Here is what was on the agenda for this week:

• International Student Workshop II
• Introduction to LibAnswer and Libinsights
• Exhibit Logistics Check-in Meeting with Supervisor
• Meeting and Tour in the Libraries Technical Services Building
• ALAO Conference
• Pop-Up Exhibit for Día de los Muertos

I will only be discussing in detail the pop-up exhibit. If you are interested in hearing more about the Academic Library Association of Ohio 2019 conference, check out my overview here.

The day that we have been prepping for since early September finally arrived! We had our Día de los Muertos adjacent Pop-Up Exhibit in the Cartoon Library and Museum. The scope of the exhibit was pretty broad and consisted of items from our special collections, some of our newest acquisitions from SÕL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo, and other comics and graphic novels currently in the collection. My job was to find items that fit under Immigration, Migration, and Mobility.The image below is a table featuring the many graphic novels I found in our collections related to the topic, including:

• The Arrival by Shaun Tan
• The Four Immigrants Manga: a Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 2904-1924 by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama
• Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons on Immigration by Lalo Alcaraz
• Étrange by Jérôme Ruillier
• Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life by Alberto Ledesma
• The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui

The Immigration, Migration and Mobility theme also led me to pull many political cartoons and original art by Bill Schorr, Eric J. Garcia, Kate Salley Palmer, and many other who had very poignant commentaries on immigration in the United States. My supervisor was in charge of pulling and transporting the special collections items which included original Jose Guadalupe Posada broadsides. Overall, the exhibit was a great success. We had over 130 people come in and take a look around. I was especially excited to see people interested in the graphic novels I pulled as well as the material acquired from SÕL-CON. I was worried that people would not want to touch any of the material we left out for them, so I would often go around and handle the material, signalling that it is okay to touch this stuff. Whats the point of even having this material if no one can see it or touch it?

I was not tasked with any of the logistics of the exhibit this time, but next year, I might be heading the charge! Aside from stopping by the exhibit to see if they could use extra help, my partner and I were given the freedom to explore the other events happening for the larger Día de los Muertos celebration. We drank hot chocolate, ate tamales and pan de muerto, checked out the altar where people left items for their loved ones, and explored the gallery exhibits in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

The planning and execution of this exhibit was helpful in a lot of ways. It taught me how to find material in our circulating and special collections, who most important people are when you need logistical support, and what the execution of a pop-up exhibit looks like from start to finish. I have plenty of experience in programming and exhibit planning, my past experience has been on a much smaller scale. I was also able to watch how my supervisor interacted with patrons. As someone who is very shy, I was blown away with how willing my supervisor was to just start talking to people about what they were looking at. This event was also an opportunity to network with some of the faculty in the department, demonstrating to them what we have in our collections and ways in which they might incorporate these materials into their classes.

Now that this event is over we can focus on our other collaborative efforts. Stay tuned for what we do next!

Long time no see! I want to pop in here and share some things I have been reading/watching along with my election thoughts.

Both the Parts and the Whole: Leadership and Systems Thinking I read this in preparation for a meeting with my supervisor. I mentioned that I was interested in learning more about systems thinking so this was her suggestion. I thought this was a really helpful introduction into systems thinking and I found it easy to frame examples from my own life with a systems thinking approach.

• Takeaway 1: Today’s solutions can become tomorrows problems if they are not well thought out (i.e. we look at the whole system and not just the problem in front of us). We must balance quick fixes with long term solutions so that we minimize the problems we run into later. Shooting the alligator vs draining the swamp.
• Key Takeaway 2: Goal Displacement is what happens when we focus more on the “how” (i.e. bureaucratic processes) instead of the “why” (our organizational goals and values). I think many of us can find examples of this in our organizations.
• Key Takeaway 3: We do not want systems with a lot of friction. Friction leads to exhaustion, cynicism and apathy.

Thinking in Systems (Chapter 1) In this introductory chapter, I got a more in-depth overview of systems thinking.

• When we are looking at systems (which are made up of elements, interconnections, and functions), pay less attention to the elements, and more attention to those interconnections or relationships.
• If you want to know what the function/purpose of a system is, just look at what it does. Stated goals and aspirations are not the same as a systems function/purpose. This can be seen when we talk about anti-racism work. We can say we are doing the work, but if we aren’t ACTUALLY doing the work, it will be obvious.

