and everything else.

And so somehow I don't -- I really should figure out what the story is, but somehow we got part of the rope that hanged him, a lovely photo of him, and then there's an envelope where you open the envelope and pulled out, and it's like, it's like the guy's mustache!

- His mustache!

- Yeah.

And it's sort of like, okay, why did we keep that?

Like, why, why?

There was somebody on the scene who said, you know, we should keep Tiburcios mustache for posterity.

But there's other extraordinary things like, so California owns a Shakespeare first Folio.

- Really?

- And I guarantee you, it's the only place where you can walk in the door and say, “Hey, I wanna look at my Shakespeare first Folio,” and we'll bring it out to you - Really?

- We'll hover, you know... - Of course, of course.

- But we'll bring it out to you.

And we have one, there's another -- we have a -- there's a second copy actually that's in pieces, and there's a page, I wanna say it's Macbeth.

But so, you know, like on old books, there's, there's always big fat margins right?

Around everything.

And in the bottom margin on this page from Macbeth, there's a series of handwritten letter Ys, which they've carbon dated or whatever, to about a hundred years after the book came out, or, or The Folio was first published.

- Sure.

And so, what I love about that is, okay, how did that happen?

Right?

There must have been a kid, like he's in school and he's, he's gotta practice his handwriting.

Right?

And so the, the, the big old fat margin at the bottom of the page is sticking out from a pile of books.

And he is just draws his Ys on there, - Like all the rest of us kids, right?

- We have Audubon's books or Birds of America.

There's about 150 copies of those left in the world.

I think the last one sold for $15 million.

And it's an extraordinary, I I think of it more as a piece of art, because each page of each species of bird is the, the correct size of the bird.

And, and beautifully painted.

Sadly, I didn't know this before I became the state librarian, but every one of those birds was killed and posed with wire.

- Oh, really?

- So it's not like we were like looking at them in the wild and sketching them.

Right?

But, you know, Princeton has been spending something, some enormous amount of money to bring back one copy of that after it was like destroyed by rain or flooding or something like that.

And those, those are just kind of the - - It almost sounds like, like you guys are kind of a more distinguished version of Ripley's Believe it or Not, in some ways.

- Well, I'll tell you, I've walked through the stacks, you know, for like 11 years and some incredible stuff laying -- so one of the librarians found an original copy of Dewey's Decimal system.

There's only 200 of 'em in the world.

It was laying behind a line of books.

I found one, it was speeches of people about to be executed from 1654 in Europe.

- Really?

- And it's like, what the hell is this doing?

Like, lying on the shelf.

Shouldn't this be like in the vault or something like that?

- So, so you have this corpus of all of these amazing items.

Some, some of them mainstream, some of them a little bit odd, like the mustache and things like that.

How does the California State Library stay connected to a... an ever younger growing population?

Okay.

Whose main way of getting information and consuming it is on their phones, obviously.

But how, what is it that you guys are doing to remain relevant so that that way the tie to the past is connected to the future that these kids live in?

- Well, we try and make -- primarily right?

It's making things more accessible.

So if, if something interests you, right?

Like when we post something on social media, right?

It's like, Hey, that's really cool.

You can go access it.

You, you don't have to go far.

You can, you can access it from your phone.

And I think also we're trying to pay more attention than we have in the past to what users are looking for.

I mean, so beyond all the kind of crazy, like Ripley's Believe It or Not stuff - Right.

- I mean, we also have like every publication that's been published by the state of California, we're a federal depository library, which means they send us all of their publications, like the congressional record and things like that.

And so part of what we've been doing is making sure we have all of it.

If you wanna see it, it's all right here.

So legislation, right?

California legislation.

Most places have it only going back to 1864.

And so we've been working to make sure we have everything from 1850 to 1864, so that we've got a complete run from 1850 to 2025.

- What's magical about 1864 as opposed to... - I don't know.

I don't know.

I think it must have been some kind of shift maybe in how they took care of it, or maybe they started printing them as opposed to doing it by hand.

I'm not entirely sure.

