Category: Conference Blogging

Includes the blogging of conference programs

You’ll Never Walk Alone: The Power of Showing Up

& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

–Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds1

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Caelin Ross to the ACRLog team. Caelin is the Performing Arts Librarian at Arizona State University Library. She earned her Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With fifteen years of experience in academic libraries and non-profit organizations, Caelin’s interests include collection management, community engagement, and exploring emotional labor, grief work, and performance in libraries and archives. As the curator for the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection, her projects aim to create meaningful ways for students to engage with performing arts resources while supporting the documentation of historically marginalized perspectives.

People often ask what made me want to be a librarian. The answer might surprise fellow academic librarians: I discovered the career pathway after nearly dropping out of college.

It took me over 15 years–starting as a college library assistant in undergraduate school—to reach this point in my career. I think if they had attended a conference like ACRL Annual 2025 in Minneapolis, they would understand why I chose this path. Being an academic librarian offers an opportunity to work alongside curious, disruptive, and thoughtful people. The work shared at this past conference demonstrates this beautifully.

Attending my first ACRL was both bittersweet and profoundly validating. The programming was incredible. It was rewarding to have been on three separate planning committees to select presentations and to see folks proudly share their work. I learned so much from evaluating submissions, and encourage folks who are also early career to volunteer on an ACRL conference committee. It is an excellent way to know what makes specific presentations stand apart and better understand the research process. Some submissions would have been better as a paper, while others may have been better as a panel. 

Lightning talk

My talk was scheduled on Friday, which I imagined would be a reasonably quiet event. However, I was shocked to attend fellow participants’ lightning talks and see the room packed with over a hundred attendees. While I waited outside the conference room, several Arizona State University Library colleagues who were also presenting at the conference stopped by to stay with me. One colleague, Anali, said, “You’re on our team. Of course we’re here for you.” 

As I headed up onstage, the nerves kicked in full throttle. I met two excellent presenters who were also presenting for the first time! We gave each other encouragement and high fives and shared how nervous and excited we were.I saw a former colleague from my previous institution and waved–I was so glad to see a familiar face. I looked out in the crowd and saw nine of my colleagues from ASU all seated together, waving and smiling.

I could have lit up the entire city. 

The talk went by quickly, but that feeling of being truly seen and listened to was everything. I created a tight five-minute presentation focused on developing partnerships with community organizations to document youth experiences, supported by concrete examples from my experience. I prepared thoroughly, timing myself to ensure I wouldn’t run over, but approached the process with the calm assurance that comes from knowing your material and your worth.

The Year Was 2010…


I have wanted to be a librarian since I was 21. As an undergraduate at an R1, major public research university, I struggled to find a sense of belonging on campus. College Library became a sanctuary for me, and to this day, is the best job I have ever had.  I stumbled through my early 20s in various non-profit employment and continued to find part-time library jobs, then made the life-saving choice to move to Chicago. I didn’t have a job, but had an opportunity to live with a cousin, so at least I had housing. A few weeks later, a temp job opened at Northwestern University Library, and I took it– even though it meant getting home at 1am. That job led to a promotion, which led to me enrolling in the iSchool at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. 

After graduating with my MSLIS in 2020, landing my first academic librarian role took nearly two years. I was 34. Despite working full-time in academic libraries for almost a decade, completing my graduate degree, and interning while keeping my 40-hour-a-week library job, I was rejected countless times. 

 The call arrived on a Friday afternoon. After hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews, I was offered the academic librarian position as a Performing Arts Librarian I had hoped for. I should have felt nothing but elation—this was my career goal. Yet alongside the excitement came a sudden weight: accepting meant leaving behind the community I had built over the years. Little did I know that this bittersweet moment would be the first step in an unexpected journey through grief, loneliness, and, ultimately, rebuilding.

The Invisible Loss of Relocation

When we talk about grief, we usually associate it with losing someone or something. Rarely do we acknowledge the profound grief that comes with voluntarily choosing to leave a place. Yet that grief is real—a complex tapestry of emotions that doesn’t always make rational sense when you’ve made what appears to be a positive career move.

In those first weeks after relocating, I found myself experiencing the most intense loneliness of my life. I had never lived alone and was over 1800 miles from friends or family. I mourned routines I had taken for granted: the barista who knew my order before I spoke, taking my dog, Pasha, on his morning walk, since he stayed behind in Chicago with my partner.

