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.
I asked if I could help, and Marge
graciously showed me how to get started. I also requested to make this project
a piece of a final project in one of my graduate-level English classes. After
receiving permission from my professor, I virtually met with Marge to discuss
the project. Knowing that I would not be able to finish the project this
semester, we agreed that I would work through as many tags as I could, and
Marge would continue the project in the winter of 2021.
A small sample of the current 1,600 tags
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.
