Short talks and paper presentations
Academic Libraries and Student Homelessness Before and After COVID-19
While public library’s awareness of patron’s housing depravation are well-documented, academic libraries’ understanding of student homelessness is limited. This paper will describe research conducted in 2019 on academic library supports for students experiencing housing insecurity, and updated in 2022 addressing the impacts of COVID-19 on students’ basic needs.
Presenter: Vikki C. Terrile
Building Community for Library Workers with Disabilities
This session will discuss the importance of community-building for library workers with disabilities due to the lack of professional support systems and disability inclusion. Participants will gain a better understanding of the reality of disability within our field, barriers to accessible workplaces, and ideas to improve our community going forward.
Presenters: Katie Quirin Manwiller; Brea McQueen
The Clash of the Commons: An Imagined Library Commons Discourse
The commons has been adopted by LIS as a metaphor for transformational library spaces. However, postcolonial scholarship exposes the violence and exclusionary practices that coincide(ed) with commons-making in Europe and North America. This paper historicizes such critiques to unsettle the American library’s view of the commons “as an unambiguous good.”
Presenter: Emily Benoff
Chronicling Inequity through Culture: The Association for Cultural Equity and the Alan Lomax Archive
Alan Lomax was a documentarian, ethnologist, cultural activist, and folklorist of the 20th century. This paper will explore Alan Lomax’s pivotal role in paving the way for equitable future by chronicling, recording, and archiving authentic American music including roots in Blues and Gospel, and helping to make underrepresented voices heard.
Presenter: William Blick
Digital Scholarship at the Edge of the Nothing
On January 21, 2022, without warning, Queens College IT cut off access to 8,000 sites representing 12 years of teaching, learning, and scholarship published to our digital writing platform. This paper addresses how structural vulnerabilities threaten digital archives and perpetuate the archival erasure of work by marginalized students at CUNY.
Presenter: Leila Walker
Dressing Down: Sexism, Classism, and Racism in “Professional Attire” in Libraries
The image of the librarian is one that has been rife with conflict for years. Professional attire, or business casual attire in university librarian positions limits people’s ability to express themselves under the guise of “professionalism”. This presentation looks at professional dress and it’s effects on the profession.
Presenter: Jenni Jacobs
Exclusionary Architecture: Physical Barriers to Accessing a Children’s Collection
An ostensibly open collection, the stacks that house CCNY’s children’s collection are enclosed in a viscerally carceral black fence, aka “book jail”. This presentation details the current state of the physical space, outlines the ongoing work being done on the collection, and envisions a better future for it.
Presenter: Sarah B. Cohn
The Information Undercommons, or, What Even is the Library School?
The critical and cunning use of information increasingly demands knowledge that is bound up by various forms of gate-keeping, such as trade secrets, the education system and the academic publishing racket. How can the library school operate in a third university paradigm, to work against this status quo?
Presenter: James Lowry
In the Framework, The Information Literate Individual is White
Taking its cue from Critical Discourse Analysis, Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, and Habits of White Language (HOWL) Supremacy, this presentation illustrates how the foundational image of the information literate individual lying at the heart of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy is coded as white.
Presenter: Anders Tobiason
Local Circulation Policies as Barriers for Readers of Non-territorial Languages
Common library circulation policies assume that patrons are sedentary and can pose barriers to access for economically and/or culturally itinerant populations. This presentation outlines how the expansion of existing consortial practices to transnational scales could help to dismantle these barriers, with particular benefit for the preservation of non-territorial minority languages.
Presenter: Reyzl Grace MoChridhe
Monuments to the “College Experience”: Academic Libraries as Institutional Propaganda
Academic library architecture serves as a physical monument to promote the university’s prestige and exclusivity. Libraries are touted on campus tours to sell the “traditional college experience.” But for whom? This presentation proposes library built environments convey a power narrative that, historically, codes as White and male.
Presenter: Ashley Hosbach
The Neutrality Myth: Exploring the Invisible Stories our Spaces Tell
The idea of libraries as neutral is a myth. What we know is libraries have never been neutral spaces as anti-racist and social justice research gains traction in our field, the role of library spaces as part of the neutrality myth is only just beginning to be acknowledged and explored
Presenters: Breanne Crumpton; Kelly C. Rhodes
The Politics of Intellectual Freedom in the 1930s-1950s American Librarianship
This presentation will explore ALA’s decision to mobilize an Intellectual Freedom discourse– rather than a civil rights one–in response to the firing of the head librarian in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1950. This event will be used as a lens through which to view the politics of librarianship in postwar America.
