Tag Archives: equity

Zooma zooma zooma zoom

If you grew up in the 70s you might recognize that back then, Zoom was a PBS show for tweens/teens. Strange that today it is the way many of us work, learn, meet, and even socialize. It’s been a while since I’ve posted because it felt like I had nothing to say about COVID-19 librarianship that wasn’t being said elsewhere. And I was busy zooming, like many of you.

It was a strange summer, and much like other summers in an academic library, many of the projects I hoped to get to did not come to fruition. I wonder if we’ll ever finish weeding? But I did spend a lot of time thinking about how to approach information literacy instruction this fall.

For one thing, I want to be more collaborative, allowing students to co-create sessions with me by sharing their experiences and what they are interested in learning. I’ve worked on this to some extent in person, but man professors expect us to “teach the databases.” On Zoom, no one knows what to expect, so I feel this is chance to experiment more.

Which is great, but, I get “one shot” classes with students, where they may have met me in similar one shots but they know they’re not going to see me again this semester. It’s hard to feel invested quickly in collaborating with a near stranger. To build a little comradery in advance, I tried sending a link to a Padlet yesterday ahead of a class I had today, letting them know it was low stakes – no need to sign their post, no right or wrong answers, ok to say “I’m not sure.” One person responded to my prompt in advance.

If you’re curious, the prompt was, roughly, “Think of a time when you needed information outside of classes. How did you decide where to look for the info? How did you know whether it was accurate? How is your experience different when you have to find info for class?” I answered, so they’d have an example. I looked up when to get a flu shot. I was starting from a New York Times article, I took a link to the CDC, which is our national public health agency and is tasked with overseeing flu shots, so I knew the information between these two sources was a) as official as it comes in our “every man for himself” country and b) edited and fact checked by professional journalists. When I do an assignment, I check first to see what kind of sources are required.

In class I gave them five minutes to answer the prompt, since most people hadn’t yet, and realized many of them didn’t know how to add to a Padlet. I let there be an uncomfortable silence with very little typing. Finally I asked if anyone was wondering how to add to the Padlet. No one spoke. I said into the silence: “In case you ARE wondering, click the plus sign.” And repeated the low stakes spiel I’d put in my announcement ahead of class.

Some responses! Not much discussion. A little, and then I caught myself filling the silence, so I moved on to asking what they’d done so far with the assignment. The professor, likely sensing that Zoom seems to be an unlikely place for people who don’t know a guest speaker to open up, called on a student who she knew had found something interesting. She shared her screen. We talked about why it was interesting — a lobbyist wrote an article for a peer reviewed journal. It passed through peer review, with a conflict of interest statement. Cool — something to talk about!

This gave me an opening to work in another thing I vowed I will bring up in every instruction session this fall: equity. Who controls academic research and publishing? Whose voices are included? Whose are left out? Where is the power (which translates to authority in information literacy terms)? What groups are not studied? I was happy to see many heads nodding when I pointed out the equity issues in research.

So, that’s one class down. Not counting four nursing orientations I did with my coworker the last week. Which were little more than “we’re here for you, get in touch, here’s our website.” Where, by the way, we post photos of our pets.

Which got some smiles, and a tiny glimpse of human connection – the nursing students were on campus and we were off, so we couldn’t see them very well, since they were in a classroom and we were on . . . Zoom. They could see us, projected onto a big screen. I will hang onto those glimpses of eye contact and enthusiasm and try not to sweat the silence and the fear of admitting uncertainty and the worry about whether people are getting what I’m saying or wondering when I’m going to shut up.

Because really, Zoom is not that different than in person “one shot” sessions. It’s not a great way to teach, nor a great way to learn, having an hour or 90 minutes with a group, one time during the semester. I’d like to build relationships, get to know my students, even over technology. Over the summer, one student responded to a post I put in her course, inviting students to ask me for help with their research assignment. We “met” several times over the next two months, and I helped with each paper. I learned, over chat, and one attempt at Zoom, that she is a mom of three young kids, trying to get her associate’s degree while caring for them. By the end of the term, it felt like in some small way, we’d made a connection. I had glimpses of what she was juggling, how hard she was working to keep it all going. And what kind of help was most helpful.

So, can I keep co-creating learning with my students over Zoom, or in person, if I only get one shot at working with them? I can try. Being in their courses as Librarian helps, because I can post announcements with tips and a little bit of humor if possible, a little personality. So they know there is a person beyond the screen, someone who cares about their research success. Who really wants to hear about their experiences finding information — which I hope helps them see they are already competent researchers outside of class, and can easily be in class as well. And who is aware of racism and gender bias in research.

