Zoë WS in SI 643

(I wasn’t in class last week, so instead here are longer-form thoughts on rad library folks on social media!) Jessamyn West @jessamyn I know I won’t be unique in putting Jessamyn Weset on my list. Jessamyn was one of the people who drew me into librarianship in the first place. In 2011, just after graduating undergrad, I started serving in an AmeriCorps program called the Community Technology Empowerment Project in Saint Paul, Minnesota targeting the digital divide in the city. I was placed in the busy Rondo Community Outreach Library in Saint Paul and started to design and teach basic computer classes – everything from how to double-click to making functions in Excel. I was thrilled, inexperienced, enthusiastic, freaked out… I had to go in every day and just try stuff (in the way that AmeriCorps often involves lots of reinventing the wheel, unfortunately) and I definitely needed guidance. I found Jessamyn’s work via a popular old-school web community that I frequented, and tha...

Previous class (Note these notes are from the ethics workshop week) It was fascinating to create a space with classmates/fellow future library folk where we could engage ethics in libraries from so many angles. Our sessions touched on ethics in the self-presentation of libraries (online and in job listings), in the conduct of librarians dealing with difficult patrons behaviors and situations that imply conflict between values (e.g. the conflict between free access to information and creative a safe public space with pornographic viewing, librarians administering Narcan, etc.), and meta-conversations about how we can find support going through these ethical decision-making processes and appreciate the complexity of these arguments (by for example forcing ourselves to take opposing sides). On the whole, I definitely walked away feeling like I just had a really thorough check-in with my own ethical processes. Over the last few years, I have gone through a kind of stereotypical 20-so...

Class Notes  Book club class! I really enjoyed taking part in our book club sessions as both a participant and facilitator. The rotating structure to the bookclub was a function of necessity for the class, but I actually think having this kind of rotating facilitator group could work really well within a library workshop context! I’m imagining a kind of skill-share collective where folks take turn leading a discussion -- perhaps among librarian staff members, or a mixture of librarians and students. (And perhaps this is idealistic, but I love the democratic/participatory feel of it.)  I absolutely loved Grimm’s Cinderella. I was pretty unfamiliar with Cinderella and entirely unfamiliar with Grimm’s version, which I imagined would be gory and sweetly dark in the Grimm Brothers’ style (which it certainly was!) We came up with a headcannon ( https://fanlore.org/wiki/Headcanon ) of Cinderella as a punky witch subverting the patriarchy, which was lovely (and maybe, like, 70% ...