Manuela Aronofsky is the Middle School Technology Integrator, digital essentials teacher, and on the amazing library team at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, New York. Manuela has served as member and chair on various ALSC committees, and worked for several years organizing the annual NYSAIS conference for librarians and technologists. Beyond a passion for integrating technology ethically and intentionally into the middle school learning environment, Manuela organizes with the Prison Library Support Network—a volunteer-run organization that works to connect incarcerated people with information services.
HVLA: How did you get involved in PLSN?
MA: My first week of grad school (2018 at the Pratt School of Information) I stumbled on an email posted to the school’s Listserv. It was a promotion for a book drive that PLSN was putting together at NYPL, in collaboration with their Jail and Prison Services librarians. During the event, we emailed publishers requesting titles to be donated into New York jail and prison library collections. I ended up meeting amazing people and making several friends (some of whom are still my organizing partners today), and learning a lot about how the circulation of library materials works within correctional institutions.
For example, I learned that day that donated materials make up the majority of library collections inside. This means that the collections can be extremely limited and not necessarily made up of things patrons want to be reading. It stood out to me that all of the books and genres we were requesting had been directly requested by incarcerated readers. To me, that is really the essence of PLSN – we work to directly help people inside access the materials and information they are requesting, and (as much as possible) on their terms. This is despite the extreme limitations of the carceral institution—which works to restrict people from meaningful exchanges and communication such as traditional reference services. Also, while we weren’t going into the prisons themselves, we were working to directly support the librarians who provide service inside. Huge props to Sarah Ball and Emily Jacobson (both of whom I met that day, and who probably taught many librarians in HVLA how to answer a reference by mail request!) Both Emily and Sarah have continued to guide our work today!
Another thing I didn’t know going into that event was that PLSN was still in its very early stages. I was so excited by the work that I connected with the host (Mia Bruner), and we ended up working together with other volunteers to really build the kernel of what PLSN is today. While I was in grad school we wrote our mission statement, designed our logo, and started to grow both our volunteer base and web presence. We also put on more events, and practiced our reference by mail skills using letters written to Brooklyn Public Library. This practice eventually empowered us to start our own reference project.
Tell us a little about how PLSN works:
There are many aspects of PLSN! Besides our reference service, we host a quarterly abolitionist discussion group called Abolitionist Futures, and we collaborate on different projects with partner organizations like Parole Prep, A.B.O. Comix, Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), and F2L. Anyone can subscribe to our General PLSN Listserv to receive our monthly newsletter (which I co-write!) and which aims to provide updates on all of our different organizational threads (send an email to plsn-nyc-subscribe@lists.riseup.net to be subscribed automatically).
However, our most volunteer-heavy project is our reference by mail service.
Since we started our own reference by mail service in 2021, our collective (which is now made up of librarians, students, and tons of other professionals and activists) has responded to thousands of letters received from people in prisons across the United States.
It might be easiest to describe how the service works by describing the general “life cycle” of a letter.
- A patron inside writes to PLSN by snail mail with up to 3 reference questions per letter. Our physical mailing address has been the incredible Interference Archive in Park Slope since the advent of our project.
- A reference coordinator picks up batches of mail (weekly) and scans the letters onto our secure electronic server.
- Another reference coordinator then reviews the letter to ensure it fits within the guidelines of our service, and redacts all personally identifiable information. They then upload the letter onto an Airtable database that is accessible to all trained reference volunteers.
- Any trained volunteer can then claim a letter to answer, and they’ll write their response electronically. The volunteer emails their completed response back to a team who reviews it, and checks for any revision needs.
- If the letter is good to go, then it is printed out to be mailed back to the letter writer inside.
Anyone interested in volunteering to answer letters can sign up to train – including at our IRL training session on June 21st for all HVLA members (and friends!) More on this below!
We also have monthly coordinators providing sign-up and volunteer support (by monitoring our inbox and backchannel platform for questions), key coordinators who make sure all of our teams are running smoothly, monthly IRL co-working sessions in Brooklyn to get through housekeeping tasks, and a team of coordinators who account for any remaining unanswered letters each month.
How does PLSN differ from other prison library services and organizations, and what does it mean that you are an abolitionist organization?
