Author: ACRL DVC

Tell me about your path to librarianship

So not a straightforward path. Pretty much a winding road. I’ve actually always been interested in some way or another how information is organized and how it’s stored. My overriding interest has always been archives, so my first brush with that was when I was the recording archivist for my undergraduate college radio station back in the day. I went to Bates College and their radio station was called WRBC and I was on the board of RBC for like a year as their archivist.

I also had a big interest in art. I was an artist in high school and I was in the National Honor Society. My big interest was in drawing. I love pencils and painting. But my big thing was film. I really loved film, so I wanted to pursue that post college and I did. I went into film production in New York City and worked in production there for quite a few years. Then I went to film school and I ended up at the ASI Conservatory in Los Angeles (I got an A in screenwriting!). I just kept going basically trying to break into the industry. It was a wild ride and I tell you breaking into the business is no easy thing. It’s super difficult and I was dying because I didn’t have any money and I was starving on the other side of the country from where I was from. So I was like, I need to do something here with my life and I decided to go back to my second love: archives and librarianship. So I got into the University of Texas at Austin iSchool. I actually almost went for a PhD at first, but they were like you know what, you’re more suited to our masters in information studies program. I didn’t argue with them.

It actually was a really major decision because I found out that I really, really enjoyed what I was learning there. I specialized in archives and I kept it on a media track there too. I was really into audio preservation. I was into what they had more on the audio side than film, but whatever I could get for media I studied that too.

But then I also got pregnant, while I was in Texas, and I had my son, and I told myself l had to come back to the east coast and my parents so they can help me. So I did, but it was also a good decision, because then I got my current job at Lafayette college in eastern PA. I’ve been there ever since and I love it. 

What do you most enjoy about your current position?

I’m a research and instruction librarian but actually my title doesn’t really reflect what I really do every day. I was hired to run the Lafayette Library’s digital humanities summer school program. It’s called DHSS and it’s my favorite thing to do. Luckily, it’s my main responsibility, so it was a good thing I love it so much.

And I love it because it’s a natural extension of what I learned at UT’s iSchool. One of my favorite classes there was Intro to Digital Humanities. I really loved the professor. It really made me think a lot about how technology affects research and that’s kind of what I do now. I’m kind of like that professor who taught me and I turn around now and teach undergrads how to do research, what’s Digital Humanities, what’s Digital Scholarship, etc. It’s a six week intensive where they concentrate on creating their own digital project based on their own original research. They get to learn a lot in a short amount of time. It keeps me from not phoning it either, because I have to keep up with all these different things to be able to teach them properly. I’m keeping up with principles research, I’m keeping up with project management styles, I’m keeping up with digital tools. My job makes me keep up with all that so I can help them better.

These past 20+ months or so have produced a tremendous amount of social, political, and medical upheaval in this country and around the world. These events have created many new challenges to what is an already challenging job working in higher education. How have these challenges affected your work? Have you changed how you approach any of your responsibilities? Has the last year and a half reinforced the work that you were already doing? Both?

So, it’s funny I’m probably the only person who didn’t panic once the pandemic started. It’s affecting my work, obviously, but, for me, I think it’s just been pretty positive because of what I do being so concerned with the digital and the work I’m doing with digital tools. Actually, right away when the pandemic started, I had to make a decision whether to go remote or not. Our Dean of the library came to me and he told me ‘it’s your call, you don’t have to take this remote if you don’t want to.’ A lot of my colleagues from other institutions had actually decided not to do it. They feared a drop off in quality. But, I thought, intuitively, that this would be such a great opportunity for me to teach these tools that have to do with cyberspace and have to do with the digital space and teach it in the digital space. And it’s been really super interesting to do it that way. I know it’s not forever but, in the meantime I’m really enjoying how effective it is to be able to teach certain things in this way.

In this space I’m able to pull up a screen right to people’s laptops about whatever tool I’m talking about. Or I can talk about animation or data visualization or whatever it is, and really show it in a way that’s kind of hard to reproduce in an in-person classroom. I know it sounds weird to say but I’ve enjoyed the weird limitations of the pandemic just because. To me, it’s so natural, it just naturally fits what I do. Actually, I just co-authored an article that has recently been published about this (Using Digital Scholarship Methods and Tools to Enhance and Transform Learning during COVID-19 at a Liberal Arts College).

