Blog 12: Influencers!
(I wasn’t in class last week, so instead here are longer-form thoughts on rad library folks on social media!)
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 that Jessamyn served as part-time admin of at the time. I read some of her posts about being a radical library person in rural Vermont (I think at the time she had also started providing radical reference serves at Occupy Wall Street actions), and gradually found some of her work about teaching computer skills in public libraries. I sent Jessamyn an e-mail with questions about teaching a social media workshop, and she graciously provided her feedback on possible lessons, ethics, and in general how to engage the public on something like Twitter (I wanted to focus on hypothetical small businesses, for better or worse). Since then, Jessamyn has been a kind of guiding voice for me in librarianship – she is incredibly thoughtful about the role of technology in libraries, the digital divide, values and ethics in library spaces, and any number of thoughtful things.
In addition to Twitter, Jessamyn has an amazing Tiny Letter that is full of insight.
For instance, this letter tackles “is YouTube like a library? How do we visualize the digital divide? Ebooks: are they “stupid?” or not? Gun smuggling in public libraries!?” :
I found Twanna Hodge’s work through the webinar assignment! Twanna is an academic librarian engaged in critical librarianship and the open access movement.
As with the webinar on cultural humility and implicit bias, Hodge is vocal about contesting the blind-spots and defaults of whiteness in librarianship. I literally just discovered her work this week, but I’m already excited to learn from her perspective and hopefully identify the community of practice in which these ideas are amplified and implemented in an academic library context.
(Sidenote: Through Hodge’s Twitter, I discovered this incredible thread of Junot Diaz’s comments about whiteness in libraries [a retweet from another user of in-person JD comments]. An excerpt:
.I don't think white folks & ppl who are addicted to whiteness in libraries know how much pain you cause your fellow LOC. I don't think you are aware of the agony that you cause even by being wonderful and tolerant and being the friend that you go out to lunch with
.These institutions are agony for the folks of color, the folks of color know we sit around & talk about it all day. No, for real, but I wish the libraries would finally have a fucking reckoning and know that 88% white is 5000% agony for POC, & if we ain't gonna do nothing abt it
.Then we need to put down some of the claims about how libraries are these wonderful, Utopian, democratic instruments when our house itself resembles some f-ing nightmare? How are we trying to sell this institution to the larger culture as reparitive
.And we need to have this conversation it can't just be the folks of color getting up and being like"yo this place is breaking my heart" this place, these institutions are breaking our hearts.
.I think if a library that every wk doesn't have a meeting about how they're decolonizing and how they're trying to lower this white agony is a library that has no future. It's true, most of these libraries really deeply have no future (full thread)
Bethany Nowviskie is the Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation and digital humanities person at UVA. I have seen Nowviskie appear again and again in conversations about technology and libraries broadly, digital humanities in libraries, ethics and inclusion, etc. Nowviskie is very vocal on politics and progressive social issues broadly, and I believe exemplifies how to embrace this kind of politics-driven perspective in the field (while still contributing in profound ways to digital librarianship and digital humanities.)
Here is an example of Nowviskie helping to reframe a data visualization project (generating spark lines based on scholarly output at Northwestern) in the context of worker’s rights (penalizing workers for taking family/parental/medical leave).
Re: whiteness in libraries -- here is a social media collective designed specifically to support and amplify the needs of librarians who don’t fall in the 87% statistic. Retweets profiles of librarians of color, writing and research into inequality broadly, all kinds of things! A really value starting point and way to stay engaged continuously on issues of inclusion and equity.
One example of boosting a recent profile in Library Journal of Robin Bradford.
Andromeda is another extremely rad technology in libraries person who engages on a number of issues. She works with @ALA_LITA which blogs about library technology at http://www.ala.org/lita/ This is more about tech crticism broadly, but a very valuable crit.
Jessamyn West
@jessamynI 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 that Jessamyn served as part-time admin of at the time. I read some of her posts about being a radical library person in rural Vermont (I think at the time she had also started providing radical reference serves at Occupy Wall Street actions), and gradually found some of her work about teaching computer skills in public libraries. I sent Jessamyn an e-mail with questions about teaching a social media workshop, and she graciously provided her feedback on possible lessons, ethics, and in general how to engage the public on something like Twitter (I wanted to focus on hypothetical small businesses, for better or worse). Since then, Jessamyn has been a kind of guiding voice for me in librarianship – she is incredibly thoughtful about the role of technology in libraries, the digital divide, values and ethics in library spaces, and any number of thoughtful things.
In addition to Twitter, Jessamyn has an amazing Tiny Letter that is full of insight.
For instance, this letter tackles “is YouTube like a library? How do we visualize the digital divide? Ebooks: are they “stupid?” or not? Gun smuggling in public libraries!?” :
Twanna Hodge
@tkhodge19I found Twanna Hodge’s work through the webinar assignment! Twanna is an academic librarian engaged in critical librarianship and the open access movement.
As with the webinar on cultural humility and implicit bias, Hodge is vocal about contesting the blind-spots and defaults of whiteness in librarianship. I literally just discovered her work this week, but I’m already excited to learn from her perspective and hopefully identify the community of practice in which these ideas are amplified and implemented in an academic library context.
(Sidenote: Through Hodge’s Twitter, I discovered this incredible thread of Junot Diaz’s comments about whiteness in libraries [a retweet from another user of in-person JD comments]. An excerpt:
.I don't think white folks & ppl who are addicted to whiteness in libraries know how much pain you cause your fellow LOC. I don't think you are aware of the agony that you cause even by being wonderful and tolerant and being the friend that you go out to lunch with
.These institutions are agony for the folks of color, the folks of color know we sit around & talk about it all day. No, for real, but I wish the libraries would finally have a fucking reckoning and know that 88% white is 5000% agony for POC, & if we ain't gonna do nothing abt it
.Then we need to put down some of the claims about how libraries are these wonderful, Utopian, democratic instruments when our house itself resembles some f-ing nightmare? How are we trying to sell this institution to the larger culture as reparitive
.And we need to have this conversation it can't just be the folks of color getting up and being like"yo this place is breaking my heart" this place, these institutions are breaking our hearts.
.I think if a library that every wk doesn't have a meeting about how they're decolonizing and how they're trying to lower this white agony is a library that has no future. It's true, most of these libraries really deeply have no future (full thread)
Bethany Nowviskie
@nowviskieBethany Nowviskie is the Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation and digital humanities person at UVA. I have seen Nowviskie appear again and again in conversations about technology and libraries broadly, digital humanities in libraries, ethics and inclusion, etc. Nowviskie is very vocal on politics and progressive social issues broadly, and I believe exemplifies how to embrace this kind of politics-driven perspective in the field (while still contributing in profound ways to digital librarianship and digital humanities.)
Here is an example of Nowviskie helping to reframe a data visualization project (generating spark lines based on scholarly output at Northwestern) in the context of worker’s rights (penalizing workers for taking family/parental/medical leave).
We Here
@librarieswehereRe: whiteness in libraries -- here is a social media collective designed specifically to support and amplify the needs of librarians who don’t fall in the 87% statistic. Retweets profiles of librarians of color, writing and research into inequality broadly, all kinds of things! A really value starting point and way to stay engaged continuously on issues of inclusion and equity.
One example of boosting a recent profile in Library Journal of Robin Bradford.
Andromeda Yelton
@ThatAndromedaAndromeda is another extremely rad technology in libraries person who engages on a number of issues. She works with @ALA_LITA which blogs about library technology at http://www.ala.org/lita/ This is more about tech crticism broadly, but a very valuable crit.
These are all great profiles, Zoë! I checked out @librarieswehere and saw that it was founded by Jennifer Ferretti, who was one of the librarians I met at the Collective conference last year and is also one of the librarians I looked at as an influencer! One of the things she talked about at the conference was creating the Lemonade lib guide at MICA, which I definitely recommend checking out: http://libguides.mica.edu/lemonade
ReplyDelete(FYI, she's a newly inducted Mover& Shaker too! https://lj.libraryjournal.com/2018/03/people/movers-shakers-2018/jennifer-a-ferretti-movers-shakers-2018-community-builders/)
I included Jessamyn West as well, having been peripherally aware of her for a while but never gotten around to actually reading much of what she's contributed to conversations in the field. Very cool perspective! Cool to hear of your interaction with her as well, and thanks for the links to the Tiny Letter, etc!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you included Jessamyn West in your list, as she was the first "influencer" in the library world that I somehow stumbled upon back when I was in high school and volunteering at my local public library. I've been a bit out of the library social media loop since starting school, however, so I wasn't aware of her Tiny Letter mailing list or archives - thanks for sharing that!
ReplyDeleteAlso, the tweets you've copied here regarding whiteness in libraries were eye-opening. I was already well-aware of how white the librarian profession is, and I knew that libraries generally aren't doing enough for their librarians and patrons of color, but I didn't realize the extent to which libraries were failing them. The tweet about how librarians need to be having discussions about decolonizing library spaces reminded me of this upcoming conference that I am hoping to be able to attend... (http://salalm2018.colmex.mx/conference-theme/)