-
Meditations on civility in the library
Reflection #1: Meditations on civility in the library While exploring Module 5 this week, I was drawn to Dixon’s (2017) article on facilitating community dialogues in the library. It percolated in my mind alongside Ashley West’s Assignment X on radical trust and some ongoing thoughts I have about community, civility, and conviviality. Now, bear in mind that I have just been diving into some Wendell Berry (if the nod to conviviality did not give it away), but also that I am taking this course alongside one on critical librarianship. So, I am currently preoccupied with notions of affection, obligation, ethics, and values. On the one hand, I am inspired by…
-
Assignment X: The fearless library
The fearless library What would a fearless library look like? How does our fear influence our services and our spaces? Do our libraries cleave to safety so steadfastly that we slow innovation? For this blog post, I looked deeper into the intersections of fear and librarianship. I hope that this small excavation of anxieties allows us to step further out of our silos and towards a spirit of collaborative design with our communities. What are we so afraid of? The idea of fear crept up on me over the past few modules. From Amy Edmonson’s conception of “the fearless organization,” to Michael Stephens’ assessment that librarians are always worried “something…
-
Hey there, hyperlinked folks!
Hi folks and welcome to my blog! My name is Rachel Syme and I am in my fifth (second-to-last) semester here at the iSchool. I currently work in a Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Metadata Librarian position, which will become official when I graduate in December. I have been in this role for a couple of years now and I learn more about the back-end of library work every day. Over the course of my career, I have worked in six different libraries in four states. So far, I’ve worked in two special libraries—a medical library and a news library (both in Maryland)—and four public libraries (two in Kentucky, one in California,…
