Fister resides at the nexus of authors and libraries, we wanted to understand why on April 15, 2020, she posted this to her Twitter account:
From her home in rural Minnesota, Fister (who is “not a fan of Zoom/Skype/etc”) and I corresponded by email. “Honestly, I was surprised,” Barbara wrote. “When I started poking around the National Emergency Library I did a vanity search and—hey, look at that! I had to tweet that my books were there, because it made me happy. I would check out of my academic library if it were open, and many of those books were there, too. It’s very gratifying to have that access.”
As Fister sees it, “Regardless of the legal issues, I think whatsapp lead the Internet Archive has the moral high ground in launching the National Emergency Library. There’s no way people who already contributed to paying for access to books through taxes or tuition can individually purchase every book they might want to consult while the libraries they relied on (and helped to fund) are closed. We need to consider the public good in this crisis.”
Throughout her career, Fister has been a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. “I’ve been able to indulge my curiosity in everything from women’s literature from the Majority World (formerly known as the Third World) to how students learn about how information works to popular literacy practices, to the impact of technology on society, to the critical analysis of crime fiction. Basically, it’s the ‘oh look, a butterfly!’ approach to scholarship.” she explained. “I also have enjoyed reading crime fiction so much that I started writing it, and was lucky enough to find an agent and publisher. I was tickled to find two of my mysteries available in the National Emergency Library.”