Gregory Laynor, Senior Librarian, Information Sciences, Thomas Jefferson University

Tell me about your path to librarianship:

I came from a teaching background in the humanities, with a doctorate in English. I’d been working as an adjunct, but I needed a sustainable life. So, I went to library school.

While in library school I was working in the Veterinary Medicine Library at Penn, and that put me on a path to health sciences librarianship. I then worked as a health sciences librarian at Temple, as liaison to the schools of Podiatry and Pharmacy. Now at Jefferson, I work with the medical school and programs across the health professions. I went from teaching in the humanities to teaching in health sciences libraries.

When I had to change my career path, I thought about the things I liked most about teaching in the humanities. It was working with students, helping them to formulate questions and move forward with their own inquiries. In a way, I was already doing library teaching before becoming a librarian. 

It may seem like a strange path, but the teaching part of what I do as a health sciences librarian is what I always really liked when teaching poetry and media studies. In some ways it doesn’t feel that different, and now I have an actual salary. 

What do you most enjoy about your current position?

Teaching, and research consultations. I do a lot of consultations with students, helping them formulate questions and develop search strategies.

A lot of my time also goes to working on evidence synthesis projects, such as systematic reviews. My training in poetry actually comes into play when I work on systematic reviews. When you need to screen 10,000 articles for a project, you need to think about structure and vocabularies, how to name things, and how to describe relationships between things in a way that’s feasible.

I also work on projects on the scholarship of teaching and learning. I’m currently involved in a scoping review on methods of teaching visual diagnosis in the health professions. So, I draw on my background in education and media studies in that work too. 

These are difficult times for many people. There’s a global pandemic, its devastating effect on the economy, people are acknowledging anti-Black racism and protesting and political unrest. There are so many people in real turmoil – and there are real challenges in higher education as a result as well. How have these things impacted your work?

Well, none of these things are entirely new, but the events of the past year have brought more attention to the underlying structures.

Before the pandemic, I had started to work with Jefferson’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement on library resources, and now there is more interest in these resources. We’re participating in One Book, One Philadelphia, which is organized by the Free Library of Philadelphia each year with events across the city. This year’s book is a poetry book, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, with poems shaped by Blackness and Queerness. We’re hosting an online discussion of the book for the Jefferson community, in conjunction with the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement. So, having a relationship with that office made the event possible. 

Book discussions and LibGuides can’t fix hundreds of years of structural problems, but they can  point to possibilities. As librarians, we tend to want to take everything on, but sometimes acknowledging limitations is ok. We may not be able to solve deep structural problems just through our work as librarians, but we can have relationships and conversations that are important.

Specifically in the health sciences, because of the structural inequities brought to light by the pandemic, I’d like to support more work on the social determinants of health. I’d like to do more of that work not just with health sciences colleagues, but also with librarians who are not necessarily medical librarians. We can connect conversations about equity and diversity in libraries and librarianship with conversations about health justice. 

Let’s switch gears… What have you read, attended or participated in recently that has had an impact on your professional development?

Just before the pandemic, I designed an online Introduction to Health Sciences Librarianship course for Library Juice Academy with another librarian who also came to the health sciences from another field, Natalie Tagge at Temple. We saw a need for an introductory course for people such as other librarians interested in applying to health sciences positions, library students at schools without health sciences courses, academic librarians not in health sciences libraries but serving as liaisons to health-related programs, and people working in other health professions who are interested in becoming librarians. 

We just finished teaching the course for the third time. In the Fall, we received a grant from the Network of the National Library of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region that paid for ten LIS students and early-career librarians to take the course. With the grant, we were also able to connect each of these ten participants with a health sciences librarian mentor, so that they could extend what they learned in the course with real world examples from their mentor and leave the course with a professional contact in the health sciences librarian community. Half of the participants were from underrepresented groups. Health sciences librarianship is overwhelmingly white. 

With so many responsibilities and so much going on, why did you choose to contribute so much time and energy to the Delaware Valley Chapter of the ACRL?

I wanted to become involved after the chapter’s 2018 program at Drexel on “Librarians as Advocates.” It was different from a lot of other academic library conferences because it situated academic libraries and librarians as part of a broader community. It seemed like the chapter was moving towards thinking about our work not as isolated in academic institutions, but part of the Philadelphia region, part of the Delaware Valley, part of a larger community. There was an awareness that we serve communities that are not only the students and faculty at our institutions, but that we are part of something bigger. That really appealed to me, and so I started to get involved in things.

I think we’re continuing that work, thinking about what program formats we have so that they’re not only for full-time, degreed, academic librarians, but all library workers.  

What are your goals or hopes for the upcoming year?

I’m working with the ACRL Health Sciences Interest Group on the national level, on the Programming Committee, on some new programs. Because of the pandemic, there’s more attention to health information. So, we’re planning programs for people interested in health sciences librarianship (responding to a similar need as the Library Juice course). We’re also planning programs for other academic librarians, not just health sciences librarians, to learn more about health information.

And I’ve been thinking about conversations we’ve been having in ACRL DVC about accessibility, how disability advocates have been asking for certain things for years and were told it’s not possible. And then – surprise – due to pandemic, some things were finally made more accessible. People talk about returning to “normal,” but maybe there will have been positive adaptations from the pandemic — and there can be more.

For some of us who have not been deeply, negatively impacted by the pandemic, what does it mean to go back and be part of workplaces in which some people have had to be in vulnerable situations all this time — to know of those challenges and to learn how to be supportive? 

What about your non-working time? Tell me about your interests:

I walk a lot, and I read a lot of Philly history. And that all connects with the walks — the history of the city, the history of my family here previously, the history of what’s going on now.

The pandemic has been confining, but reading and walking helped me think across time and it felt more expansive. The history feels very palpable.

My walks don’t feel like an escape, but are more of a grounding experience, literally, that has been a big part of my life. There was a phrase that Jasmine Woodson, ACRL DVC President, said in one of our board meetings: “tethered to the earth.” Walking keeps me tethered to the earth.