There Is No Race: Finding My Way to Librarianship

Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Eamon Smith, Metadata Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2026-2027 year here at ACRLog.

On June 12, 2026, I got a phone call with an offer to start my first academic library job as a Metadata Librarian. I remember feeling some combination of shock, elation, and fear as my brain anxiously ran the math on what the next few months would look like. Sure, I’d been offered jobs before, but this call was different. This wasn’t just a job offer; it was a career offer. Before me lay a livable wage, a clear path towards promotion, professional development and mentorship opportunities, health insurance (!!), and a community of people who cared fiercely about the library’s mission.

For me, this was the end of a pretty arduous road. By the time I got the call, it had been roughly two years since I submitted my original application. In the meantime, I had been working multiple jobs as a web designer for my local public library, and as a reference librarian for a different public library. An offer to interview was extended in April 2026 quickly followed by an invitation to campus, and two months later I got my phone call.

What came before

Years before deciding to pursue my MLS, I was a 22-year-old college graduate with a BA in International Studies wondering how in the hell I was going to make a living. Like many recent graduates, I struggled in my initial job search. I remember being so desperate to find work that I stopped caring about anything unrelated to money and health insurance. It was a frustrating place to be. As a student, I had been prompted constantly to ask myself what I wanted out of both life and work and was cautioned not to chase money by people who, in all honesty, seemed to already have plenty. Now, in the real world where “want” was a luxury and “need” was king, I was slowly transforming into this jaded ball of stress, struggling to imagine what the future was going to look like.

I got my break in January 2019, when I started working as an Immigration Paralegal for the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands. It was good work, and I was able to leverage my Spanish to help people in meaningful ways, but I was paid peanuts and told to be grateful. And I was grateful, for a time, but eventually my gratitude gave way to restlessness and anger. I was living in Nashville on $28k/year and something had to give.

Eventually, I segued into a new role as a Program Coordinator for TennCare, Tennessee’s state Medicaid program. It had nothing to do with my degree, but it paid a whole hell of a lot more than I’d been making. I moved into a nicer apartment and started saving money for the first time. Lulled by my newfound stability (and the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic), I abandoned the idea of professional development for several years, content to simply be alive, housed, and employed. But before I knew it, four years had passed and again and I was restless. I was older and considerably more mortal than I had felt in my early 20s, and I was beginning to rage against my own complacency. Stability had given way to boredom, which led me back to that same damn question:

“What do I want?”

What came next

I found my answer in librarianship. In 2022 I decided to pursue my MLS through the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I had explored the earning potential of my BA, and I wanted to a career which afforded me some semblance of professional identity and upward mobility. There was also a part of me that liked imagining myself as a librarian. I’d always been a teacher by nature, and librarianship was a way to foster that ability while eschewing the pitfalls and price tag of a PhD.

When I began my MLIS program, I remember feeling late to the party. Even amongst my graduate cohort, I was one of only a handful of students not actively working in a library while also pursuing their degree. Given my proclivity towards self-doubt, it was hard not to second-guess my career trajectory when everyone else seemed so settled. I never felt I was at a demonstrable academic disadvantage as a non-librarian library student, but anxiety is one hell of a paralytic. I had spent years working outside of libraries, and I worried that those experiences were evidence that I was behind in a footrace that, truthfully, didn’t exist.

Looking back, I realize my insecurity had less to do with whether I belonged in this field and more to do with the story I had been telling myself about what a librarian looked like. I’ve since learned my story isn’t at all atypical, as there is no single path to librarianship. The skills I developed before ever calling myself a librarian did not disappear when I changed careers; they remained an inextricable part of who I am. They are a stubborn refutation of the notion that homogeneity is a prerequisite for success in any field, carried forth by an even more stubborn man.

I suspect there are many other aspiring librarians who, like I once did, look at the people already in the profession and wonder if they arrived too late, took too many wrong turns, or lack the “right” background. To those folks, I would say that any background can be a strength. The true glory of librarianship is the unbound potential for professional reinvention.

You are not behind. You cannot be. There is no race.

What comes after

Now, three months into my new job, I’m trying to enjoy each learning experience that comes my way. Many of my coworkers have cautioned me that the first year is a “learning year”—a time to adapt, grow, and become accustomed to the systems and rhythms of the university. In the meantime, I’ve been cataloging up a storm as I work through a backlog of academic gifts, process course reserves, and, once again, find myself returning to that essential question: What do I want?

