With the rise of electronic resources, some more “traditional” librarians in the San Francisco Public Library system were reported to hide books to protect them from destruction.
After the October 17, 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, City Librarian Ken Dowlin applied to the Federal Emergency Management Authority for a $1 million grant.
With this funding, he changed the organization of the books from the Dewey Decimal System to a system he referred to as “leveled access.” The Mercury Project involved the purchase of new computers, including a supercomputer from the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for an online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC).
[4] In the Word Watch of April 1997, The Atlantic Monthly defined guerrilla librarianship as “the use of surreptitious measures by librarians determined to resist the large-scale 'deaccessioning' of rarely used books: 'A branch librarian ... sometimes goes around with a due-date stamp, furtively stamping into currency books that she feels are imperiled.... [Employees of the San Francisco Public Library] call it “guerrilla librarianship”' (The New Yorker).”[5] In more recent history, the term “guerrilla librarian” has been used to refer to Mick Jones of The Clash.
This exhibition is free as a “direct artistic challenge to the likes of the corporate British Music Experience.”[6] Other guerrilla librarians include organizations such as Biologists Helping Bookstores, private citizen scientists re-shelving books to prevent pseudoscience from being placed in with the science categories.