As we mention in our values statement, we approach this work from an abolitionist perspective, which shapes our work in meaningful ways. It also means our service differs from other reference by mail projects. For example, we don’t reject legal questions outright. Instead, we partner with law librarians to ensure thoughtful, informed responses. We’re also sex-positive, meaning we’re willing to send pornography if it’s allowed by the prison, and we don’t impose arbitrary limits on the number of song lyrics or game-related materials we send (while keeping in mind each facility’s mail policy restrictions, so we can avoid mail being censored or returned.)
Our approach is also unique from other systems in that we set a 50-page limit for materials— this is double what NYPL allows and five times San Francisco Public Library’s JARS’s (Jail and Re-Entry Services) limit of 10 pages. Volunteers with us are given the time they need to respond thoroughly, keeping correspondents updated along the way, rather than rejecting questions that take too long to research. Importantly, we don’t collaborate with Departments of Corrections in any state, which is another significant distinction.
This also dovetails with what makes us an explicitly abolitionist organization. I think our values statement on abolition says it best, so I will paste that here:
Abolition: Our work is rooted in an abolitionist framework, which means we believe no one in our society is disposable and the prison industrial complex must be abolished. Abolition represents a commitment to fostering our collective understanding of ending mass incarceration and building a constellation of alternative information resources that exist outside of the carceral state. As abolitionists, we seek out radical possibilities by building connections across our communities based on solidarity and we reject work that expands the reach of the carceral state.
It’s always important for us to note that our work has been grounded every step of the way by frameworks from abolitionists such as Mariame Kaba, Victoria Law, Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Harsha Walia, Dean Spade, and others. I invite this blog’s readers to look up any of these amazing writers, and I am happy to suggest any specific materials if you’re interested in exploring further!
Can you give examples of the types of reference letters you receive? Is there a particular reference request that has stuck with you?
We receive a really wide range of questions – they reflect the diversity of interests, and the variety of people’s information needs.
Common questions include those related to accessing vital support and services: reentry resources, pro bono legal support, and applying for Social Security. Medical-related questions are also common, as are letters asking about games/hobbies – including drawing tutorials, song lyrics, sports team rosters, and role playing game manuals.
Many people write in about educational opportunities or business research like correspondence courses, patents, grants, and trademarks. Others ask about books-to-prison and pen-pal resources. There are also a lot of requests related to health, exercise, diet, and nutrition. We receive many requests for bills, statutes, and information on specific court cases, lawsuits, or pending legislation.
There are a lot of letters that stand out to me personally, especially since I started taking on mail scanning shifts and am exposed to 40 or 50 letters at a time. One that I frequently think back on is a letter that asked for official documentation with a recommended time frame for dental cleanings. Without proof from something like the American Dental Association, the jail wasn’t going to bring in a dentist. It’s hard to comprehend that this patron found out about our service, hand wrote a letter, and acquired a stamp all to take a bet on getting this important request answered by strangers within 3-6 months. It was also a letter that took about 10 minutes to answer, and we can only hope that it was successful.
There are a lot of requests like this, that I think reveal the lack of resources inside for even the most basic but necessary information.
Explain some of the challenges PLSN has encountered since it began. What keeps you coming back / keeps you going?
PLSN is a volunteer-powered organization, meaning of course that nobody is currently compensated for their time or labor. Inevitably, this means that we can’t guarantee we will always have enough volunteers to sustain our service. Currently our reference listserv has over 400 people on it, but an analysis we did last year showed that the active number on the list is only around 50. We’re consistently working to raise that number, but because PLSN is decentralized our work has always relied on a few “heavy lift” volunteers.
In late 2022, we were faced with a significant backlog of letters that could not be addressed within our thoughtfully established workflow. We therefore made the difficult decision in July 2023 to pause our service to address the backlog and assess how we could restructure our workflows to remain accountable and responsive to the patrons writing to us. Part of this process involved sending template letters to everyone waiting on a response, and explaining the pause in our service. This all took emotional labor, effort, and time.
Since the pause, we have developed new working groups focused on developing accountability measures for volunteers, better coordinator support, more robust documentation of our processes, and backlog contingency plans. This is what keeps me going! Despite the stress of maintaining support for a need that only continues to escalate, I’ve found that PLSN remains creative, empathetic, and proactive. We’ve navigated a number of difficult conversations, and have always managed to keep our organization moving forward.