That question doesn’t stress me out anymore. I’m beginning to appreciate that a career doesn’t have to follow a straight line to be a successful one. I’m still learning what I want from librarianship, and I suspect that answer will change as I do. For now, I’m content to be here—to learn from my colleagues, put the skills I’ve accumulated over the years to work, and share my experiences with you all along the way.

Stay tuned for another post next month, where I’ll be sharing more tips for navigating the FYAL experience!

A Mini-Conference About You: How to Academic-Librarian-Interview

This past summer, I spent much of my time writing cover letters and organizing my schedule for interviews. Starting from late Spring, I applied for positions globally, and had 7 first-round interviews and 2 second-round interviews, with some positions only having one round. Although a slightly stressful time, looking back on the past summer, I ended up kind-of having fun with all the travelling and talking about myself. For anyone in or about to enter the interviewing and application cycle, my thoughts are with you, and I hope that this post gives you a bit of a breathing room.

Cover Letter

Honestly, I think this is probably my least favourite part of the application process. Due to the sheer number of positions out there, it is very difficult to mold each one to my liking, so that each letter sounds slightly different from each other, while still containing who I am as a person and a librarian. My best tip for cover letters is to have the first paragraph as an introduction about myself, the second paragraph with examples for the specific position, and the last paragraph as research interests or fun projects that makes me unique or interesting as a candidate. I try to keep each letter to a page and a maximum 1.5 pages for positions that I am really excited about. For the last paragraph especially, I tried hard to align myself with the job posting while thinking of ways that I could innovate or make the position more to my strengths and experience (although limited). This way, I also had more fun writing the cover letter itself and saw more ways to integrate myself into the role, which also helps in the future if I was asked for a virtual or in-person interview.

Presentation

As someone who used to have a fear of presenting, in-person presentations are definitely more intimidating, however, I found that being physically in the presence of others who are wanting to get to know you and wanting you to do well really helps in terms of finding the flow of the presentation and catch the vibes of the room. Being in a new setting can take a bit of adjustment but preparing lots of back-up plans in case technology issues arise and preparing beforehand with a colleague also helps in brushing off any nerves. For the presentation style, I ended up ditching my favourite Canva templates and just used a plain PowerPoint with white backgrounds. This way, I could mold each slide deck with the institution’s unique services, projects, and presentation topic, while still adding my own voice and flow. I found that with a bare bones presentation, I didn’t have to worry about the colour scheme, and could add in any screenshots and images to my liking. In addition, accessibility features were much easier to use on PowerPoint which allowed me to easily navigate the screen reader and alt-text additions.

Q&A Period

In contrast to the cover letter, this was my favourite part!! Q&A periods can get repetitive over multiple rounds especially by the end when the interview panel seems to ask if I have any questions 10+ times (haha), but this is such a great way to be less formal and ask about literally anything! My go-to questions if I ran out of library-related ones were about favourite grocery stores and marathons. Something I underestimated was the Q&A period directly after the presentation. In the presence of any staff at the university library system, one can easily catch the atmosphere of the organization depending on the interest and engagement of the audience and the type of question asked. Interviews are definitely not one-sided, and this part of the process is definitely a chance for the candidate to gauge fit between themselves and the institution. My favourite interviews were the ones where library staff asked me questions based on my CV, which signaled to me that they actually read through some of the fun things I had worked on and thought about how I could bring those experiences to the position that I was interested in potentially working in.

Overall, I look back at this summer as a positive one. I got to travel, check out cool cities, and meet some amazing librarians at cool organizations and institutions! I wish that I could have three or four bodies to work on all those interesting projects and innovative institutions. Just being able to ask about the possibilities and the future they saw in me gave me a lot of hope for my future career in the profession. Although the stress of interviews and the job market can’t be diminished with a magic wand, I hope that it is possible to find a little bit of sparkle and joy while going through the process.

Towards a “pedagogy of the depressed”

“Okay guys, genuine question. How long until we’re justified in killing people over this?”¹

Alarmed, I tried to reroute our whole-class discussion. I asked students to refocus on the prompt I’d provided: Choose one of the AI-related issues we’ve discussed this semester and brainstorm a potential policy solution. Consider timelines, barriers, stakeholders, and other decision-making factors.

When one student reluctantly suggested that local, grassroots action would be the most effective way to make change, I excitedly shared a case study in which local resistance led to a city dropping their Flock contract. But the mood in the classroom continued to spiral.

“I don’t know about the assassination thing,” someone offered.

“Okay, but they’re already killing us,” a student said. “They’re literally killing us.”