The Academic Bubble Challenge

Academia presents a unique paradox when it comes to community building. You’re surrounded by people devoted to knowledge and sharing ideas, yet the structures can feel impenetrable to newcomers. Faculty established relationships, students focused on their studies, and I felt like an imposter.

As an academic librarian who works with archives and special collections, I occupy an interesting intersection. My role involves supporting everyone’s research and learning needs, yet initially, these interactions remained largely transactional. I helped locate resources, organized archival collections, and assisted with reference, but these initial encounters made me feel more isolated. When the spring semester ended, the campus community disappeared, leaving for cooler weather in the brutal desert summer.

Small Steps Across the Grief Threshold

It has taken more than two years to begin to accept this change. I lost family, relationships, and pets. I stopped expecting my new city to replace what I had left behind. Instead of seeking exact substitutes for what I had lost, I began approaching community-building as creating something entirely new.

Some strategies that helped me cross this threshold:

1. Embracing the “beginner” status: I started asking for recommendations rather than trying to discover everything independently. This vulnerability opened conversations and positioned me to receive rather than always provide help.

2. Leveraging library connections: My role gave me a unique vantage point. I created recurring opportunities to develop relationships beyond one-off interactions by developing training programs and student employment opportunities.

3. Acknowledging the grief: Rather than dismissing my feelings of loss as self-indulgent, I allowed myself to miss my former community while building a new one.

The irony that I struggled to navigate my new social terrain as a librarian—someone who helps others navigate information landscapes—wasn’t lost on me. Yet, slowly, the scattered connections began to form patterns.

Over time, I discovered that building community in a new city isn’t about replacing what was lost but creating space for what might emerge. The grief doesn’t completely disappear but becomes integrated into a more complex story that honors what was left behind and what has been discovered.

For Fellow Academic Nomads

If you’re an academic librarian (or anyone) who has relocated for a position, know that your experience of grief amid professional advancement is valid. Community doesn’t happen overnight, and the particular structure of academic institutions can make the process even more challenging.

Some practical takeaways from my experience:

  • Give yourself at least a year before making judgments about belonging.
  • Create small, sustainable routines that put you in the same places consistently.
  • Look for interdepartmental committees or university-wide initiatives that connect people across silos.
  • Remember that your expertise as a librarian—finding connections between seemingly disparate elements—can serve you in community building, too.

The stacks that once felt like barriers between me and potential connections have become the architecture supporting my new community. Between the books, across database training sessions, and through research consultations, I’ve found my people—different from those I left behind but no less meaningful.

The grief hasn’t vanished. Some days, a song or memory will bring a sharp pang of loss. But now those moments coexist with the warmth of new connections—proof that our capacity for community isn’t limited, but expansive, growing with each chapter of our lives. 

With Gratitude 

For now, I want to thank my ASU Library community. Your spirit of collaboration, empathy, and curiosity shines through in everything you do. Thank you for sharing meals, celebrating with drinks, and for bringing your absolute best to this conference. Working together with colleagues like you is all I have ever wanted.

This solidarity is my hope for our field. When we come together as a community we remember our collective power. Never underestimate the power of just showing up.

Notes:

  1. Vuong, O. (2016). Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copper Canyon Press. ↩︎

Special Thanks: Anali Perry, Matt Harp, Rachel Fernandez, Cami Garland, Vina Begay, Eric Prosser, Cat Dinh, Karalyn Osser, Olivia Sparks, Eric Hardy, Nataani Hanley-Moraga, Alex Soto, Yitazba Largo-Anderson, and Gina Peterson. Special shout out to Jamie Diermier and Neah Ingram-Monteiro.

A Reintroduction and Conference Report

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

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:

A Department of Education Office Changed My Life. Now It’s Been Cut by Lydia Kiesling, Time

Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Library Agency by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times

First time attendee at ACRL 2023: Getting there can be enough 

March has gone by so fast, and that’s definitely in part because of the ACRL 2023 conference. I was extremely grateful to have my registration paid for by the Congress of Academic Library Directors (CALD) of Maryland. Truthfully, I almost didn’t go; less than 12 hours before I needed to leave for Pittsburgh, I was at the Pet ER with my pup. She’d been sick in the days leading up to the conference, but thankfully, that visit helped her turn a corner and I felt okay leaving her with dogsitters (but with a car rental website pulled up and ready on my phone in case I had to come back).  