Are white women going to fuck it up again in 2020 In this video, Kimberly Foster interviews Jenna Arnold, author of Raising Our Hands: How White Women Can Stop Avoiding Hard Conversations, Start Accepting Responsibility, and Find Our Place on the New Frontlines.

• This video really reinforced meeting people where they are. It makes no sense for me to give my Tr*mp-voting aunt a James Baldwin book and to expect her to read it AND to understand it. We must work hard to talk to the communities we are accepted into. I am trying to navigate how to have these conversations within my own family.
• White progressive women need to practice more humility and stop performing wokeness for each other. This point comes from an observation Jenna made during her research. She talked about how progressive white women could never really get to the meat of conversations with each other. There was very little curiosity and a lot of one-upping each other on the fine details and nuances of social justice issues which obviously isn’t very conducive to action or progress.
• Somewhat relatedly, this video reminded me of White Supremacy Cultures’ role in reinforcing this behavior from white women (and people in general). Off the top of my head, I think about defensiveness and perfectionism as characteristics of White Supremacy Culture and how this overlapped with what Jenna saw in her research.

From Being to Doing: AntiRacism as Action at Work This was a an ALAO conference session by Ione Damasco that I watched asynchronously. I am always interested in how we can go beyond talking about issues to putting in some actual work.

• Ione’s presentation went through some of the characteristics of White Supremacy Culture and offered liberating actions we could take against those characteristics.
• My biggest takeaway from this presentation was the mention of generous accountability coined by McKensie Mack.

Shifting the Center: Transforming Academic Libraries through Generous Accountability I wanted to see the context in which the term generous accountability was used, so I watched this presentation by McKensie Mack (they/them/theirs).

• McKensie also discusses how White Supremacy Culture and how libraries continue to perpetuate the characteristics. They also touched on how White Supremacy Culture makes accountability feel punitive, bad and scary due to the focus on defensiveness, perfectionism, etc.
• McKensie reminds us that accountability should not be seen as punishment! This made me think about previous conversations I’ve had with people about cultural humility (or just humility) and being able to accept being wrong, learning from mistakes, and moving forward. Can you even imagine accountability that does not feel like punishment? This is something I will have to work hard to unlearn.

Challenging the Good Fit Narrative: Creating Inclusive Recruitment Practices in Academic Libraries I read this article for a workplace discussion on EDI and this was pretty eye-opening. It talks about this notion of a candidate being a “good fit” and how this can be coded language to exclude people of color (or anyone outside the white supremacy culture norm) from the organization. I thought this was super interesting, especially how the research shows that most people can’t even articulate what a “good fit” is, but use it as a way to exclude people. Obviously there was a conversation about how this takes so many diverse candidates out out of the pool. This then leaves the impression that there aren’t enough people of color out there and is the reason why our organizations diversity percentages are pathetic. The authors talk about “extending fit” vs. “good fit” and how we should consider the former. We might actually want people who will come in and challenge the ways we see and do things. This is how our organizations can evolve. So those are some of the things that have been percolating in my brain the last couple of weeks! Let me know if you read/watch any of them and have any thoughts. As of writing this, Joe Biden won the Presidential Election and this has drudged up a lot of things to think about. I am relieved, but has shown me how the systems we are part of at a micro level are mirrored at a micro level. Let me explain. We talk a lot about anti-racism work in libraries and how it should not be the responsibility of BIPOC to educate folks or to do the work on their own (and without compensation!) Everyone has a part to play, not just BIPOC. And most of the time, BIPOC are already doing the work with no credit or compensation OR with very tokenized acts of acknowledgement. Now look at the voting demographics of this election, where we see Black people showing up for our democracy, leading many grass-roots organizations, and building communities despite the obstacle placed in front of them while the white vote continues to be split (weighed on the Tr*mp side). People on social media are thanking black voters and Georgia and I get that sentiment. But instead of thanking them, how about we actually listen to Black people? organize with Black organizers? pay Black organizers for their work? rebuild the systems that systematically oppresses Black people? listen to Black folks? A familiar scene, just at a national level. I’m not trying to be a bummer. I just wanted to share how jarring it was to make that connection between those two situations. Anyways. I hope wherever you are, that you are staying safe and that you can breathe a little bit easier tonight. I know I can.