“We need to do what they’re doing in France,” another declared. “They’re not going to school. They’re not going to work. They’re massing in the streets and burning buildings. That’s the only way they’ll listen to us.”

During class, a student made this observation: “It feels like all the older generations are panicking about AI, but our generation is just like ‘oh yeah, another apocalyptic catastrophe, okay.’” Their classmates nodded.

This is a generalization, of course, but I believe it’s grounded in a real phenomenon, at least here in the United States. In other countries that have been shaped by different catastrophes, generational divides may look different. Here, I’ve often noticed a difference in political and social affect between those who remember the world before 9/11 and those who don’t, and again, another between those who were adults before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of ChatGPT and those who weren’t. Many of my students were only middle-schoolers in March 2020. They were children in 2016. For my older colleagues, the world is spinning off its axis, but for my students, the world has no axis. There is no stable world to return to, one where we trust authorities and well-resourced institutions. Their world is rotten to the core, and it always has been.

I’m twenty-five, just a few years older than most of my students. I don’t remember a world before 9/11, though I’m told it was different. I don’t remember a world without the Internet, but I do remember one—barely—where iPhones and social media were wondrous and new. I haven’t allowed myself to feel big, world-changing hope in a long time, and I don’t remember a time when I hoped for something and it happened, or when I trusted an authority figure and they followed through. I can’t imagine what my students must feel like.

After my recent classroom experience, I felt more unsure than ever about my teaching. How can we teach students who feel so cynical and hopeless when we also feel cynical and hopeless? I want to feel something again; I worry about developing apathy, and, most importantly, about my students developing apathy. If a student finishes my course feeling less empowered than they did when they started, I believe I’ve failed as a teacher. I want students to leave my classroom equipped to follow their curiosity, engage in productive civic dialogue, and make change in their communities. But this semester, I’ve consistently heard from students that there’s no point in trying to do any of those things. That nobody will listen and nothing will change, no matter what they do–unless they do something very, very drastic.

To help me think through these issues, I returned to Pedagogy of the Depressed by Christopher Schaberg. Titled in a cheeky reference to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Schaberg’s book reflects on the rapidly-evolving, often depressing state of the college classroom in the early 21st century. “At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed,” he writes. I nodded furiously as I turned the pages. “Or, rather, it wasn’t a certain point at all: it happened ‘gradually and then suddenly,’ to borrow a line from Hemingway. This was depressing. It changed the feel of the classroom, it altered the possibilities of how we could learn together.” (pg. 2)

Critically, Schaberg gestures towards this particular “depression” as a phenomenon caused by structural forces both inside and outside the academy, rather than an issue of individual students’ and teachers’ mental health. Even if we all had access to amazing therapists and infinite workplace wellness initiatives, the “depression” in question would persist. “The ‘depression’ I am interested in tracking in this book is not so much an individual experience, not located (at least not solely) in the depressed subject,” he writes. “It’s a state of things. It’s a depressed atmosphere, a dispersed feeling of dread that has as much to do with cultural forces and planetary circumstances as it has to do with the intense feeling of solitary helplessness.” (pg. 4)

And what a state of things! In the same vein, one of my colleagues recently shared this article with me: “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” by Doris A. Santoro. While this article is targeted towards K-12 teachers and administrators, I believe it applies just as well to higher education. Santoro says, “Teachers who experience demoralization believe that the school practices or policy mandates that they are expected to follow are harmful to students or degrading to the profession and that their attempts to alter them have been fruitless. Demoralization is a moral type of dissatisfaction that needs to be understood as a problem of professional ethics.” While this is certainly a problem in higher ed, which Schaberg explores in Pedagogy of the Depressed, I think our students also experience “demoralization” in everyday life. So do we. “Demoralization” captures the dissatisfaction from feeling like it’s impossible to live in accordance with one’s values, that one is forced to live unethically, and there’s nothing one can do about it.

Defined either way, in a broad or narrow sense, “demoralization” is a cause of the malaise Schaberg describes. “Maybe what’s so depressing about all this is that it feels very much like living at the end of something,” he writes. “[. . .] I’m tired of keeping up the charade that we’re working toward real transformation, when it feels more and more like we’re mostly just maintaining a cobbled together machine that’s on the brink of falling to pieces.” (pp. 115-116)

The bulk of Pedagogy of the Depressed reflects on Schaberg’s personal experiences teaching college English. Schaberg contextualizes the need for a “pedagogy of the depressed,” and he raises useful questions around what it might look like. But he stops short of theorizing a clear, distinct “pedagogy of the depressed.”

