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.

Tell me about your path to librarianship:

Like many people, I had a circuitous route. My undergraduate degree is in English, and that is because I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t until I was close to graduation that I realized that “poet” is not really a job, and I didn’t want to teach.

But I had gotten a part time job at my local public library and they cross trained me. I worked the circulation desk, I did interlibrary loan, I paged and shelved, and when the reference librarian went on her lunch break, I could sit at the reference desk to sub for her. That really clicked for me: the idea of helping people find the information that they needed to answer their questions and accomplish what they wanted to accomplish really resonated with me. I found my home.

I knocked around for a few more years, but decided to go to graduate school and become a librarian.

What do you most enjoy about your current position?

Ironically, it’s teaching! The thing I thought I would avoid by becoming a librarian! 

So what changed?

My students have elected to be there rather than the compulsory nature of public school, so already it’s an easier crowd. They’re a little more mature. I don’t have much experience with little kids, but I can handle 18 year olds. I’m lucky enough that my university allows me to teach a first year seminar of my own design and that’s probably the biggest asset that I have in this position.

Of course it’s an information literacy class, but in the thinnest of disguises. It’s called “Seems Legit: What’s Real and What’s Fake on the Internet”. We talk a lot about social media, which is a place where my students already are, so I’m meeting them where they are, which makes it easier for them to progress.

They teach me so much, because you know, I’m old! I don’t know about who’s influential on Tik Tok, but it’s an important resource for where they get information that they actually use to make decisions. It’s a changing world.

So they keep me somewhat abreast of what’s going on in the world and I help them develop the skills they need to navigate and evaluate information. It’s fun!

More traditionally, I like research consultations, the teaching that happens in a one-on-one meeting, which is so much more effective than a one-shot, classroom session. For me, the most rewarding part of traditional librarianship is when a student has an Aha Moment, where they find something that clicks for them and they can make real progress on something they’re working on.

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?

There are some in-person experiences happening on campus now, but for the most part, Arcadia has been entirely online for a year. It’s a whole new way of teaching and learning and connecting and living. It has been a long time and the winter was rough. I think a lot of people have hit a real wall.

For my teaching, I’ve learned to focus on what is essential and I’m hoping that I can bring this forward. I’ve always been student centered, but I think even more so now, I understand students’ real need to be able to determine what works for them. So if we accomplish the learning goals that we agreed on, I’m a little bit less concerned about the details of how that happens.

Racism has long been an issue in higher education and my campus is no exception. My university is taking active steps; we have an Anti Black Racism Initiative with many different prongs and faculty, staff, and students are all involved in trying to identify what racist policies exist and to make the changes we need to make. We’re recognizing the lack of diversity in our full time teaching faculty and trying to elevate people of color, especially Black faculty and staff, so that their voices and perspectives are heard more around campus. I really hope that the university remains committed to these initiatives. We’ve only just begun, and there’s so much work to do!

And for me in my own classroom, because I have access to first year students, I made sure that we talked about the issues of the day. Our “common read” was How to Be an Antiracist, so we spent a lot of time focusing on that book and the ideas that Kendi presents. It surprised me to see how so much of that content was news for many of my students – that systemic racism exists. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that, but I was. But I was heartened to see their response to the book and their commitment to doing what they can in their own lives to take antiracist action.

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

One of my colleagues is hosting a Community of Practice for our team. We had tried to launch this once before, and it failed to take flight, but we’re trying again. We’re still in a fledgling state, but I have really appreciated her dedication to getting us to commit and so far, so good.

It has encouraged a lot of reflection, which is something that I don’t often do in a written sense, but she’s encouraging that and that has been really useful for me. I’m a note taker and a note reader, but I’m not a journal keeper. It has been helpful for me to adopt some of the practices that she has been advocating and it helps our team. We discuss our concerns about teaching and librarianship in a productive and directed manner and it’s good.