We also organized and executed an extremely successful fundraiser last year. Thanks to a volunteer’s matching gift program from his employer that he committed to PLSN, we raised over $130,000. This is a number I still pinch myself about, but it has definitely felt like a sigh of relief, as we know we can sustain our reference service financially for years to come. The fundraiser was yet another project that we dove into collaboratively and with hope. Seeing people come together to support our success was unbelievably uplifting, and we’re eternally grateful to everyone who donated and participated.
How can the HVLA Community get involved?
The best way to become involved is by attending one of our 2-hour reference trainings and diving right in to start answering letters. Once a volunteer completes a training (these are interactive sessions where attendees look at and collaboratively respond to an actual reference request), they have the option to be added to our Reference listserv. That gives volunteers access to our database of letters that need a response, as well as information on special reference events such as our IRL monthly co-working sessions, and virtual monthly Reference organizing meetings.
If our IRL training on June 21 won’t work for HVLA members, we invite anyone to register for one of our monthly virtual training sessions. You can see those dates + registration links here: https://plsn-nyc.tumblr.com/be-a-volunteer.
What would you tell someone that is not sure they have the expertise necessary to be an effective volunteer?
An effective volunteer just needs to complete a training, understand our values, and commit to participating. As this blog post hopefully made clear, there are so many moving parts to our organization and reference project, that there are many ways to be involved. And nobody should feel intimidated by an overly heavy commitment. Our accountability working group is currently developing a work wheel that makes all of these parts transparent, and lays out what a “minimum” volunteer requirement might look like (one suggestion is a commitment to answering four letters per calendar year). Considering the breadth of questions we receive, nobody has to have specialized training or knowledge to participate or answer a letter, although it is a great feeling when a letter comes through with a request that touches on someone’s professional field or topic of interest!
For example, I have written a few letters to someone inside who is an avid reader, and likes to ask for book synopses of specific titles so that he can make more informed purchases or book requests. I find these legitimately fun to answer, and I’m sure that there are letters out there that will either feel fulfilling or enjoyable to answer for every volunteer.
That said, while specialized knowledge is not necessary, having been in the school librarian field for 8 years, I can attest that the solution-oriented, collaborative, and helpful spirit school librarians bring to their institutions makes this project a really great fit for our profession specifically.
Anything else you want to say?
A few last important things to note (in my opinion), are:
- Letter writing volunteers have a lot of support along the way (including from all of the coordinator teams mentioned above). This also includes financial support on the coordination side – meaning all purchases made by coordinators for our reference service (ex: printing and postage supplies), are reimbursed quickly through our funding platform.
- Letter writers do not need to be librarians or information professionals. This is obviously a non-issue for anyone on HVLA, but it does mean you can invite your friends to train and participate too!
- Since all of our letters are scanned and digitized, all aspects of our work (besides the physical mail scanning process) can be performed virtually from anywhere in the world. We currently have volunteers all over the United States and Canada – including meetup groups in the Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
- PLSN isn’t a penpal service – meaning, while we expect that trained volunteers remain active and participate in our service, there is no expectation that volunteers will develop an ongoing research exchange with any particular patron. This means it is perfect for people with even sporadic free time – especially school librarians during the summer 😉
- There are a lot of ways to participate and grow as a PLSN volunteer, including joining a working group, onboarding onto any of the coordinator roles described in this post, attending our monthly virtual Reference organizing meetings, or participating in one of our other projects like the Abolitionist Futures discussion group. We try to make our service and organization as transparent and barrier-free as possible, and we’re always ready for input from our volunteers about how things could be better, or run more smoothly.
- If you’re not ready to commit or register for a reference training, but you’re excited by this work, we recommend that you join our General listserv to receive information on all upcoming events (including all future reference trainings), organizational updates, submissions from our network, and more. Send an email to plsn-nyc-subscribe@lists.riseup.net to be subscribed automatically, or email us at plsn_nyc@protonmail.com to be added by an organizer.
I hope this post inspires you to train as a reference volunteer! Please feel like you can reach out to me at any point (maronofsky@berkeleycarroll.org) with questions.
TRAINING EVENT INFO:
PLSN Reference Training for School Librarians and Friends!
Saturday, June 21, 2-4pm at the People’s Forum