I’ve been strongly resonating with this term of late, and I’ve also been trying to remind myself that all teaching (and all doing, of anything worth doing) must involve some failure, especially when I’m doing something as tricky as facilitating discussions on current events. Plus, failure invites curiosity and facilitates learning. I want to close by offering some thoughts on what a “pedagogy of the depressed” means to me and inviting you to share what it might mean to you as well. What does it require—from us, of us—to teach these students in this climate, when we often feel the same weight of cynicism as they do? How can we empower our graduates to be lifelong learners who change their world for the better?

A “pedagogy of the depressed” embraces the whole people who enter our classroom, with all their complexities, life experiences, interests, and frustrations.
A “pedagogy of the depressed” means not just accepting, but embracing, the fact that the classroom is an inherently political space. As Freire explains, there can be no democracy without an educated population; education is one of the fundamental pillars of a functioning polis. A classroom that claims to be apolitical is not, in fact, apolitical; it is interested in maintaining the status quo, which is a political choice.
- What follows from this? A political classroom is a classroom that empowers students to act. This requires them to understand what’s happening around them, why it’s happening, and how they might change it. I don’t think that third element was present enough in my instruction this semester. I could have provided more case studies of successful change-making, like communities resisting data center construction or Flock contracts, and then used those case studies as springboards for conversations about the issues at hand (economic investment in AI, surveillance technology, etc). I still want students to develop their own opinions and solutions; they might want to change the world in ways that I disagree with, and that’s okay. But at the heart of the discussion is a case study that shows them how change is possible, and hope isn’t pointless. As Freire himself writes in Pedagogy of Freedom, “One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicative, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love.” (pg. 45)
A “pedagogy of the depressed” is based in the politics of refusal. Some might view “refusal” as a give-in or dead-end, but as Carole McGranahan (2016) has suggested, refusal may be a far more generative practice than acquiescence. Practicing refusal allows us to imagine an array of wild, beautiful futures that we may not otherwise consider. “Refusal is insistence on the possible over the probable,” writes McGranahan. “[. . .] Hope combines with will to refuse authorized anticipations, thus moving away from the probable into the possible.” (pg. 323) In this way, refusal may be a route to addressing demoralization.
In order to enable work based in the politics of refusal (refusing AI, for example, or refusing classroom surveillance), unionization is critical. And as my own faculty union says, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” This is true of the working conditions of all library workers, regardless of faculty status.
As one of my students shared: “I think it’s still important to stand up for our values, even if we know we’re going to lose.” This is the most important part of a “pedagogy of the depressed.” If nothing else, we must remind ourselves that we are still human, still kicking. Still here.

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
McGranahan, Carole. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 319–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48579449.
Santoro, Doris A. “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” Educational Leadership Magazine, June 1, 2018. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/is-it-burnout-or-demoralization.
Schaberg, Christopher. Pedagogy of the Depressed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

For reasons of privacy, student quotes are approximate and representative, not exact, throughout this post. ↩︎

Student Loans for Librarians: Now More Difficult!

I’m back to talk about everyone’s least favorite subject: student loans. I wrote about student loans in July 2025: On Owing $93,605 in Student Loans; or, A Profession Built on Debt. In that post, I showed readers the math. I had been paying around $450/month on Biden’s SAVE plan, but once that repayment plan was ended because of Republican challenges to the plan, my new student loan payment would be around $1,200/month.

I also talked about my progress towards loan forgiveness through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, and how my goal of making 120 monthly payments had been interrupted several times, but perhaps I would be on my way to meeting that goal and having my loans forgiven in September 2026. Well, Past Violet was extremely mistaken on that front, as I was laid off just a few weeks after writing that post, an emotionally and financially devastating development that postponed my progress towards loan forgiveness yet again.

For those playing along at home: my current balance is $92,122 and I’m paying $1,100 every month in the Income-Based Repayment Plan. I’ve made 102 qualifying payments towards the 120 payment goal (a qualified payment means that I was employed by a nonprofit employer during the month I made the payment). Once I make that 120 payment goal, barring any fuckery, I can apply to have my loans forgiven.

A screenshot of Violet's student loan balances, showing six loans that have balances from 9,000 to 22,000 dollars. The table is labled MOHELA loans and the monthly payment is labeled at $1,098. Each loan shows it is from 10-12% paid off. — [insert skull emoji here]

As I wrote about last time, Trump’s 2025 One Big Bullshit Bill changed the student loan possibilities for incoming grad students. As of July 2026, grad students are now limited to borrowing up to $20,500 a year. The interest rate for graduate loans also increased to 8%.