It might go without saying, but I certainly wasn’t at my best during those days. Traveling can already throw me for a loop, but it was intensified with worry for my dog. I was checking my petcam whenever my dogsitters weren’t there, and more than once I found that I needed to just go up to the rooftop terrace of the convention center and sit for a while. My coworkers said I seemed quite chill, given all that had happened, but that’s how my personal brand of anxiety manifests; it’s calm, cool, and collected on the outside and a bit of a storm on the inside.  

View from the convention center.

Maybe you expected this post to be more of a conference report, and I will definitely shout out some of the work I saw later, but I start with this to normalize the mental health struggles that can come with conference attendance. How disruptive to life and routine they can be. On the first full day of the conference, there was a community chat at 8:30am entitled, “Anxious People Unite” led by Heidi Burkhardt. It was so, so nice to be in a room of librarians who understand the impact anxiety can have (and for me to have the opportunity to just… rant a bit about the absolute struggle in getting to the conference!). I think I would have been even more spacey and out of it during ACRL if not for this chat, because in addition to letting the anxiety out, we all shared coping tips and strategies.  

This was my first time at ACRL, so I didn’t know what to fully expect. I’d only ever attended AWP (Association of Writers and Writers’ Programs) in the past, which is ginormous, and I didn’t really know anyone. It was different in Pittsburgh. I got to catch up with some of my graduating cohort, since we’re all now scattered across the country (academia, am I right?) as well as other folks from UIUC and GVSU. My work with ACRLog also allowed me to meet some new people too. I think browsing the poster sessions was my favorite part; of course, engaging with the authors was intellectually stimulating in its own right, but it was also nice to hear the conversations happening around me. It can be a struggle to explain a job in academia to those outside of it and knowing that everyone here had that baseline understanding was lovely. I was excited to bring some of the concepts back to my home library, like the posters about shortening database descriptions for their student audiences and a seed library.  

An interactive exhibit (“Commons Threads”) at ACRL 2023, where you looped thread around your answers.

I went to many great sessions though, such as Meg Galasso’s contributed paper Fatness and the Future of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Librarianship and Ali Krzton’s contributed paper Welcome to the Machine: Ir/Responsible Use of Machine Learning in Research Recommendation Tools. I won’t describe them here since the papers are available to read, but both sessions were extremely enlightening and informative. I also attended a Visual Literacy focused roundtable, where I learned a great deal about the concept as well as some good tips and tricks from the other librarians present. Particularly, an activity where the point is to have a “failed” search – such as searching the color “nude” to see the results that come up. I think it’s good for students to see how search engines and databases can fail; search persistence is something I’m always trying to get across in my instruction sessions. We can then go a step further beyond persistence to ask deeper questions about the results. 

Overall, I am glad I went. As my title suggests, I’m trying to push beyond my ambitious overachiever thought processes and acknowledge that this time, just getting there was the accomplishment. Life got in the way, as it is wont to do, but I think I made the best of the brain power I did have. I found that once I was in the convention center, I was busy and distracted enough that I wasn’t focusing as much on the anxiety about my dog. She is fine now, for anyone wondering; it was just one of those “worst timing ever” situations.  

So if you also encountered struggle in attending ACRL 2023, just know you aren’t alone in that. 

My First Conference (as an academic librarian)

I promise I did not vanish into the abyss. I did, however, disappear into an incredibly busy March and April and I offer profound apologies to my fellow ACRL bloggers, though I’m quite sure they understand how these things go in the wild world of libraries.

TLA 2022 in Forth Worth, TX. April 25-28. Theme: Recover, Rebalance, Reconnect.

One of the many events that consumed me during these past two months was the Texas Libraries Association conference, AKA TLA2022. If you are a member of #LibraryTwitter, you might be familiar with the controversy that was stirred up by one of the keynote speakers, Alyssa Edwards. I was unfortunately unable to go to this keynote due to a very long and tiring day waiting in lines (Sidenote: What do conference organizers have against chairs? I haven’t been able to sit on the floor without a monumental effort to get up again since undergrad. Do not make people stand in lines for hours! It’s not acceptable or disability inclusive or okay! Geez!) but the issue was echoed again and again in each session I did attend. Libraries are being badgered by bigots, zealots, and busybodies who jump on us the moment we show any support to LGBTQ communities.

