International

Making the Cross-Border Jump as an Academic Librarian

Moving to the United States, especially at this sociopolitical moment was not something I was expecting (re: see Violet’s most recent post here), however, a dream position came up that I couldn’t turn down! I wanted to take this first post as a regular contributor to ACRLog and mark this turn in my career in hopes to help anyone else who might be going through similar changes.

Applying

Interviewing and applying to positions in other countries is straightforward, like other types of interviewing, but reading the fine print may be necessary. Some positions say visa sponsorship is not available but may be open to Canadian applicants through the TN visa process. Sending an inquiry to HR before applying just to ensure that the institution and search committee is aware that you are a Canadian applicant might be a good idea as well. The academic library interviews were more intense than the Canadian interviews I have had, where the process was sometimes one and a half or two full days. The long interviews were personally appreciated as I tend to warm up over time and enjoy getting to visit the different campuses, cities, and have more time to get to know everyone at the library.

Moving

Moving away from home is definitely not easy but is unfortunately something that one needs to be open to in order to secure a job in academic librarianship. To make things easier for myself, I have adopted a sort of minimalist lifestyle (emphasis on sort of) and living away from home since high school has helped me become better at packing and moving (although it is cumbersome and physically draining). Many institutions already offer this, but during the in-person interview, taking advantage of all the opportunities to look around the city and neighbourhoods such as tours and lunches to ask questions, really opened my eyes in envisioning myself fitting into the city. The job is important, but a fit between the city’s lifestyle, food scene, cinemas, and bike/running trails were equally important for me.

Mental hurdle

I definitely think that the biggest obstacle to accepting a position in another country was in my head. Just the thought of working in another country was pretty daunting, but here are some strategies that helped me make the transition easier. First, identifying anyone at my current institution who has ever worked in the US, or moved from US to Canada, or other countries was really helpful. Getting to know their experiences and personal anecdotes really helped me prep myself and to know which questions to ask to which person. Second, asking if there were other Canadian librarians at the institution I was interviewing at was critical. This showed me that they had an HR team, an international office, and a department who knew how to support Canadian applicants as well as a network of librarians who had gone through the same or similar process that I could rely on in the future and during the transition period.

Logistical Things

This was/is still my least favourite part. From learning about the TN visa process, getting a new phone number, applying for a social security number, making a bank account, finding a place, thinking about taxes, and much more that I am probably forgetting, there are many steps that need to take place when you are moving countries! Surprisingly, there are a lot of other people who had also gone through a similar move (especially for tech, engineering, post-graduate degrees, etc.) that I could reach out to in my own life and read about online. Something that I had trouble doing was asking for help when I needed it, especially things like rides and their time, but I am actively working on it and trying to put myself in their shoes and thinking about how happy I would be if someone reached out asking to share my time and experiences.

The main message that I wanted this post to show is the transparency of the process and encourage others who may be on the fence about it, especially early-career librarians! There really are no boundaries, and these paper processes can be annoying, but there are entire teams at the library from human resources to managers who can really make the whole move less stressful and burdening. I also wanted to take this post to thank everyone who helped me during this transition and to those who shared their experiences, knowledge, and time with me!

Funding Cuts and Collaboration

A few months ago, I wrote about how federal funding for international studies education, including language programs, was likely going to be cut and, indeed, recently national resource centers around the country, focused on various areas of the world, received word that their programs were no longer a governmental priority. This will have wide-ranging effects on programs as well as student scholarships, but that’s not actually what I’m here to talk about. Instead, I want to focus on work that’s still ongoing in area studies on campus.

Fall marks new exhibit openings at the art museum here, which this year include an exhibit entitled Mekong Voices: Transnational River Justice in Mainland Southeast Asia. The exhibit covers life and work along the Mekong, a river that flows through mainland Southeast Asia. It includes art about the changing environment along the river, as well as traditional handicrafts. Along with these tactile pieces, there are also a few film clips covering communities along the river and how climate change and global trade routes are impacting livelihoods.

The exhibit grew from the Mekong Culture WELL, a project on my campus focused—unsurprisingly—on the Mekong, agriculture, and community. Since its inception, it has had a library component, and I have often been brought into discussions on culture mapping, compiling historical data, and writing up reports for NGO’s—along with more standard instructions sessions.

The Mekong Culture WELL has been in existence in one form or another for several years now, and it has been rewarding to build relationships with faculty members and students over a long period of time. One lesson I’ve learned, though, is to pass queries along when necessary. Every so often in meetings of liaison librarians here, the question arises of how subject liaisons and liaisons with a specialized skill such as GIS can work together.

For me, this has never seemed particularly complicated, but it’s possible that this is because I’m lucky enough to have good colleagues. When a student or faculty member comes to me looking for technical knowledge that I don’t possess, I’m more than happy passing them along to a coworker, and my coworkers have also been gracious enough to receive them.

The one area where I do struggle is keeping on top of all the ways faculty members from my subject areas interact with the library. If someone, for example, is working on a digital project or a project with maps, I might never hear about it. The only solution I’ve found is getting out as much as possible, either talking to other librarians or, even better, keeping open lines of communication with faculty about their projects in general.

On the other hand, sometimes I’m just surprised. Right before the grand opening of the Mekong Voices exhibit, one of my faculty members called me. I answered, assuming we were going to discuss a research proposal I’d recently sent her. Instead, she said, “Come downstairs,” citing the presence of one of the Mekong Culture WELL faculty members. Downstairs I went, to find a group from the museum, including the co-curator of the Mekong Voices exhibit.