I certainly feel like I’ve worked more In the past year than any other year that I’ve been here, thus far. Obviously every library is trying to maintain a high standard and we’re trying to do the same, trying to maintain that high standard of our work. I was also trying to make sure to bring something new to what I was doing. I have a lot of different professional interests, including information literacy, I’m a research librarian, I’m interested in OER and open education. And then, the digital humanities piece & digital scholarship piece. And so I was always just trying to come up with new stuff. I launched a new thing during a pandemic, the digital humanities idea incubator that you can read about in the article I mentioned earlier.

The idea incubator was something that me and my colleague thought about before the pandemic, but then we saw a need that had to be filled and we just launched it in our interim session last year and we’ve done it two times. It’s a set of workshops that we offer to all students. They can all come and learn about research from us, they can learn about data, they can learn about digital humanities, just as a low-stakes way to start learning about that stuff. We have some students who are really responsive to it.

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

Recently, I’ve been interested in open education. I got into it when I was at UT and I used to work for the University of Texas system. They had a department that was called Institute for Transformational Learning. I was sort of a records manager there, but what they have been doing was kind of interesting. They kind of threw me in and asked me to find some Open Source materials like videos and other stuff. I said okay, but then I got deeper and deeper to the point where I was making them whole spreadsheets of different OER materials. At that point, my supervisor was like ‘oh you’re good at this’. So I’m like, okay, noted. And then I got this job and the colleague of mine, who had been doing OER work since before I got here, mentioned it to me and he got me hooked into it again. 

One thing I did do before the pandemic, I became part of the open education and leadership program in the organization SPARC. They really just kind of immerse you in a course where you’re learning more about OER, learning more about open education strategy, learning about open policy. A big thing is that you have a capstone project and I was asked if I would make my project into an OER survey so I’ve been developing an OER students survey through that.

After I was done with that, I moved into doing one of the Affordable Learning PA’s Creative Commons certificate programs. So now, I have a certificate in Creative Commons, which I completed this past summer of 2021. Going through programs like this just allows me to keep deepening my knowledge of this thing that I kind of just fell into and it allows me to help other people with their research and learning more about access to information, access to and an understanding of technology, that kind of thing.

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?

Well, I’m just going to be honest, I was asked by a previous board member. I work with Stephanie Gomez in our LVAIC information literacy group (I love that girl!). She’s the newest member but a little while ago she approached me, saying ‘hey so there’s this thing. And there’s also this open position, would you be interested?’ And I’m like, well you’re pretty cool so I’m going to consider it. So I looked at the description and I was like oh okay, they need help with some things I’m interested in like the mentorship program and facilitating scholarships for new career Librarians. And I thought, if I’m going to spend some time doing something, I want to help with these sorts of initiatives.

What are your goals or hopes for the upcoming year?

I thought this was a great question because my supervisors will also like to know this! It’s funny because when it comes to my job and goals, I don’t have concrete goals, necessarily, but my goal is to just keep nurturing my own approach to my job. I’m just trying to stay kind of organic to making sure I understand our advancements in digital technology, like how is theory changing with digital media. 

My highest concern is making sure that I’m shepherding the DHSS program properly. Student needs are super important to me. Faculty needs are important, of course, but I’m always interested in making sure that I make connections with the students, especially those who may not be supported fully by the institution. At Lafayette, I’m in this place where a majority of students are coming from high income places, but there are a ton of students who get lost in the cracks and I, and all of us at the library, want to make sure that those students don’t get overlooked in some way. I’m always thinking about how we can get at that, and how we can help them.

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

I’m laughing because my first thought was sleep! I thought about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I’m just trying to go up that triangle, you know what I mean? Especially since my son is the big focus of my time outside the library. He’s four. A lot of it is that he’s a young child but also my son has special needs. He has a rare condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, which is a fragile bone disorder. So I spend a lot of time with him on his care and as his advocate. I spend a lot of time talking to doctors and being in the hospital and just making sure he gets taken care of. And he just started a new adventure in pre-school. He’s in a classroom for children with developmental disabilities and it’s going really well. 

When I do have some energy, I’m a media and pop culture addict. Obviously, I mentioned my background is in film, I still love art, and I’m still that person. I still am a ravenous film and TV snob. And then my son and I have bonded over video games. I introduced him to video games this past pandemic, like a million other people in this country and he loves it. So we’ve been really falling down the PlayStation and Xbox rabbit hole, specifically retro gaming. So we have a PS2 and an Xbox360 and we’re working our way up to the present.

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.