- Now, now are, are you, as the California state librarian part of like, you know, this small like community almost like, you know, people with robes, like the library of the guy who's or gal who runs the library of congress - I can't believe you're gonna make me confess to this on television.

[ Laughs ] - So it is a secret cult.

- Theyll throw me out of the secret club.

- So it is a secret cult!

- So tell - I mean - how do you, do you all like hang out together?

Do you communicate, do you share items?

What, what's the connection?

- Well, there's every state and several of the territories in the US has a state librarian.

And so there'll be conferences with them.

It's, it's different states have different structures.

So in California, I report to the governor in other states, the state library is a division within the Department of Education, or like in California, right?

The archives are part of the Secretary of State's office.

And so the different structures in different states limit [ Clears throat ] what state librarians can do, right?

So, so for example, I'm the state librarian in a state where I'm part of the Secretary of State's office, and I come up with, here's what we need, right?

We wanna digitize all these things, make more, make things more accessible, easier to find by using AI.

And we send our budget request up the food chain right?

To the head of the Secretary of State's office, and they're all about elections and voting.

So we don't get the resources we need necessarily to help modernize and share what we've got.

- Well, well -- - So that's what can happen in other states.

- Okay.

Well, well let me ask you this.

So you say that you may not always get the resources that you need to do some of the more visionary things we're located here in Sacramento.

- Go ahead.

- Okay.

We're located here in Sacramento.

We're 90 miles away from the Silicon Valley, and which effectively means that we're 90 miles away from the heart of the new AI revolution.

Have any of those folks contacted you all?

Are there any partnerships that you've got going on with the AI folks?

Because they are all about consuming content all the time?

- Yeah, there's a, there's tons of opportunities for us at the state library and the state of California generally to make the information that we have more easily accessible and more findable through partnerships with AI and using things like they call 'em smart tags, was what I, I saw in something I was reading the other day.

But, so I mean, we have the ability now to link like all kinds of disparate information.

Like you can take the weather satellite that UC Davis has, you can take the material that comes from that.

You can connect it to letters and diary entries.

We have from the 1860s about rainfall and flooding.

You connect that to what Cal Fire has, and you have an incredible database that can help you kind of anticipate fires, right, for example.

- Sure.

- I mean, there's all kinds of opportunities, but, I mean, it's not a... a knock on any particular administration.

It's just government tends to walk slowly into change.

- Right.

- Like any large, you know, even business.

- Right, right.

- Any large bureaucracy.

- Well, you talk about walking slowly into change.

One of the things that, that, that comes up about libraries, which are typically associated with lots of material, but repositories of books, information.

Over the past few years, there's been a lot of controversy about books and what books should be available to the public and which ones shouldn't, and all that with freedom of speech.

What do you think is the role of libraries as protectors or defenders of access and speech itself?

Or is there a role?

- Well, I think libraries defacto play a role by providing information for the communities they serve.

Now, so if that's, if that's your mission, then there has to be at least one book on every - in every library that's of interest to one person.

- That's part of the goal.

- Sure.

- And I think the flip side of that...

I'm sort of a, my father would say a contrarian, but flip side of that is there ought to be at least one book that's gonna make me crazy, right?

- Sure.

- That it's there on the shelf.

And I, you know, I think people who talk about, you know, banning books and taking books off the shelves, I, I find it a little bit insulting because libraries are run by people that have like a degree in library sciences.

They're trained to do this work, right.

To determine what's an appropriate, you know, book for appropriate age levels.

And, and also, you know, in school libraries where a lot of the book banning takes place.

If my parents were to, to say they didn't want me to read James Joyce, which would've been killer, right?

If they had done that.

But if they called up the school right, and said, “Hey, Greg, I don't want -- we don't want him reading James Joyce,” the... the person types that in.

And I'm never gonna read James Joyce, what's -- what is not acceptable in the United States of America where the First Amendment says we have freedom of speech and freedom of expression is where my, my folks call up and say, we don't want any kids to read James Joyce because we don't like it.

That's not... that's not... that's not what we stand for as a country.