This blog post was originally written on November 08, 2020

It’s been a little over a year since I began my diversity resident experience. More interesting is the fact that I have spent half of my time working from home because of the pandemic. Sometimes I wonder how different my experience as a resident would have been had the pandemic not happened.

• Would I have nailed my lightning talk at SALALM?
• Would I have learned some cool stuff at HILT about text encoding?
• Would I have been closer to publishing something?

When I ask myself these questions, I guess what I am really asking is if I would have been further ahead by now. But what does further ahead mean and why does it matter?

Success in the tenure-track academic sphere is measured by how much you are willing to (over)exert yourself to produce things: papers, presentations, service, etc. There is the expectation that you work more than your 40 hours with the justification that its okay because your hours are flexible as faculty. When you combine these expectations with the fact that I am on borrowed time, I feel this immense pressure to succeed in order to ensure that my CV will need to be competitive for the (hopefully) post-COVID job market.

So what does this have to do with my one-year anniversary as a resident?

I’ve been reflecting on this definition of success and am at the point where I am questioning if that definition is what I want. Do I want my career to be so focused on measures of success that are outside of my control and dictated to me by my organization and the larger higher education culture (which happens to overlap with White Supremacy Culture)? Hell no. But if I want to be an academic librarian, am I resigned to conform to the system? I don’t know yet.

So in this first year, I’m still negotiating how much of myself I want to give to the profession. Do I want everything I do to be defined by my job? Or do I want to carve space for myself to explore things that bring me joy outside of my work. These are the questions that will guide me into my second year. What is the balance that works for me?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am so glad to be celebrating my first year as an academic librarian. The amount of growth I have seen in myself both personally and professionally has been remarkable. I even had the opportunity to be the Latin American Studies Librarian for five months! And at the same time, I have witnessed (first-hand and second-hand) how unwelcoming at the individual and institutional levels how our profession can be to those who identify as BIPOC. These experiences live side-by-side every single day and I am not sure I would have these perspectives if I wasn’t a resident.

For that, I am weirdly thankful.

I’ve had my first okay night of sleep in a while, and my chest has started to loosen up a bit, but my anxiety and depression are still lurking in the background.

I objectively love my job. I am grateful to be in the position that I am in and grateful that I get to work with the people that I do, and I love the work that I do! But some days, its all just too hard. With the weather changing and my already existing anxiety and depression, I am continually struggling to just wake up and get out of bed most days.

Anxiety, depression, and a new job are the perfect storm for a bad time. There are so many new things to learn, people to meet, and things to do. My anxiety and depression also feed into my impostor syndrome, and they all work together to make me feel incompetent. When I am having a bad mental health period, my job feels like a burden. I am not excited to learn new things or meet new people or continue learning skills. Instead, I feel burdened by these responsibilities. And the more I feel burdened, the more I feel dread. The more dread I feel, the harder it is too wake up to go to work. Lately, its this self-fulfilling cycle that has been harder and harder to escape.

It feels like right now, I am just getting by. Only doing the things that are absolutely necessary for my job as a resident librarian. And that sucks because I want to do amazing things and be a great librarian. But instead, I feel incompetent that I am so easily overwhelmed. I feel incompetent when I spend too long on an assignment or when I feel like a reference meeting I had with students wasn’t very helpful. And despite peoples validation of my work, I still feel incompetent. Like I am not doing enough. Like I am not thinking hard enough. Not trying hard enough.

And in my worst times, my anxiety and depression make me question what I am even doing as a librarian:

How can you expect to be in a tenure track position when you can’t even handle a residency?

How do you expect to be a librarian when you suck at communicating?

How do you expect to be amazing at outreach when you are so bad at talking to people?

Anxiety and depression trick you into perceiving things in the worst way possible. They can really skew your assessment of your job and make you question whether or not you are supposed to be doing this job. Is this my anxiety and depression sending me these bad signals or is librarianship just not for me? And you can imagine the crisis that follows.