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 was asked to participate, but I said yes because I had been to DVC events before that I thought were super cool because they took a more progressive approach than something that, say, ALA would do. For example, I’m thinking of the Fall 2018 program held at Drexel, which was about advocacy in the library. I thought it was so awesome – that was probably the best event I’ve ever attended. There was a lightning round and someone from Penn State gave a presentation on the work they were doing with students’ knowledge of internet privacy. It was so cool. I had a really good impression of DVC and have found since I’ve become a part of the board that my suspicions of how progressive the group is have been confirmed, which is great. It’s my people.

What are your goals or hopes for the upcoming year?

Like everyone, I hope that we can do more things in person safely in the coming months. I hope to take some of the lessons that I’ve learned about my privilege and about my teaching forward with me in my everyday practice and to model critical thinking not just about information, but about myself and my place in the world for my students. And I hope everyone can get vaccinated.

But what about your non-working time? Tell me about your interests — even though it may be challenging when working from home to separate working time from non-working time…

For real – especially when you are at the kitchen table! We are two people in a two bedroom apartment. I had the spare bedroom for several months and now it’s my turn to be out here, especially since I’m not teaching my class right now. 

One of the things that has been successful throughout this whole thing is that my book club has continued to meet. We have not missed a single meeting and have discussed nine books on Zoom! We moved the meetings to Saturday nights since there are some members with young children and that’s a time that works for them. It works for all of us and it has been really nice.

I miss concerts so much! Today is actually one year to the day since the last concert I attended. I saw Wire at Underground Arts on March 10, 2020. I remember my partner and I talking before going, wondering if we should go. Looking back, it was pretty risky, but I also don’t regret it because we didn’t realize at the time that it would be more than a year before being able to do that again.

Another hobby that has fallen by the wayside, is that we like to play Dungeons and Dragons. Some people make it work online, but that doesn’t really work for our group. The last time we played D&D with our friends we were talking about what might happen. One friend was confident that the pandemic would be under control within a month. I think about that almost every day.

I also collect records – LPs. We have way too many records. We have a pretty eclectic collection, you can find a little of everything in there. It’s kind of nice to sit down for 20 minutes and just really listen to one side of a record. I can’t wait to spend quality time digging through the bins in a record store again.

Tell me about your path to librarianship:

My path to librarianship was not a straight path. In college, I was really interested in art and fashion and I bounced between the two for a while. First I thought I wanted an art career, but then I ended up working in the fashion industry for about six years after college.

I worked in what’s called fashion production: looking at things coming in from factories before they were shipped to stores and putting things on fit models to make sure the look and fit was ok. It was interesting, but after about four or five years I was wondering if I wanted to keep doing it forever. That’s when I started looking into grad school for librarianship.

I talked to a few librarians – mostly academic librarians, because that’s what I had been around my entire life. Both of my parents were university professors at a state school that extended privileges to state residents, so I grew up in and around University Libraries. When I was 12 or 13, I could use my library card and go to the library at night, which was really nice.

I had studied art history in college and I always really liked the research aspect of it and thought maybe I could be an art librarian. So I went to library school but didn’t get a job right away so returned to fashion for a few more years until I got a library job.

I thought I would be an art librarian or work at a fashion school, but my first job was at a small liberal arts college and I found I really liked working with undergraduates. That led me to where I am now at Drexel, where I started as a librarian for undergraduate learning. I continue to be really interested in what students are doing in the first year of college and that transition from high school. So much changes for them. One of the things I love about my work is hearing about all of their different backgrounds and paths.

What do you most enjoy about your current position?

I really like working with undergraduate students and also, my current position gives me quite a bit of autonomy – I can set my own priorities. I’ve managed a reference program at Drexel for a few years and I’m getting to the point where I feel comfortable saying “This is what I think we should do” rather than asking other people what we should do. It took me time to get there and have the confidence to know what I’m doing and what I think we should be doing or how to investigate if I’m not sure. I like being able to set the priorities and decide what is most important.

I’m working with a new, part-time person who is helping out in reference. She’s a newly minted librarian having finished grad school in December. She’s doing reference and helping out on a project for me and it’s great to work with her and feel like I’m helping her get experience and a good start.

I enjoy teaching too, but I don’t do as much these days, not only due to the pandemic, but really due to the complexities of Drexel. It’s nice to have a real mix of things to do.

