2020
5
Feb

Teaching with Care: A Relational Approach to Individual Research Consultations

In Brief Although single-session instruction makes it difficult for librarians to build deep relationships with the students they teach, individual research consultations offer great opportunities for these connections to occur. Transformational learning and teaching begins with positive, reciprocal student-teacher relationships. Unfortunately, these interactions are often tainted by the hierarchical power structures that keep students from...
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2020
22
Jan

Information Privilege and First-year Students: A Case Study from a First-year Seminar Course Using Access to Information as a Lens for Exploring Privilege

In Brief This article explores the topic of information privilege and how this concept can be used with first-year students to teach about information literacy and privilege. It is building off the work of a credit-bearing first-year seminar that was taught on this topic and a survey that was conducted after the class was over....
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2019
11
Dec

No Holds Barred: Policing and Security in the Public Library

In Brief Library and Information Studies (LIS) has traditionally taken a conservative and uncritical approach to security and policing in libraries. The available literature usually adopts one of three frameworks: the liability framework emphasizing risk and its management, the security consultant framework featuring authors with private security or policing backgrounds, and the First Amendment framework...
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2019
13
Nov

Librarianship at the Crossroads of ICE Surveillance

In Brief Information capitalism, the system where information, a historically, largely free and ubiquitous product of basic communication, is commodified by private owners for profit, is entrenched in our society. Information brokers have consolidated and swallowed up huge amounts of data, in a system that leaves data purchase, consumption, and use largely unregulated and unchecked....
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2019
30
Oct
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Consultants in Canadian Academic Libraries: Adding New Voices to the Story

In Brief The practice of hiring consultants in academic libraries is widespread, but research on the topic is not. We argue that this practice stems from underlying neoliberal ideals that may disenfranchise library workers. This research is the first to include the experiences and perspectives of library employees to better understand the practice of hiring...
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2019
16
Oct
and

When Does Burnout Begin? The Relationship Between Graduate School Employment and Burnout Amongst Librarians

In Brief Burnout issues are of increasing concern for many service professionals, including Library and Information Science (LIS) workers; however, the majority of articles addressing burnout in the LIS field describe methods of coping with burnout, but do not ascertain trends and preventable factors. The purpose of this study was to identify the percentage of...
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2019
18
Sep
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Leading from the Center: Reimagining Feedback Conversations at an Academic Library

In Brief What if we brought the same compassion and learner mindset that we use with students to our interactions with colleagues? Inspired by change management through the lens of appreciative inquiry and interpersonal effectiveness, a team of University Library faculty and staff developed a series of professional development workshops to establish a shared baseline...
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2019
4
Sep

Against medicine: Constructing a queer-feminist community health informatics and librarianship

In Brief Community health informatics (CHI) is rapidly developing as a field of library practice but remains constrained by unexamined definitions of “community”, “health”, and “informatics” as separate and unified terms. This is further complicated by a failure to situate libraries within a history of institutional oppression which continues to work itself out in the...
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2019
21
Aug

Sliding Across the Database Divide with Proactive Chat Help

In Brief Proactive chat help has gained attention in academic libraries for increasing the number of questions from online users. Librarians have reported a significant increase in chat traffic, particularly related to research. So far, library websites have been the primary target of proactive chat implementation efforts, leaving subscription databases largely untouched and their users...
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2019
7
Aug
and

“All I did was get this golden ticket”: Negative Emotions, Cruel Optimisms, and the Library Job Search

In Brief Drawing from survey results and interviews with recent job seekers, this article investigates the effect behind defeatist attitudes, anxieties, resiliency narratives, and intimacies that are central to librarian successes and failures. Connecting these narratives with Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, we explore the dangerous attachment LIS job seekers have with the field. While library...
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