A Reintroduction and Conference Report

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Zoë McLaughlin back to the ACRLog team. Zoë is the South and Southeast Asia librarian at Michigan State University. Besides collection and liaison work, she also catalogs, mainly in South and Southeast Asian languages, and works on physical and digital accessibility in libraries. When she can, she translates from Indonesian and searches for zines and other interesting publications from South and Southeast Asia.

You may remember me as a FYAL blogger from a few years ago. I’m happy to be back on the blog, still in the same job as South and Southeast Asia Librarian, but now with a few more years under my belt, staring down the title of “mid-career librarian.” In my time away, I’ve gotten more involved on the national level and gained a better understanding of how things work in my home library, so hopefully I’m coming back to the blog with new insights, or at least some new ideas.

For now, as a reintroduction, a little bit about me as told through a conference update.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Association for Asian Studies conference. Librarians who cover Asia tend to meet at this conference, as do interest groups for individual countries or regions, to say nothing of the usual conference panels and roundtables. Usually, we go over cooperative projects that we’re working on and institutional updates including new hires and new collection focuses. This year’s conference turned out to be even more interesting than normal because it coincided with moves to dismantle the Department of Education.

As you might imagine, this added an unsettling aura to the conference. There have been, rightly so, several statements already made on the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and how this affects libraries, but Department of Education cuts are also alarming, and not just for the harms they will do to public schools and special education programs. The Department of Education, through programs including the Fulbright, as well as others, provides funding for individuals and programs in the field of international studies. Some of this funding, ultimately, trickles down to libraries in the form of support for collections in the most traditional sense as well as in more innovative ways, such as support for open access projects.

Since I said this would be an introduction, here’s how these cuts affect me: funding from the Department of Education helped to send me to library school. I went to library school knowing I wanted to specialize in Southeast Asian studies, which meant that I needed to learn languages—as many as possible and as fluently as possible while balancing all my other coursework. Languages, as it happens, are also an area of national interest; think Cold War, spies, and the origin of the field of area studies itself. This is (in part) how I funded my education and this is also what we stand to lose. Ultimately, an already underserved area of librarianship (how many catalogers do you know working in Thai?) will be further underserved, meaning our collections and resource description will suffer, to the detriment of library users.

So this was all hanging over my head and the heads of all the other conference attendees, including administrators dealing with what to do about the news, non-citizens on all sorts of visas, and students trying to figure out their futures. It was a lot. It’s still a lot.

It was also rather comforting to be around other people who care about Asian studies and have the side conversations that happen at conferences, though they were markedly different this year. There are still many serious questions and unknowns, but it was helpful to meet colleagues new and old and to be reminded that there is more than just the most recent crisis to think about and that some of our ongoing projects, like cooperation between institutions and collaborations with partners overseas, have just as much relevance and meaning now, even as we face these challenges.

Further reading: