YSS member and board member Emily Zorea is a graduate student in UW-Milwaukee’s Masters of Library Science and Masters of English program. She serves as the school librarian for the Ithaca School District. Her research interests include community-based projects where technical and professional communication, education, and libraries intersect.
How can I do this better? This is a question I have asked myself over and over since March 13, 2020. As a school librarian, when education moved online, our school library program needed to move virtual as well. In-person relationships between my students and community turned to virtual meetings as we Zoomed our way throughout the spring, and now the fall and beginning of winter.
All of us have been asked to rethink our
professional practices over the past months. In schools, teachers are lesson
planning for in-person and virtual students, and are asked to be ready to teach
virtually with only a few hours’ notice. In libraries, we have found ways to
offer virtual Storytimes, book clubs, readers advisory, and curbside pickup,
among other services.
Our most vital practices-such as checkout and readers advisory- needed to be rethought in a pandemic, and libraries have led the way in creativity and problem-solving. Although it can be exhausting to continually problem-solve and rethink ways we offer services, rethinking our practices can reveal new options we previously may have overlooked.
YSS
Blog Tag Categorization Project
For those who do not know me, hi! My name
is Emily, and I am the school librarian at Ithaca School District in Richland
Center, Wisconsin. I just completed a two-year YSS board position as
Director-at-Large. I have also served as a blog contributor here on the YSS
blog. Academically, I am finishing a double master’s degree in both Library and
Information Science, as well as a master’s degree in English in Technical and
Professional Communication.
This fall, the amazing Marge Loch-Wouters mentioned she was beginning the process of working on recategorizing the tags used on our YSS blog. There are currently 1,637 tags! The large number of tags means that the terms are not as helpful as they could be in finding past posts. Marge’s vision was to go through each tag, and find ways to recategorize them. The goal was to bring down the 1,637 number to a more manageable list, such as 100 tag terms the blog would commit to.
After Marge identified all the current tags used on the blog, I began the process of reviewing each tag, one at a time. I looked at all the blog posts each tag was connected to, considered the essence of what the blog past was trying to accomplish, and then worked to identify or create a tag term that would communicate the blog posts’ idea. Before the end of the semester, I had recategorized 172 tags.
Rethinking
“Neutral” Communication
In libraries, we often try to present
neutral information in ways that are clear, helpful, and efficient. We
certainly would never knowingly promote systems of injustice in our community.
We would certainly never knowingly reproduce oppressive practices that affect
marginalized audiences. Identifying new tag terms might seem like a very
neutral task.
And yet, very often, regardless of our personal commitments, we reproduce the systems we have been taught in our work. Even if those systems are oppressive. Even if those systems exclude marginalized audiences.
The truth is that our work and communication is never neutral. Legacies of our past creep into our work, unless we take the time to reflect and make intentional choices to think and act differently.
Communication, Library Spaces, and Social Justice
In this time of a pandemic, we all have
been asked to rethink our practices, to think about how we can do them
differently, virtually. What is especially needed in this time is reflection,
not only on how to present Storytime on Zoom in effective ways, but how to
think about how our positionality, privilege, and power affect our decisions,
and community messages of either acceptance and welcome, or exclusion.
Especially when we are working on seemingly “neutral” projects, like a blog
tagging project. Because all of our work matters.
Natasha Jones, Kristen Moore, and Rebecca Walton wrote the article, “Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future” as a call for the field of Technical and Professional Communication to embrace social justice as one of its core values. Although this text was written for an audience in the field of technical and professional communication, as a professional in both professional writing and libraries, I see tremendous possibilities for this article, and the social justice framework this article describes, to be used interdisciplinarily in library spaces to inform our practices.
In their article, Jones, Moore, and Walton define macro level concepts of positionality, privilege, and power. These concepts affect the ways people engage with identifying markers, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ableness, religion, and class (p. 220). This heuristic can offer librarians a model to think critically about how certain groups in their community are marginalized and disempowered, and to identify specific ways library work can promote agency and advocacy (p. 220).
Simply defined, positionality is the idea that different aspects of our identity, such as race and gender, are historical and dynamic (p. 220). What it means for me to be a woman is part of a historical social construction that continues to shift as new understandings of gender are cultivated in our culture. Also, what it means to be a woman varies over time and in differing phases of life. For this reason, it is dangerous to define identify markers-like gender-in universal ways.
Privilege is an unearned advantage that benefits those gifted this status at the detriment of those who were not (p. 220). Being offered a job over another candidate because of my race, and conforming to racial expectations, is an example of privilege.
Both positionality and privilege grant unearned advantages, and by extension, those receiving those advantages often are in positions of power to make decisions that impact others (p. 220).
Part 2 of this report will be published on Tuesday December 15. You can find that post here.
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