This year will be memorable, I am sure. I’m not going to predict which changes will last and which will be forgotten post COVID. But I’m trying to make the best of things, as we all are, and I think there is always room to learn from my students, even in Zoom, even “one shot” at a time.

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We’re fine without fines

I had an interesting conversation today with a student worker who wanted to know if we charge for replacement ID cards. I said no, and that even if there was a policy in the past, I was not in favor of charging students extra for things, especially since most students have little money. I pointed out that it’s possible a lost ID is at campus safety, so it might be good to ask the student to check there before having a new one made, but otherwise, just make the replacement. The student worker said they hadn’t heard a librarian say anything like that before.

We also don’t charge fines at my library, although if a book is never returned we do bill for replacement. one of our staff has been calling patrons with bills, and she said today that they don’t always believe there will be no charge if they return a long overdue item and some have even said they don’t return it out of fear of a big fine.

When I worked at a public library, “fine free” was becoming popular. In 2017, NY Public Library System president Anthony Marx wrote about some forays into fine amnesty and fine free borrowing for kids and noted that in response to those who worried about what fine free tells people about responsibility, “what is truly the greater moral hazard? Having fines or not having fines? In my view, teaching kids that the library is not an option for the poorest among them is absolutely unacceptable.” Indeed. It has always really frosted me when kids can’t use the library because of fines.

Because it turns out, library fees and fines are regressive. And now the Chicago Public Library has become the largest American library system to go fine free. Library Commissioner Andrea Telli had a similar response to the question of whether eliminating fines erodes accountability: “Libraries don’t necessarily want to be in the morality business, and we don’t want to make the assumption that if a book is late or someone can’t pay for a fine, that they’re delinquent or bad in some way; they may just be in a place in their life where they can’t pay the fine.”

Exactly. It turns out the value of returned items is often higher than that of fines collected, and that fines don’t deter people from returning items late — they just prevent people from feeling the library is for them. Which is not in line with the values of librarianship, or of human decency generally.

If the administrations that provide our funding want fines to be part of our budgets (which is not even necessarily the case — in Chicago, fines never went to the library), we need to help them learn about equity and inclusion, and stand with our colleagues who point out that we’re fine without fines, but excluding our patrons because they can’t pay is not fine.

 

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Full catastrophe living for libraries

Many years ago when I was first learning about mindfulness, I read John Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. He writes about how mindfulness — in brief, being in the moment, observing and nonjudgementally letting go of thoughts not related to being present in the moment — can help us deal with the “full catastrophe” of contemporary life, from actual physical pain or illness to the anxiety, panic, fear, and other uncomfortable emotional states we might be in as a reaction to things beyond our control. As I read American Libraries Direct the past two weeks I realized libraries are kind of in a full catastrophe moment along with the rest of the world.

In those two issues alone, there are articles about about the American Library Association’s and children’s literature authors’ stands on family separation at the border, about library equity issues such as the threat to LGBTQ books in Hong Kong, freedom of access to information issues, the long history of pubic libraries advocating for the poor or marginalized, librarian’s in the Iowa trying to help those in Puerto Rico still reeling from last year’s the hurricanes, and a man from Alabama leading a drive for books for his school district’s library (which it can’t afford) by climbing Mt Kilimanjaro. Meanwhile in the everyday trenches libraries of all kinds are facing flat or reduced budgets, position cuts or reductions (even directors in my state are part time in smaller libraries), and loss of school or even public libraries, depending on the state or country. Many of these issues result in contentious disagreements among people — sadly, almost everything in our culture now seems to be fraught with that possibility.

The good news is we as a profession can get through all of it — the full catastrophe — the same way individuals can get through their own. We can be professionally mindful, present for and with the people in our libraries. We can be mindful of what libraries bring to people, and how we approach our work. We can let our anxieties and fears about the future of our workplaces and our profession go, and focus on what’s right here now, which in my experience makes us even more open to trying new things, rather than being afraid of change.  In doing that, I predict, we’ll be ready to meet any catastrophe, we’ll thrive where we are, and our libraries will benefit and be welcoming places that meet our patrons’ needs.

In 2014 in this space I wrote, “What we do is awesome. What we do is community-building. What we do is hope-fueled and potentially narrative-changing. What we do can fill in the broken spaces in our communities, in our lives and the lives of those we serve. What we do is empowering — people can learn and grow and be their best selves because of the books and services and programs and presence we offer. What we do is shepherd the most egalitarian places in America. Our libraries when they are at their best are the very best of what our society can be.”  I was writing about public libraries but this describes academic libraries just as well. It’s full catastrophe some days, but we can handle it

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