And that's not what the law says is how we're supposed to conduct ourselves.

- So... so what do you make of the efforts that are currently talked about, about politics and elected officials inserting themselves more into the operations of libraries themselves?

I mean, currently the current administration caused a little bit of a rumble because as part of its sort of audit, DOGE, I guess, of all federal government agencies they wanted to step into and, and look into the Library of Congress.

And there was a bunch of conversation in the country about whether or not that's appropriate.

What's your view in terms of where it is that politics stops and intellectual freedom starts?

[ Laughs ] - Well, as they say in politics, that's a terrific question.

Unlike politics, I won't be wheeling off to the left.

I will try and answer your question, but not after I filibuster for a bit first.

Local public libraries are, 95% of their funding comes from the city or the county that they're located in.

There's a board of supervisors that's responsible for the budget of a county.

There's a city council that does the budget for the city, and there's decisions that they have to make about what's the top priority, what's the, like in management, right?

Or leadership, what's the most important thing to do right now?

Like what -- there's only a finite amount of money.

We've got all these different demands, what do we do with that?

And that's kind of where I see it ending.

I mean, you have a library director who runs the library for you.

And I think that the function of government is sort of, okay, you know, we can only provide you with 80% of the money you need.

We can give you 90%.

We can do this at the federal level.

I think, I mean the incident you're talking about at the Library of Congress, I mean, the excuse that was given for the dismissal of the first woman, the first African American to be the librarian of Congress who got an email at 6:00 PM Right?

That was, that was the kiss off that, that she got after nine year -- nine or 10 years of service there.

I mean, that -- the statement they made was that, “oh, well, you know, she's helping, she's too woke or too, you know, into diversity and.... and putting books on the shelves that, that are inappropriate for little kids.” Well, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the largest library on the face of the earth does.

It's a research library.

It doesn't have a... doesn't have a damn thing to do with local public libraries.

And so it's... it's just kind of in my judgment, I mean, it's an excuse or it's an effort to add control.

- Hmm.

- Right?

To sort of muzzle.

Right.

Something that may or may not be, well, I think I'll stop there.

- Well let, let's stay with the thread of control.

Another concern about how control manifests itself is through misinformation.

Libraries defacto contain information and it's information that may have a point of view or a perspective or just be factual in nature, but it's information itself.

You are a former journalist.

It used to be with the San Francisco Chronicle covering politics.

Correct?

- A journalist is a strong word for working for the Chronicle.

[ Laughs ] You know, our motto was, “if it's news, it's news to us.” - It's news -- [ both laugh ] - Clearly a subscriber.

Yeah, - Yeah.

Clearly, clearly.

What, as you think about the era that we're in and the institution that you run and the other institutions that are similar to yours, which are repositories of information that people come in with, the assumption that what they're going to be able to access there is... it is what it is, whatever that may be.

But we live in an area -- era and we talked about AI earlier of deep fakes and misinformation and manipulation.

What's your view as to the... the responsibility that all of us have to support institutions like the California State Library or other libraries in order to be at some level a bulwark against misinformation and by extension manipulation?

- Yeah, I think more of our responsibility is to help kids in particular create critical thinking skills.

- Ah... - And it's not terribly complicated.

There's a professor outta Stanford and you could put all of his, like the five things to do for critical thinking On like one bookmark, which I have seen.

And it's, it's kinda like what a copy editor used to do at... at newspapers and things like that.

Is this true?

Right.

So the ability to understand that Greg's kooky blog, just because it's at the top of the search right, isn't quite as reliable as the the New York Times, right?

So it is -- and those sorts of skills, libraries can help do that.

But that's a thing that has to happen in schools because it has to be something that- it has to -- you have to create that habit.

And it's easier to create habits when, when you're a kid.

The second part of it is, and, and we're doing things around this at the library, is, alright, well let's just lay the source material out there.

Like, we're not going to tell you this is a trustworthy source.

It's like, so we're redoing the page on our website that has all of California's governors.

And so instead of us writing, you know, a quick biographical sketch or something, it's all gonna be in their own words.

And you can make the judgment.