How does the yearly cap of $20,500 stack up to the cost of attending school full-time? Well, schools aren’t always super upfront or super clear about how much tuition costs, but here’s some numbers I found based on a quick and dirty search. At the school where I adjunct, Syracuse’s School of Information Studies, tuition for their MLIS program is $36,000/year. At my alma mater, the University of Washington iSchool, tuition for an MLIS is $31,000/year. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s iSchool, tuition for an Illinois resident is $15,000/year. At the lower end of the tuition scale, Eastern Carolina University’s MLIS program tuition for North Carolina University is $5,600/year for residents attending the online program. There’s an online MLIS costs spreadsheet created in 2025 by Reddit user u/DifficultRun5170, which I encourage you to take a look at if you haven’t attended school lately!

These numbers are just tuition costs, not including fees or textbooks or the costs of living expenses. What does that mean? LIS students who don’t come from generational wealth will likely need to take out expensive private loans to cover their costs of attending school. Women and people of color will disproportionately pay a higher price, as statistically they will be more likely to face financing gaps, as well as more likely to pay more over the life of their loans under the new repayment plans.

In addition, The Washington Sun reported this week that the Trump administration is moving forward with plans to hire private debt collectors for those who have defaulted on their student loans. That would mean the government would seize tax refunds or garnish wages for those who can’t pay their student loan balance. More misery for those struggling the most.

The new restrictions are disheartening. I don’t have a solution to this systemic problem. But I encourage everyone to talk about it more. If you’ve been in the profession for decades, talk with newer professionals and students about how much the financial picture has changed since you were in school—they should understand this isn’t how things have to be. If you have student loans, talk about them (and not just when you get them forgiven!), so people can get their heads around the idea that it’s not a moral failing to be in debt. Our cultural silence about money issues is damaging: it fuels anxiety, shame, and financial illiteracy. You have the power to change that, one conversation at a time.

You Can’t Ask the Librarian You Don’t Know Exists: Outreach Experiments

Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Hilary Turner, Business Librarian at Baylor University, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2026-2027 year here at ACRLog.

I’m New Here

As a first-year academic librarian serving as the sole instruction and reference liaison to my institution’s business school, I’ve been thinking a lot about different forms of capital—not financial capital, but rather the “credit” required to integrate ourselves successfully in a new role and at new organizations.

The importance of continuing to develop our human capital (defined by McKinsey in a corporate context as the “knowledge, attributes, skills, experience” of employees) goes without saying. But what about the social and professional capital needed to be successful and effective in a new environment? We can be as competent and qualified as possible, but if we remain an unknown quantity to our new colleagues and students, do we really exist? If a tree falls in a forest but no one is around to hear it…

The biggest challenge for me right now as a first-year academic librarian is: How do I become a familiar presence on campus and acquaint students, professors, and other constituents with the services I offer? How do I build social and professional capital?

The Mad Scientist Approach

The most helpful way for me to begin answering this question has been to run mini experiments. Curiosity is a good friend in this. Here are four of the outreach strategies I’ve tested in my first two months on the job:

1. I sent targeted emails to faculty.

This is where I started. I focused my email efforts by doing behind-the-scenes research first, looking up the course numbers all the required (core) classes for both the MBA programs and the BBA degree at Baylor. Once I identified the relevant course numbers, I conducted a search in our fall catalog that allowed me to identify which professors were teaching those courses.

From there, I drafted and sent out emails to the faculty briefly introducing myself and sharing a bulleted list of services I could offer, which ranged from creating or updating a LibGuide to providing in-class instruction sessions on a business research topic—all the way to assisting them in tracking down hard-to-find articles or datasets for their own research.

For the sake of efficiency, when multiple instructors were teaching sections of one course, I sent out a group email. My basic template for all of these communications was customized for each course.

Learnings: The first few weeks of the semester are extremely hectic. I took my ego out of the equation and remained patient—and, in some cases, sent a follow-up note about three weeks into the term. Ultimately, I’ve connected with a healthy number of business school faculty this way and been invited either to meet with them or to plan and conduct an in-class instruction session lasting anywhere from 25 – 75 minutes.

That being said, email outreach as a new-to-campus academic librarian is not just about immediately completing a transactional exchange. It can serve as a doorway for addressing current needs, certainly, but also provides food for thought as faculty look forward toward future semesters.