This past year has been difficult for many people. There’s a global pandemic, its devastating effect on the economy, people are acknowledging anti-Black racism, both social 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?

I’ve been working from home since March 13, 2020, so it has been a year. I actually enjoy working from home and it’s really nice that I’m able to. I’m also able to work from my Mom’s house and my sister’s house. They both live about an hour and a half drive away from where I live and it has been nice to have that flexibility even though I end up working the same hours.

Drexel was already set up so well to transition to remote library services. Chat was already set up and we had been using zoom, so that was a fairly easy transition. My actual work isn’t that much different due to the pandemic.

In terms of the other things, I had been thinking about racial injustice a lot even before, but the police murder of Walter Wallace last October happened about 15 blocks from where I live and I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

Our library staff is somewhat diverse, but our student body is very diverse. I wonder how I’m serving the student body as a white woman with a lot of privilege. I don’t have answers.

Drexel Libraries wrote an anti racism statement and I’ve been working on updating reference training materials for new librarians to include our diversity and accessibility statements. It will also include a section on bias in language because I think it’s really important.

One of the things I’ve worked on in the past few years is to eliminate “guys” as a way of addressing people. To me, it was meant to be gender neutral, but I know that it’s not. I’m trying to not assume gender or ethnicity based on the names I see, but it’s hard to unlearn these things, so it’s a constant awareness to practice. I participate in an anti racism libraries group and I’ll think about what we’ve talked about over time. It’s a constant learning process in both my personal and professional life, because they really go hand in hand.

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

I’ve been trying to take advantage of anything that is free since our budget for professional development was eliminated this year. I attended the North American Virtual Reference Conference a few weeks ago and it was interesting to see what folks were doing during the pandemic. One of the presentations I saw was about the concept of “slow librarianship.” The pandemic has really shone a light on many things, including that we live in a productivity culture, which tells us we need to be productive and implies that whatever we’re doing, it’s not enough and we need to do more.

I’ve actually been pretty good at setting boundaries between my work and home life, but I got a lot out of the sessions about making time for yourself, not getting consumed by work and not getting consumed by capitalism and productivity culture. I found that really helpful.

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?

A few reasons! First, to give something back to other people in a specific way and then to meet other interesting people who don’t necessarily work at my institution.

I’m also on the board of ACRL in the Instruction Division and chair of a committee this year. That has really helped me develop some of my leadership skills too. It’s nice to be in a position like the chapter board where I’m not so much a leader, but a contributing member.

What are your goals or hopes for the upcoming year?

I crafted goals last February, but some of those don’t really fit for where we are right now. The hope is that people will get vaccinated and that we’ll get back to some semblance of seeing one another and feeling like it’s safe to see each other.

I definitely have work projects I’d like to see moving forward. The new person I’m supervising is helping figure out how best to use the library FAQs we have set up in Springshare. We need to do some work on those and create a structure for folks to be able to do more with those.

And then I’ve also been working with other librarians at Drexel to develop a community of practice around teaching and I’m really interested to see where that goes and how that develops.

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

Well, in normal times, I like to travel and I’d like to go back to travel. When I talked about setting boundaries between work and home, I’ll admit I’ve been bad about taking time off this year because there’s nowhere to go and I don’t like to use vacation time to stay home. Maybe by the summer I’ll be able to travel somewhere close by.

I enjoy reading a lot. A lot of people have said that during the pandemic they haven’t been able to read. Well, I’ve kept reading.

My sister has two children, aged three and six and I always spent a lot of time with them, but during the pandemic, I’ve been helping out more. My six year old niece has learned to call me on a tablet and video chat. She’s going to zoom kindergarten so she’ll reach out between kindergarten zoom meetings.

Exercise has always been important to me and it is something that has helped me deal with the pandemic. I look forward to getting back outside when the weather is nicer, maybe meeting friends in the Wissahickon for walks.

Before the pandemic, I started taking art classes, and during the pandemic I’ve been doing it over zoom, so that’s been fun – to have one night a week to just do art.

I knit and do some sewing at home too (but not like my sister, who has made a lot of masks for children and for charity and to donate!)

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.