So if you wanna learn about Peter Burnett, who is California's first governor and took some time in his inaugural speech to encourage Californians to scalp Indians, 'cause the state of California would pay them money if they did so.

- You're kidding.

- Or Earl Warren, right.

You know, you can look and see who these people are in their own words.

So we're not part of it.

We're just putting the information out there for you.

And I think...

I think that's gotta be, - Come on.

- Well you and I could go to our phones and look at the stuff that interests us and the algorithms, make sure that we keep getting more of the stuff that interests us and never have any exposure to other points of view than the ones that we choose to - right - Experience ourselves.

- Doesn't that worry you?

- Profoundly!

The answer isn't for me to say that you're looking at the wrong stuff.

I think there's kind of a first step, which is I gotta make you curious about what some of the other stuff out there is.

And if you become curious, then we've gotta put out information that, it's like this... this is... this is them in their own words.

We didn't manipulate this.

This is the piece of legislation.

This is the government report on what happened.

Right.

Rather than us like, so, oh, okay, well we're gonna summarize it and put our spin on it, right?

Because whoever doesn't like it will say we're spinning it a certain way.

And it's... it's a struggle because we've been asked to help participate in a program where we're giving out grants to support making more information available to Californians so that they can make smarter and healthier decisions about themselves in their communities.

Like particularly around like local news and local coverage.

And so how do you measure whether something is trustworthy?

I say it's trustworthy, but you don't think it is.

'cause it's from one of these sources that you don't like, from looking at the stuff on your phone that the algorithm sends you.

- Sure.

- So it's... it's hard to find, okay, well what's the balance point?

The best thing we've been able to come up with is, here it is, here's this governor saying... here's the governor's inauguration speech, and you make you make a judgment.

- Well, that actually sounds reasonable, like small d democratization to access to information and people make up their own mind.

But it comes back to what you said earlier about critical thinking and the -- and instilling those tools and skills into the populace in general.

But your focus is really on children.

You've mentioned that two or three times.

Are we doing a good enough job at doing that?

Right now?

[ Laughs ] You're the librarian.

- Well, let's put it this way.

If there were -- the more stronger readers that we have in California, the less vexing some of the challenges the state faces would be to address.

You like to travel.

I love to travel.

I mean, I saw something that was either on a tag, you know, like a luggage tag or something like that where it says travel is the antidote to prejudice.

Well, so, there's -- we could take the rest of the show to talk about the benefits of reading, but one of them is, is making you appreciate more the positions of other people making you more empathetic, giving an understanding of, okay, well there's different points of view than my own.

And I think the more of that that's out there, the better it is.

I think there's a terrific opportunity that's missed by not thinking enough when it comes down to policymaking about libraries being an essential part of the education system.

If kids are coming to the libraries, little kids are coming and they're going to story time and they're learning to read and they're becoming, like, the buzzword is always a lifelong learner, right?

If you're turned on by that before you get to pre-K or kindergarten, well, okay, you got, you got a leg up, right?

- Sure.

-You're gonna succeed better.

And I don't know if it's changed, but for many years, right?

So you've heard this where it's like, “okay, well if you're not reading at a third grade reading level, you know, then your life trajectory, you know, starts tapering off like this.” Okay, so, hopefully it's changed and I don't know whether it has or not, but for a long, long time, the state of California would measure whether you were reading at a third grade reading level in fourth grade.

Like, that's too late.

Right?

And it's -- we'd discourage by not looking for opportunities to connect different things that people do.

I mean, we miss opportunities to make reading, to make learning fun and to create that habit in little kids.

So I think, - 'Cause like I'm too old to change, right?

But when you can reach, right?

You can reach kids and... and it's an amazing thing to see - going -- visiting local libraries.

But -- - So I guess the word is visit your library, read with your kids, teach 'em critical thinking.

- I couldn't have said it better myself.

- Alright.

And we will leave it there.

And that's our show.

Thanks to our guest and thanks to you for watching Studio Sacramento.

I'm Scott Syphax.

See you next time.

Right here on KVIE.

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