Presenter: Jonathan Cope
Preferred Names & Gender at CUNY: LGBTQ Advocacy Work
This presentation will offer a short history of the activism and advocacy around issues of preferred name and gender change across CUNY. The talk will highlight recent improvements in awareness and a streamlined system to make these changes – especially critical for LGBTQ-identified students and CUNY employees.
Presenter: Elvis Bakaitis
Reckoning with the Wounds of Coloniality in Information Literacy
Libraries and their agents must acknowledge the role of information literacy in reinforcing colonial wounds. Methods of western knowledge production reinforce the dominance of capitalism and modernity resulting in colonialism and epistemicide. We must reckon with our methods of discussing western epistemologies to heal colonial wounds rather than deepen them.
Presenter: Adrianna Martinez
Sharing for the greater good: How resource sharing and interlibrary loan challenge unequal informational structures (but it’s a struggle)
Operating in an information landscape that is centered in the Global North and that reproduces structural inequities, I argue that resource sharing fundamentally challenges hegemonic structures, but that it is also conditioned by them. It takes work to truly challenge those structures, and I propose some strategies.
Presenter: J. Silvia Cho
“What are you, really?” Multiracial Library Workers’ Experiences in Libraries
Although there is a welcome increase in attention to issues of diversity, equity, and ways to fight back against micro (and macro) aggressions in the library field, there has been little—if any—inclusion of the voices of multiracial library workers in these discussions. This paper is a start.
Presenter: Diana K. Wakimoto
Interactive Sessions
Built to Belong: A student-driven approach to designing library spaces (interactive)
Creating a place of inclusion and belonging requires thoughtful planning. Including students in the initial ideas phase provides insight into what makes a space welcoming, safe and comfortable for them. Attendees will learn how a research university designed a participatory project to engage student researchers in designing an inclusive space.
Presenters: Renee Kiner; Leslie Poljak; Rachel Rubin; Diana Dill
Budgets as storytelling: Using narrative budgets to advocate for support
This interactive session will outline a case study for developing a narrative budget based on the model created by Doralynn Rossman where the focus is on telling a story of impact to request fiscal support. Participants will develop their own versions to apply to their institutional context.
Presenter: Cinthya Ippoliti
Search and destroy: Interrogations on power dynamics in the library classroom
This interactive presentation will explore power structures in the library classroom. Presenters and participants will examine the database demonstration, the ‘sage on stage’, and instructional design to surface implied power dynamics in teaching. Presenters will also posit questions and explorations around the power dynamics behind knowledge production and access.
Presenters: Ava Brillat; Shatha Baydoun
Panel Presentations
As You Like It: Black Labor, White Comfort, & DEI Theater
A panel of Black librarians discuss what the DEI industrial complex is, how it promotes and re-ascribes current systemic and institutional status quos that have been re-presented in new and more palatable ways, and how this does harm to Black librarians and bars access to the LIS profession.
Presenters: Brea McQueen; Alexandria Brown; Anastasia “Stacy” Collins
Imposter Syndrome in Academic Libraries: Indigenous Women Edition
This panel will be examining the feelings of otherness and the various barriers self-doubt can create for Canadian Indigenous librarians in academia. This talk falls under the libraries and feelings category, for we will delve into the personal accounts of three Indigenous library workers.
Presenters: Emilee Bews; Kaia MacLeod; Bethany Paul
Neuroatypical Navigation in the Library: Students Renovate and Redesign The Library for Success
The instructor and students will share highlights from our course “Disability and Equity in the Library,” which includes several neurodivergent students and those with anxiety. During this class, the students have reflected on their learning needs and conducted research to design proposals to redesign library space and services.
Presenters: Jess deCourcy Hinds and students
ScholCom and OER Fellowship: Pathways for New Librarians within CUNY
This panel focuses on the experience of four CUNY Office of Library Services (OLS) Fellows and how their work around scholarly communications and open educational resources fosters the future practice of librarianship at CUNY and professional growth of GSLIS graduate students.
Presenters: Rachael Nevins; Elizabeth Arestyl; Eric Silberberg; Ellis Ging
Alternative Sessions
Research Impact Fluxkit: A Playful Exploration of Research Assessment
Librarians sure do love their toolkits—but what happens when the tools we use reinforce systems of discrimination and exclusion? The Research Impact Fluxkit is a playful and interactive interpretation of the library toolkit intended to spark discussion about how we assess the impact of our research.
Presenter: Erica Finch