Anyway. I write this to mostly vent. But I also hope that someone else out there might read this and feel validated, or at the very least, seen. The more we talk about mental health and mental illness and the workplace, the better.

Living with mental illness is hard but one of the best things I can do for myself are to have some self-compassion and celebrate the little things (like sharing this blog post).

My first conference to kick-off this series of blog posts was the Academic Library Association of Ohio conference hosted in Columbus, Ohio. The conference’s broad theme was “Libraries Speak Up! Advocate. Collaborate. Educate.” I was really excited to attend this conference for a number of reasons:

1. It was local.
2. It would be my second conference ever.
3. I love learning about how libraries can be agents for change in society.
4. I would get to network with other Ohio Librarians.

But lets get into the criteria that I have laid out for conference posts:

Organization: Overall, I think this conference was organized really well. There were a couple of hiccups throughout the day, but none of which were detrimental to my experience. For example, registration was a fairly smooth process, but the registration table was in a place where if the line got long enough, it was out the door and in the cold. Another issue I ran into was the lack of clarity when it came to the conference session locations. As we all exited the ballroom for the first sessions, I must have looked extremely confused because a kind woman asked me if I needed help finding where I needed to go. She ended up walking me to my first session. Admittedly, this is partially user error. Looking back on the conference website, I found the document that had the sessions and their corresponding rooms, but I swear that I couldn’t locate the digital document during the conference to save my life. Later on, I found a physical document telling me where each session was held and it was smooth sailing from there. Parking/drop-off options were clear, and the sessions I attended were considerate of time.

Impact: I attended the key note and 3 out of the 4 session time slots, opting to take a break during the session 3 time slot. I found our keynote to be really great. They were very frank and honest while also being inspiring and hopeful. Some of the initiatives that they undertook on their campus were really cool and I hope that the other librarians found their speech to be as important as I did.

The first session I attended was “Speaking Up with Special Collections: Connecting Campus History with Current Challenges” and I left this session inspired to advocate for student groups to donate their stuff to University Archives, especially student groups that are doing important social justice work on campus. I also thought it was awesome that one of the presenters was an undergraduate student.

The second session I attended was “Doing Democracy with Libraries as Leaders: Collaboration and Development of Integrated Plans for Civic Engagement on College Campuses”. I’m not sure I left this session inspired per se, but I did find it interesting to learn about how other libraries approach potentially politically charged topics in a non-partisan way. I was also happy to hear the ways in which this librarian discussed engagement with communities that may not be able to participate in our democratic system (like undocumented students, permanent residents, and their families).

The third session I attended was “Great Minds Think Alike: Expanding Outreach through Community Partnerships”. This presentation was awesome! I thought the slides looked amazing (I am a sucker for good visuals!), and the content was relevant and helpful. I also appreciated that this librarian used interactive elements in her presentation. I have an interest in how Academic Libraries can work with community partners and public libraries to do some great stuff, and this presentation really hit the nail on the head when it came to demonstrating examples of these partnerships. I was super inspired to think about ways in which my library could collaborate with public libraries (something that my supervisor and I are now working on!)

I also made some great connections with previous residents, other librarians from Ohio State, and librarians interested in residency programs.

Accessibility: From what I saw, the conference center and conference organization were very amenable to accommodations for differently-abled persons as well as being conscious of non-binary identities. Everything was on one floor making it more easily accessible to those in wheel chairs and walkers. I will say that I found some seating arrangements to be pretty tight and not sure how someone with a wheel chair would fare during certain sessions. The conference center did have gender-neutral bathrooms, but they were a bit of a walk away compared to the other bathrooms. There was also an opportunity to note what your preferred pronouns were. I can’t speak well to how parent friendly the conference was. There was no day care that I know of and did not pay attention to whether or not their were lactation rooms.

Visible Diversity: The visible diversity was about what you would expect from a library conference in Ohio. It was not great. If I had to give an estimate, I would say that about 1 in 9 persons there were visible diverse. Again, I would take this with a grain of salt for all the reasons listed in the introduction post.

