Category Archives: Essay

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

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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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Learning at Work: Translating Classroom-Based Inclusive Pedagogies to Academic Library Student Employment

Essay, ,

By Nancy Shore, STEM & Health Sciences Librarian,
Columbus State University,
Erin Tan, Head of Access Services,
Columbus State University, Columbus, GA
and
Kristina Clement, Assistant Director of Academic Engagement and Instruction and Instruction Coordinator,
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA

Introduction

Student employees play an important role in the daily operations of academic libraries, contributing to access services, user engagement, and special projects while simultaneously developing transferable skills for future employment (McKenna, 2020; Sterling, 2015). The student employees benefit from meaningful participation in campus operations and financial support for their work in academic libraries, while library supervisors face challenges in training, motivating, and retaining a transient workforce. Traditional supervisory strategies geared for full-time staff often emphasize efficiency and policy adherence, but they may fall short in supporting the diverse learning needs of student workers, particularly those who are first-generation or neurodivergent (Accardo et al., 2024; Becker-Redd et al., 2018). Emerging scholarship suggests that extending inclusive pedagogical frameworks, commonly applied within classroom contexts, into campus workplaces can help address these challenges. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) emphasizes proactive planning to reduce barriers by offering multiple means of engagement, representation, and action (Smith, 2025), while Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) highlights the value of clearly communicating purpose, tasks, and criteria for assignments and job responsibilities (Winkelmes, 2023). Both frameworks demonstrate positive impacts on student confidence, belonging, and persistence in employment settings and hold potential to enrich student experience as employees in academic libraries.

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Makeshift Mentoring for Atypical Academic Librarians

Essay,

by Daniel E. Feinberg
and Tamara Druash
University of North Florida

Abstract

Mentoring has been a part of every career in the modern era. It has been practiced so that a seasoned veteran in a career will give guidance to a protégé or a person new at a job. A typical example would be that a senior associate in the field would be guiding and advising a novice in the field. For academia this would usually mean a higher-ranked professor working with a novice professor to give guidance for the mentee’s professional career. However, what happens when a mentoring system is not in place at an institution, or if there are not enough tenured mentors available? In this article, two academic librarians tackled teaming up to work towards promotion, creating an informal peer-to-peer mentoring partnership. It became relevant at our institution because of this exact scenario. Suddenly, a lack of tenure, or as it is called at the university, University Librarians, caused a loss for traditional mentoring. Therefore, peer-to-peer mentoring was the best option as seen by the two librarians. It is recognized that at times it may seem strange for two associate librarians working side by side to work towards promotion. It was the option that would work best in this case. This article will discuss what informal peer-to-peer mentoring is, how two academic librarians have used it at a university to benefit their careers, and some of the challenges involved as they embarked on their mentoring journey.

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Critique, Postcritique and Libraries

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by Mark Eaton
Reader Services Librarian / Professor
Kingsborough Community College Library
Brooklyn, New York

Abstract

This paper, adopting a perspective from the recent literature of “postcritique”, finds that criticism in librarianship can be constructively supplemented with other methodological approaches. Instead of exclusively using criticism to analyze, dismantle and find fault with texts, librarianship can expand its perspectives to find new reparative possibilities of care. Following the work of Nicholas Holm, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Rita Felski and others, we can see that while criticism has thrived as a disposition in librarianship and elsewhere, recent scholarly interventions suggest that it is not the only possible approach. This paper ultimately argues that a postcritical disposition can sit alongside a critical disposition, not as a replacement, but as an additive.

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