“And I got bored when I didn't have a band
And so I started a band, man
We're gonna start it with a positive jam” — The Hold Steady
Two things about me: 1.) I love to turn ideas over in my head and 2.) I love to use writing as a way to think through an idea or a lived experience.
I love the exercise of taking idea apart, understanding its component pieces, and putting them back together in a way that helps me think about something differently. It’s an extreme example, but I wrote a dissertation about the history of land-grant colleges in the postbellum south because I worked at a land-grant university and didn’t understand what people meant when they talked about the land-grant mission.
Back in the 2010s, microblogging on Twitter was a good way to connect with colleagues and to build a professional voice and I used the site to work out, in real time, some of my favorite ideas about lived experience and library work. A blog that I co-authored for several years came out of that and, while I still used Twitter as a way to work out ideas, the blog became a place to build a community centered around the idea that library workers from different functional areas could work together toward a common goal: building a better library experience for users.
I took the seven years between 2017 and 2024 off from thinking about libraries beyond the limited scope of my day-to-day work. I posted less often on social media, and the blog I co-authored reached its natural conclusion. Instead of focusing on libraries and library work, I worked full-time and earned a doctorate in Higher Education. I learned a lot about nearly every aspect of how higher education “works,” from finance and economics to organization and governance to higher education policy to history. In learning about many of the “whys” that animate higher education, I became better at connecting the priorities of the university to the priorities and the day-to-day work of the library.
When I picked my head back up in 2024 to look at the landscape of librarianship, especially academic librarianship, it felt both oddly unchanged and deeply changed. As with any field, libraries continue to reckon with how they will respond to changes in society and how the changes in society shape them. New voices enter the field each year, bringing new lived experiences and new ideas with them.
The other thing I need to acknowledge here is that the work I’ve been engaged in since 2020 has been deeply rewarding, but sometimes difficult for me to describe. I’ve been employed in a variety of roles that included “Administrative Projects,” “Effectiveness,” “Strategy,” and “Impact” in their titles. These roles made use of soft(er) skills like facilitation, project design and management, process and procedure documentation, and data collection and reporting. I’m good at helping groups become their best selves, at designing and carrying out projects, and at identifying the infrastructure necessary to operationalize strategy and then getting people invested in building that infrastructure. Those skills are, in some ways, less straightforward to talk about than the work I did with metadata creation and remediation before I made the career pivot. People know what it means to be a cataloger. People are less familiar with what it means to a person who deals with organizational effectiveness.
My goal with picking back up with writing about ideas is not to recapture a time in the past. I loved being co-creator of a movement to build a “unified library scene,” but that doesn’t feel like my voice anymore and it doesn’t feel like what anybody needs in this moment.
I want to use this space to work out, in real time, how the academic library can use its unique collections, services, and spaces to support the strategic goals of the college or university. I want to use this space to think about we can build smarter workplaces through things like effective meeting facilitation. And I want to use this space to think about how we can be clear eyed about which user-facing services and which internal-facing workflows and practices we need to sunset in order to make space for what matters.
And in between, I want to share the books, TV shows, movies, music, and ideas that are catching my eye and holding my interest.
The “why” behind everything I do is to leave every space better than I found it through hard work and unwavering belief in what is possible. So let’s get to work. Let’s build something awesome together!
—E.