It’s not as bad in academic libraries. My colleagues in public libraries and especially those in school libraries are taking the brunt of the abuse. However, the field itself is having a reckoning, if the thrust of nearly every main session at TLA is any indication. I attended sessions each day, and book banning and challenges, patrons abusing staff, programs being canceled and boycotted, and constant, aggressive censorship was a topic brought up at almost every one of them. Even while I was busily networking in the Exhibition Hall, my main goal of the conference, I saw it everywhere. The air hummed both with the tension of the amount of pressure librarians and library staff are under as well as understanding. Every time a speaker acknowledged how hard this has been on us, professionally, physically, emotionally, I could feel waves of relief coming off those surrounding me. I got it. I’m lucky to have a partner who is also a librarian, so he understands. But how many of the people I encountered at that conference had felt isolated in their struggles? If your family, friends, even colleagues just don’t grasp the severity of the anxiety you live in day after day, that the one book you order or the one event you plan is going to set off a tidal wave of complaints, how amazing must it feel to finally have someone recognize it? And not only that, but someone on stage, holding a microphone, speaking with authority?

Nadine Strossen addressed the audience of librarians during her mid-conference keynote when she said, “In the land of the free and the home of the brave, it should not take courage to be so brave to do your job.” And all I could think was yes, yes, thank you! Thank you for acknowledging what the people around me have been doing. Thank you for speaking that truth to the people who really needed to hear it.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how amazing Ibram X. Kendi’s session was.

TLA did my heart good. I took a risk by going, I know I did. Large gatherings like this are going to be a gamble for a while with the COVID pandemic still in full swing. We did have protections in place, particularly either a vaccination record or clear test being required to enter the convention center, but in the end I’m very happy that I went and experienced this validation. No, I’m not on the front lines of this fight, but I’m also not so sheltered that I can ignore it (nor insist on continued oppression-favoring neutrality like some  members of our field). It was a memorable and important first conference for me in my academic librarian career. I’m hoping to attend more in the future, especially because I don’t see today’s problems going away any time soon. I’m going to keep my head in the game to support fellow library workers. We all need each other right now, that’s how we make it through this.

One step at a time.

Reflections on ACRL 2021

As I logged into the ACRL 2021 Virtual Conference Opening Keynote, I was excited and nervous for the conference. I didn’t know what to expect. Would I find new and inspiring ideas? Would I find old and tired conversations that I’ve participated in over and over again? Would I find the virtual format engaging? Who would I be hearing from? How difficult would it be to find non-dominant voices?

My recent focus in research has primarily been on critical librarianship, information literacy, and open pedagogy. These subjects were well represented on the calendar. And, in the actual sessions, I found perspectives and conversations that were entirely new to me. Now, this isn’t true across the board, but the virtual conference allowed me to watch other sessions if I didn’t find the discussion in a given session to be meaningful.

From the opening keynote with Tressie McMillan Cottom and conversations about information and platform capitalism, to a deconstruction of imposter syndrome by former library pages, I found many of the new perspectives to which I was exposed to be helpful and well-grounded in a critical theoretical framework. The critical perspectives brought by the presenters helped me to articulate some of the challenges that I have been wrestling with recently: feeling gas lit by higher education conversations focused on productivity rather than recovery and healing, an alarming preference for surveillance of students rather than connection with students, and the continued omission of critical anti-racist approaches from conversations about progress. Luckily, I haven’t felt this in my library specifically, but I have found the broader discourse in higher education to be discouraging, especially since the start of the spring semester.

In addition to McMillan Cottom’s keynote, the session with We Here, “Systemic Oppression Requires Systemic Change,” highlighted specific instances of racism and oppression in librarianship. Recently, I’ve often felt as if I am blindly gesturing at these issues on a strictly theoretical level. For the most part when I speak about the systemic racism of libraries, I get a few nods, but more blank stares. The presentation underscored that there are concrete and present manifestations of white supremacy in academic librarianship, and it is not strictly an obscured, ominous force that is difficult to uncover. While many conversations about anti-racist work have died out since the summer, this presentation encouraged me to continue seeking anti-racist organization within librarianship and without.

I walked away from the ACRL Virtual Conference with new ideas, a handful of lesson plan sketches, and a re-assurance that I am not the only one trying to have conversations about critical librarianship. In fact, the ability to quickly move between virtual sessions allowed me to find something that really felt like a community. I only wish I had the opportunity to build more connections with that community. At future ACRL conferences, whether virtual or in person, I am excited to find ways to intentionally build relationships.