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Leading an Artistic Life as an Academic Librarian

Peer-Reviewed Article, , , , , ,

Robin Bergart, University of Guelph
Amanda Etches, University of Guelph
Jordan Pedersen, University of Guelph

“[A]esthetics are important to librarians. We seek to satisfy our aesthetic sense through harmony in architecture of library buildings, beauty in literature, music, and the arts, and even elegance in library systems.”1Gorman, M. (2000). Our enduring values : librarianship in the 21st century. American Library Association.

Over the course of our careers as academic librarians, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover colleagues with “secret” artistic talents. Sometimes we would only learn about their lives as accomplished painters, writers, dancers, and musicians when we got to know them better, or when we happened across their names on the cover of a book or attached to an exhibit or performance. We wondered why their artistic side wasn’t more widely known across the library and why they so often seemed to keep their artistic work hidden away, intentionally or otherwise. We were curious to learn more about the artistic lives of academic librarians. Can you lead a full artistic life while pursuing a career as an academic librarian? How do you balance a library career with an art practice?

This is an exploratory study whose aim is to define and describe the phenomenon of the “artistic academic librarian,” that is, academic librarians who are seriously committed to making art. We want to discover to what extent an academic librarian career is compatible with a serious art practice. The study is based on a survey and interviews with artistic academic librarians across Canada who generously shared their experiences with us.

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    Gorman, M. (2000). Our enduring values : librarianship in the 21st century. American Library Association. ↩︎

We should be doing this! Librarians benefit from designing and grading library assignments

Essay, , , ,

By Glenn Ellen Starr Stilling
Appalachian State University Libraries (retired)
gess@hey.com

Abstract

Throughout my career, my job focused heavily on library instruction. After the first few years, I started to wonder how much impact my work was actually having. I found a way to add meaning and relevance to my work by increasing my involvement with library assignments. I offered to design library assignments, share them with the course instructors for their feedback, and also, if the instructors were interested, grade them. In this article, I reflect on twenty years of working with library assignments. I discuss the following: Work done in this area by librarians at Appalachian State University; why I felt compelled to do this work, even though it was not the norm; benefits, challenges, and lessons learned;  learning theory that I applied to all the assignments I developed; two library assignments for which I taught library sessions and graded students’ work many times; a grading rubric for one assignment; a partial example of high A level work for one assignment; and a document that can be used during library sessions and/or as a librarian-graded assignment.

Keywords: Library instruction, Student assignments, Grading, Job satisfaction, Job feedback

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Libraries as Places Where Stories Begin: Building A Writer-in-Residence Program at UBC Library

Essay, , , , ,

By Allan Cho
Community Engagement & Partnerships Librarian
University of British Columbia Library

Introduction

The mission of academic libraries has been to steward literary archives, preserving the manuscripts, correspondence, and records that underpin scholarly research. Yet they have been less visible as spaces where literature is actively created. In this essay, I explore how the University of British Columbia (UBC) Library’s Writer-in-Residence program reimagines the academic library as a collaborative space where community engagement, literary practice, and research intersect. By embedding practicing writers on campus and in the broader community, the program supports emerging voices and positions the library not only as a repository of cultural memory but also as an active site of literary creation.

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Maneuvering Roadblocks: A Framework for Navigating Access Barriers Across Varied User Bases

Peer-Reviewed Article, ,

Katherine Carlson
Duke University Medical Center Library
Katherine.a.carlson@duke.edu
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0735-6942

Abstract: Library users frequently encounter a variety of barriers when trying to access services and resources. It is critical that library staff thoughtfully engage and interact with these potential barriers with a goal of mitigating them and maximizing access for all potential users. The proposed framework provides staff with three key components of the process and guidance for navigating these potential access barriers. Zoomed-out and generalized for all types of libraries and staff, this framework can be applied to any context and provide guiding questions for beginning the process of intentionally navigating access barriers. Led by empathy for the user, library staff are encouraged to anticipate, react, and reflect on their experiences maneuvering roadblocks for users.

Keywords: access barriers, accessibility, user services
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The Library World, Mental Illness, and the Everyday

Peer-Reviewed Article, , , , ,

By Andrew Field
Royal Oak Public Library

1.

Yesterday I heard a noise I immediately identified as a library noise – the sound of a cart rolling. And though it sounds insignificant, the particular sound felt almost Proustian in its associational richness, in the fecundity of its everydayness. For carts, as we know, are what we use to transport books, to get them where they need to be; and they are used all the time in libraries, and located in various places in the library: in storage rooms, basements, second floors and hallways, stationary, alone, empty and filled with books, pushed by pages, clerks, librarians, and managers, and fated with different configurations of wheels that squeak in certain ways or roll steadily or crookedly on the particular floor or carpet. You would think, then, that carts are conspicuous aspects of libraries, and, in a sense, they are. But in another sense, they are so interwoven into the fabric of the everyday at the library, that we do not see them. Even when we use them, unless they are broken, they are transparent to us. And so this sound, when I heard it, meant something; it seemed to emerge out of a texture I couldn’t see, and illustrate something about that texture. In so doing, I felt I was intuiting something about the nature of libraries, about the feel of the world of libraries, and therefore in some sense the world itself. And it left me wondering, what did that experience mean?

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