Tell me about your path to librarianship:
I actually went to school to be a teacher, ideally a social studies teacher. I had a couple of really great teachers in high school, so I decided that’s what I wanted to do. I got a dual degree in history and education and graduated right in the middle of the Great Recession.
At that time, a lot of teaching jobs were being cut, but it was especially hard for a couple of subjects and social studies was one of them. I was at a loss for a while, substitute teaching and doing what I could to try to get experience.
One day I was substituting in a middle school and I learned that many substitute teachers go to the school library for their break. While I was in the library, the librarian was giving a micro one-shot lesson for middle schoolers and she described herself as a researcher.
Until that point I had thought of Librarians, especially School Librarians, as stereotypical older women with the horn rimmed glasses who probably read a lot and I realized I didn’t know what they actually do. But listening to her, I thought it sounded interesting, and at that point since I didn’t have any jobs lined up anytime soon, I started looking into librarianship.
In Pennsylvania, if you’re certified in one subject, you can get certified in a number of other subjects if you pass the Praxis exams, so I began looking at other subjects as a way to get another job, including the possibility of a school librarianship/media specialist position. I took the Praxis exam, passed it, got certified and then moved on to a few longer term substitute teaching positions, which ultimately led me to getting a long-term librarian media specialist position. I had the chance to work in a high school library for about five months and got to experience what it was like.
The work was interesting and fit my interests, so I thought I might as well go from my MLS and I started taking classes at Drexel. When my long term substitute position ended, a library assistant position opened at Drexel in the Hagerty Library working with the Career Services Collection and it corresponded exactly with what I had just been doing. I ended up getting that and then from there, I got hooked on academic libraries. I’ve worked in a kind tour of them moving from Drexel to Rosemont College, next to St Joe’s, and now I’m at Penn State Abington.
So I’ve been working my way around Philadelphia schools over the last couple years. Most librarians I’ve talked to have had a roundabout path into librarianship. This was my roundabout way.
What do you most enjoy about your current position?
I still love teaching and working with students. I have a student intern this semester and it has been great to be able to work with him, ask him about his responses to ideas and to learn from him what students may think or like. He’s motivated and funny so it’s been really great to work with him.
At the same time I like the backend stuff too. I like the ability to take a break from teaching and outreach to do research. My position is a tenure track faculty position, so this is my first opportunity to dive into the research side of things, which is fun. It’s funny because it feels like you’re back in high school or college because there are deadlines and papers to write, but that stuff is fun. I’m able to choose topics and develop ideas I’m interested in that are relevant to my work. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to learn things that make me a better librarian and can help other people do their jobs better. It’s interesting and engaging and it allows me to balance the different aspects of my job: when I’m tired of one thing I can get back into the classroom and after a day like yesterday when I taught three classes back to back, I can look forward to sitting down and reading some articles quietly, taking notes and not talking. The flexibility is what makes my work enjoyable – being able to work on different kinds of things at the same time.
I just reread this next question, which I first formulated almost one year ago, and have just added to the following list of challenging things happening. 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 more recently, political unrest. There are so many people struggling, and there are real challenges in higher education as a result as well. How have these things impacted your work?
So speaking of the political turmoil, I worked with a colleague at Abington to create a project and embed it in a Mass Media and Society class, a communications class at Abington.
It was an extra credit project, where we basically had students develop fact checking skills and build up their ability to evaluate sources and determine what’s appropriate and what’s not, and what’s credible and what’s not.
We started it as a way to prepare for the election but with the events that have happened since the election, it’s actually become even more relevant. We were planning on doing the course project in the spring anyway, but it has really shown the value of this – to have the students really work through this process.
We’ve tried to keep the topics as neutral as possible, offering things like nutrition, misinformation in sports, and misinformation in technology in addition to political topics. We want students to be able to choose anything they’re interested in as a way to practice these skills.
The last five or six years have provided ways to show the value of the ability to evaluate sources and why it’s very important to do that, but it’s been reemphasized recently. It’s helped us show the value of this type of project. The faculty member has been amazing and helping with demonstrating value, so that has been encouraging – to know that the work we’re doing is relevant and pertinent for the students.
As far as the pandemic, that’s been difficult, because as an Outreach and Engagement Librarian I’m trying to engage with students that are not physically there. We’re not unique, this has been the case across our campus and at every campus and every institution that I’ve heard about, but it’s still hard to build relationships and make connections with students when they’re not there. Last Spring was definitely a struggle, the Fall was a little bit better. We’ve built some relationships that are now carrying over, so it’s been great, but it’s still hard.
I go to the library only once a week and it’s not what it used to be. Most of the staff used to complain about how noisy it is in the library, and now we walk in and see two or three students at most, so it’s dead and it’s odd and it’s difficult. We’ve figured out some best practices, ideas and strategies that have worked at least a little bit, but we’re not at the level of engagement that we were at the beginning of the spring semester last year, even though we’ve noticed that students want to engage and they want to be engaged.
