I’m a couple of weeks later than I’d hoped to be with this blogpost, one result of what’s continuing to be an unusually hectic and unusually uncertain semester for me (and probably for many of you, too). But I had a thought on my morning commute-substitute walk today: why not write small amounts on a few different library topics that have been bouncing around my brain recently? So here are some short cuts, for (and from) the busy and distracted.
Hybrid is not the same as remote or onsite
This semester at the college where I work, library faculty and staff are working partially in person at the Library and partially remote, a situation that we usually describe as hybrid when referring to classes. I will admit that one of the things I’ve learned since the pandemic began last year is that I don’t prefer a 100% online job, and I’m grateful to be working in my office on campus 3 days/week. But it’s been surprising to me how much administrative overhead our new hybrid work environment involves. Last year when we went into lockdown it seemed to take ages for us to figure out some of our new processes and workflows; I especially remember the pain point of trying to figure out how to get PDFs signed and shared between multiple people who were all working on different devices at home. There are definitely administrative advantages to being on campus part-time — three cheers for easy access to printing and scanning! But it has taken more time than I anticipated to fully grasp which tasks are best done onsite and which I can still easily complete at home. On the (very) plus side: as long as the weather holds it’s possible to have face to face meetings outside on days when my colleagues and I are in at the same time, and that has been amazing.
Terrific award news
Library Twitter blew up on earlier this week with the news that Safiya Noble, among lots of other amazing and smart folx, has been named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. If you’ve not read her 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, I strongly recommend it, or you can search up videos of one of the many, many talks she’s given in recent years. I remember being so disappointed that I had to miss her invited paper at the ACRL Conference in Portland in 2015 because my own session was scheduled at the same time, and my City University of New York colleagues and I were delighted that she gave the keynote at the CUNY IT Conference in 2017. Noble’s work is timely and necessary, and this recognition is so well-deserved.
Thinking about teaching and libraries and interdisciplinarity
As soon as I saw the MacArthur news I posted it in the Slack workspace for the course I’m teaching this semester in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program. We’d started the semester reading Noble’s chapter Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities which provoked a robust discussion in class, and our students are looking forward to returning to her work later in the semester too. I’ve blogged a bit in the past about teaching in this program; students come to this program from graduate departments in a variety of different disciplines, and the course is a great opportunity to think through using technology in teaching and research from multiple perspectives. I appreciate that I always seem to learn so much every time I teach it, both from my coteacher (this semester, a colleague in English) and from our students, who are often also teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY colleges themselves. This is my first time teaching the course fully online, and I’m also appreciating the opportunities to have even more discussion about open digital pedagogy and scholarship than we do usually, and to be able to bring the work of libraries into the course as well.
Ending with gratitude
It’s a tough semester all around on campuses and in libraries, I expect, with the pandemic far from over, and I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the things I’m grateful for, large and small: the clouds and sky on my walk to work in the morning, sharing physically-distanced bagels in the library with colleagues last week, and the time I carve out (almost) each day for meditation (thanks to the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course I took last year). And I’m aiming for a longer, less-distracted cut here next time around.