2. I put my face on the door.

(Quite literally.) As I got settled into the liaison office area in my library, I noticed that one colleague had her headshot mounted on foam board just above the nameplate outside her door. I thought this was genius and reached out to our University Libraries marketing and communications team. Within a few days, my face was out there too.

Learnings: This one is a bit more difficult to assess, because I don’t survey people coming to my office about whether the photo outside my door had any effect. However, there is quite a bit of literature available about the Mere Exposure Effect, the idea that our preference for certain people and things increases the more familiar they become. Decision Lab published a very readable article about this in 2019, noting, “We prefer things we have been exposed to in the past, and our preference increases as our exposure does.” Note to self: Does this explain my enduring affection for Bon Jovi?

*Source: Pilat, D. & Krastev, S. (2019.) “Why do we prefer things that we are familiar with?” The Decision Lab*.

It makes sense to me that building familiarity can be pursued in many ways—in this instance through the smiling photo by my nameplate. Time will tell if there is a payoff for this, but I will continue the experiment because I don’t believe it could do any harm and may in fact do quite a bit of good. My hunch is that one of the first steps toward being approachable is to become recognizable.

3. If you build it, they won’t (necessarily) come—so I go to them (tabling at the business school).

Have you seen the 1989 movie Field of Dreams? (It involves sports, so I’m kind of amazed I have.) Kevin Costner plays Ray Kinsella, an Iowa corn farmer. One day out in the fields he hears an otherworldly voice insisting, “If you build it, he will come.”

Kinsella gets the fairly unhinged idea to build a baseball diamond on his land in the middle of nowhere and—well I won’t spoil the specifics—but someone important ultimately does show up at the field.

However, when it comes to building social capital on campus, the maxim from this film doesn’t always hold true, particularly if your office is located in your institution’s main library and not in the the building where your discipline’s classes are held.

Inspired again by the familiarity principle, I spend time at our business school at least a few times per week, rather than hoping students and faculty will organically wander by my office. One morning a week, I’ve reserved a table in the first-floor atrium of the b-school. This is a strategically sound location given that a large concentration of business students and faculty are continuously passing through—and it doesn’t hurt that there’s a small café in the atrium. Food is a universal draw.

I put some candy and other library swag on my table, as well as signs with a QR code to my page on the university’s website, information about how I can help, my business cards, and a relevant handout or two.

Learnings: The number of students and faculty who approach my table in the atrium any given Tuesday varies quite a bit. Sometimes it’s one individual, sometimes it’s upwards of five.

There’s a deeper story behind those numbers though, which is the high value of these interactions. Thanks to tabling, I’ve met: a student with five (!) majors who didn’t know I existed before our encounter, a junior I’ve been consulting with on an extremely advanced independent project who updated me on his progress, and a busy professor asking me to send him a slide with my contact info and services to share with his class. I could go on. I will continue to table at the business school regularly for this reason.

What I’ve taken away from this experiment is that it’s important to not put the onus on my students and faculty to find their way to the library that serves as my home base. I can and do try to meet them where they’re at.

4. I got business cards.

“Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.”
—Patrick Bateman, American Psycho (2000)

All (extremely dark) jokes about Bateman’s psychopathy and overwhelming disconnection from reality aside, I ordered business cards through my university during the first month I was here. And I use them all the time.

I bring my cards when I table at the business school or when I attend a university event of any kind, whether it’s an author talk or a breakfast discussion about agentic AI applications in faculty research, because I never know whom I’ll meet. I also keep a supply on my desk for easy access at the end of appointments there.

Learnings: On multiple occasions, sharing my card has facilitated new connections. This has been an effective addition to my new academic librarian toolkit because it reduces the number of steps required for a patron to follow up with me. It takes them from a hazy “I met this librarian person the other day and hmm what was her name” to “I should contact Hilary at this email address, and I have a tangible cue to prompt that.” It reduces friction.

Back to the Bigger Picture

At only two months into my new role, I’m still experimenting and assessing the success of these strategies. There are more tactics I’d still like to try, and it will take time for some of my efforts to bear fruit. Zooming out, it all comes back to my larger goal: to increase my recognizability on campus and to establish the kind of familiarity that renders me more approachable and accessible.

Each academic community is different. What ends up working best for me not be the most successful method for outreach in your unique role. I’d be interested to hear about what you’ve found works well for you—whether you’re a newer academic librarian or even just new to your institution.

In the meantime? I’m still collecting evidence.