We were meeting with someone in a student organization in the fall and they were talking about all these events that they wanted to do, planning for all of them to be in person for the spring, because they were just itching to get there. It’s hard to balance that with all the other things they have on their plate that they were not anticipating – plus the work they’re doing in school. What’s the incentive for them to engage with the library in a remote way? They’ve been staring at screens all day already, why would they want to do that again for another half hour? Trying to find a balance has been difficult, but moving forward thinking about when we do return, we have some ideas about how to create a new normal for working with those students.
Also, going back to the question to think about everything that happened over the summer, it helped me crystallize what I wanted to focus my research on. I always had a somewhat nebulous idea that I’d like to do research on students who are coming to higher education from outside of a white, middle class or upper middle class background, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do that. Events this summer helped to confirm that it’s what I really want to focus on.
Abington is a majority-minority campus. I work with students on a daily basis who, even if they were accepted into a traditional university, can’t afford the room and board. They’re trying to save money and they’re students from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Events of this past summer helped crystallize for me that I want to focus my research on looking at how libraries can effectively assist these students.
Let’s switch gears, although this next question overlaps a little with what we were just talking about… What have you read, attended or participated in recently that has had an impact on your professional development?
This question overlaps a little with the last one! But I’ll mention an article I read by Amanda Folk from Ohio State titled Reframing Information Literacy as Academic Cultural Capital: A Critical and Equity-Based Foundation for Practice, Assessment, and Scholarship that talked about this idea of cultural capital and academic cultural capital. I thought it made a lot of sense and really fit in with what I was thinking about – students coming from Philadelphia public schools where they haven’t had libraries, they don’t have access to libraries, they don’t know how to use libraries, and even beyond that, lack experience in an academic environment. The lack of cultural capital is going to impact their ability to function on campus.
And not just looking at their academic backgrounds, but also looking at their social backgrounds: what have they been exposed to? And their cultural backgrounds: what have they experienced that has helped them to succeed in this environment?
We often talk about students who don’t know what a database is, or a catalog, or an abstract. How can we make the library understandable and relatable to students who are coming into the library because they need help, but they don’t know where to go and they don’t know how libraries work or function? The events of the summer helped spark this direction for me to research how we can make libraries accessible to students without much cultural or social capital.
That really helped me focus on wanting to research how we can help students beyond the one-shot class and improving instruction, to finding out how we can structure the library differently to make it accessible to all students, whether they’ve experienced libraries before or not.
It also inspired the idea of creating a Student Advisory Board to get student input and get their ideas of what they appreciate or don’t appreciate about the libraries and to learn about things they wish could change. My overarching idea is that I’d like the libraries to be a student organized space. I’d like them to have a strong voice in how the library is organized and how it runs and functions so that they can make the libraries their own, so they can feel comfortable and enjoy that space and know that it’s theirs. That’s the goal.
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?
When I was at Drexel and a prospective librarian still trying to learn about the field, I remember attending some ACRL DVC events and it was such a great welcoming community. People really encouraged my exploration of the field and inspired ideas. It was such a great introduction to academic librarianship that I wanted to help give back to the organization.
I’ve worked in four different libraries in the Philadelphia area and have been exposed to different librarians in different roles at different institutions that I’ve really come to see just how valuable this community is. You start to see people multiple times and colleagues you’ve worked with previously at meetings. I’ve seen the value of this community. There is so much talent, innovation and commitment here. I want to encourage that. It seemed like a natural fit.
What are your goals or hopes for the upcoming year?
First and foremost to make sure everyone stays healthy and safe and in hopes that the pandemic wanes so that we can get back in the fall.
Beyond that, since this is my first tenure track position, I hope to make a mark and start publishing things in addition to having presented at a few events. I’m trying to develop a larger research project and hope to get that off the ground. I’ve been exploring it, but I hope to really dive in and get started.
And then, I hope we’re back in the Fall, taking what we’ve learned from this experience and applying it to fix the things we could update and strengthen what the library is doing moving forward.
What about your non-working time? Tell me about your interests:
I’d like to know what non-working time is! I have a toddler and a preschooler, so personal time is at a premium. Being a Father is a driver of everything right now, which is great. I always wanted to be a parent so it’s fantastic.
But when I do get a little time for myself, I like to play music, I play guitar – when my girls let me!
I consider myself a lifelong learner. I love trying new things, learning new things and building new things.
My wife teases me about my love of watching documentaries. I’d rather watch a good documentary than almost any other kind of show. I recently started going down the rabbit hole of documentaries on YouTube. My history interests are focused on the older history of Ireland and the British Isles, so that’s something that has been interesting to watch. Occasionally when I get to read something that’s not a Disney Princess story or Dr. Seuss, I’ll try to pick up something on the history of Britain or Ireland. That’s my kind of jam.
And if I get another half hour or so to myself and it’s not raining or too cold, I like to go for a run. I was a big runner when I was younger and I like to try to keep that going when I can, but it’s more difficult now because I need to fit it in before naptime or before the girls wake up, or it has to be warm enough to put them in the stroller so that we can all go out. It has been a little difficult this winter, but it’s still nice to get out and move around in addition to playing Barbie or having tea parties.