Food: We were provided breakfast (which I did not have), lunch with desserts, and snacks. The food was buffet style where you would go down a line and grab what you wanted which I thought had its pros and cons. My second session finished earlier than some of the others and allowed us to be toward the beginning of what then became a very long line. I think I would have preferred lunch to be served to us to avoid that issue but it wasn’t all that bad. There were vegan and vegetarian options and I think it accommodated many different food preferences well. I actually really enjoyed the lunch options and the plates that they provided were huge! This helped you fit everything you wanted onto the plate without having to wait in the long line for a second time. Snacks, drinks and coffee were self-serve and available at anytime which I thought was really great.

Overall experience: I had a great and productive time at the ALAO 2019 conference. I was able to network with many different librarians and hear about some really awesome projects and ideas. The overall environment was inviting and supportive and I look forward to attending the conference again!

Here is what this week had in store for me:

• affordable learning committee meeting
• impromptu reference session with a grad student
• exhibit informational meeting
• cohort exhibit planning
• meeting with supervisor
• tour of book depository and University Archives
• first time taking the campus bus
• coffee with Vice Provost of libraries
• digital flagship course
• junior faculty writing group

Part of my position as a Resident Librarian (especially this early into my position) is information gathering. You will notice that I spend a lot of time weaving in and out of different meetings because I am currently assessing whats going on here at the libraries. The Affordable Learning Committee, Meeting with Exhibitions coordinator, Tours, and coffee with the Vice Provost are reflections of this information gathering. This week it felt a little overwhelming to have so many information heavy sessions. As my first full-time job, it has been hard to navigate so much information and I think part of this difficulty is that I pressure myself into thinking I have to get the hang of it all now and know everything about this place. This has been something I have been struggling with since I started my position and I am trying to practice some self-compassion to try and get out of my own head.

In-terms of specific meetings, our visit to University Archives and the Book Depository were some of the most memorable meetings from the week. In order to get to this facility, my colleague and I had to take the bus for the first time as this facility is on the other side of campus. On the right, you can see an image I took from the book depository. That hallway is 250 long, and the shelves are 30 feet high. There are at least 8 of these stacks in the Book Depository, and there are plans to add more in the future. I was so completely fascinated by the logistics of this facility. They store items based on size, not subject, and the way the various sized storage boxes are designed lead to optimum space-usage. It was absolutely incredible.

In less-than-incredible experiences, a colleague had a student that needed help with finding specific resources for research and I completely blundered through trying to help him find what he needed. After explaining the situation to my supervisor, she explained that it might not have been able to find what he needed in the first place (at least not easily) and that I did not have to feel like I needed to deliver sources right then and there in that meeting. This was especially helpful in reframing reference questions for me. As someone who has never done reference, I have always felt like I had to know where everything is off the top of my head. But now I know that it is okay to take a couple of days to think on a request, and the importance of asking the patron questions! In my social anxiety, I completely forgot to ask vital questions like name, professor, time-line etc. It was one of those situations where in the moment I felt very unqualified and silly, but after I could laugh and say “better luck next time!”

My meeting with the Exhibits Coordinator was interesting. It was mostly a meeting to see their face and know they are an important resource to know and lean on when the time comes. I love exhibits and programming, so I had a lot of fun picking their brain about the logistics of their services to the libraries. I’d almost consider a position like that!

I also learned a lot about grants and other sources of funding at the coffee meeting with the Vice Provost. These coffees are set-up as informal gatherings where we can sign up to chat with him and let him know what we are up to, any issues we want to address, etc. I thought this was super cool and signed-up just to check it out. The topics for the meeting varied by what my other colleagues wanted to discuss, and the topic turned to grant and donations. I think this meeting highlighted a whole part of the libraries system that I never thought about before.

Overall, it was a pretty busy week, but I got to explore a variety of different areas that function within the library. I also had to come to terms with my own anxiety and perfectionism when it came to this position. It is detrimental to my mental health (and my position) to be so caught up in thinking that I have to know everything and beating myself up when I don’t. The beauty of a residency is that I have more room to make mistakes, take risks and continue to grow into the librarian I want to be!