It turned out they were there for an impromptu tour of the exhibit on the Vietnam War currently on display in the Libraries. I had put together a popup display of related books that could be checked out, but the main exhibit used materials from the Michigan State University archives, definitely not my unit. Luckily, I’d already put together a guide for student visitors to the exhibit, so I did show them around, while relying heavily on my own previous research into MSU and the Vietnam War.

While they were there, we also visited an exhibit of African materials from the MSU Museum, a separate entity from the art museum. Because they are currently undergoing renovations, portions of their collection are on display in other locations, including in the area studies display cases in the library. Seeing the African materials prompted a discussion between all of us on how the memory institutions on campus work—or don’t—with one another. Some collaborations are happening, but we all agreed that there was room for more.

Over the coming year, I hope to work on these ideas more. Even in the face of funding cuts, I’d like to look for ways to work with people across campus to make sure that international studies maintains a presence.

How do you work with librarians with other specialties? How do you keep track of campus projects? Are there any interesting collaborations between your library and museums or other organizations on your campus or in your community?

What I did for my summer vacation: library edition

The summer, for many academic librarians, brings a lull, and for me that sometimes means that I have the opportunity to travel. Budgets here, as I imagine they are in many institutions, are currently a mess, but I was luckily still able to visit Southeast Asia a few weeks ago. I didn’t do nearly as much purchasing as I would have liked (see the aforementioned budget problems), but I was able to buy a few things and I also met a lot of great people to hopefully collaborate with in the future. So, without further ado, here’s a little bit of what I did on my summer vacation.

Kediri, East Java

My first major stop was Universitas Nusantara PGRI in Kediri, a city in East Java. For the AIFIS-MSU Conference on Indonesian Studies this past June, faculty at the university composed and choregraphed a piece for their students to perform as part of the opening ceremony, drawing on local performing arts traditions. They had a larger festival planned in July, so I, of course, wanted to attend. After I gave a (very embarrassing) speech about the importance of preserving cultural heritage, I relaxed and watched several musical and dance performances presented both by students and by community groups.

History students from the university also took me to see some important historical sites in the area, including Tegowangi Temple, where I met the woman in charge of maintaining the temple. She grew up in the area and it was her father who decided that the temple should be looked after and maintained. Kediri was home to a historically important kingdom in Java and it was fascinating to learn more about this history from the students and to hear what excites them about their studies.

Place Marketing

Everywhere I visited, I also stopped by a tourism information center, or found other ways to pick up place marketing materials for MSU’s collection. This meant everything from wandering through a Jakartan construction site looking for one of many, many malls to visiting an office located inside an Arc de Triomphe lookalike in the middle of Kediri. Collecting place marketing materials is always fun because they’re everywhere but it’s still an adventure hunting them down—a kind of library scavenger hunt.

“Academic” Meetings

Then, of course, there were the more standard library- and academia-focused meetings. I’m hoping to get more involved in collaborating on research with practitioners in Indonesia, either in traditional research collaborations or through other methods such as translating research papers into English so that they can be published for a different kind of audience, so I had several different meetings discussing ideas.

On the library side of things, a highlight was visiting the library of Surakarta’s Grand Mosque. The National Library of Indonesia and the provincial Regional Library have started a program seeking out so-called “hidden” manuscript collections: collections not found in libraries, but instead in private homes or in community institutions such as mosques. I was invited to sit in on a meeting at the mosque to go through their collection and identify which pieces would fit into the scope of the project. I got to see everything from books of tafsir with notes in the margins to student report cards, learned about different kinds of paper and what they signal about time period and preservation, and ferried a lot of archival housings between tables.

When I visit libraries overseas, I try to make note not only of what kinds of materials they have, but also how they can be accessed. If a student comes to me looking for Javanese Qurans, do I know the person they need to contact to gain access? Is there an online catalog? Even better, are there digitized copies available to browse? In the case of the Grand Mosque, there’s as yet only a paper catalog (currently out of print), but there are a large number of manuscripts that have been digitized and made available online.

My other big library meeting was with the Library of Congress field office in Jakarta. The Library of Congress has offices around the world that funnel books back to the US, including to research libraries. I can report that despite everything going on politically in both the US and Indonesia, operations at the field office continue. Shipping costs are rising and there are other unexpected hurdles that come up, but it was heartening to meet with everyone face-to-face and hear how things are going.

Zines

Finally, I planned my itinerary around a zine festival in Jakarta, a city whose zine scene I’ve watched from afar for some time. The festival was held at KONGSI 8, a small studio and café space, but they managed to fit in a good number of vendors as well as a large collection of zines from makers who weren’t present. I had to resist buying everything, and instead focused on political and environmental zines, as well as zines about identity.

Collecting zines for the library helps to provide immediate access to what everyday students, activists, and creators are thinking. The next step, of course, is making sure library users know the zines are available. One thing I’d really like to focus on in the coming year is communicating with students about the library’s zine collection and brainstorming with them ways they can use zines both as sources for their research and as a way of expressing their ideas and findings. But more about that in another post.

What have you been up to this summer? Any interesting projects? Any bright ideas? Are you ready for the fall semester?

Test for E.C.H.O.

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Marc Mason, Library Undergraduate Services Associate at Arizona State University Libraries.

I had one of those days today. One of those rare ones, the kind of day where you walk around with a little more bounce in your step, your chin tilted a bit higher. It was a day where – hallelujah! – validation rained down upon my shoulders and washed away some of the frustrations I’ve felt lately on the job.

We could all use a few more of those days. Mine came about courtesy of our university’s International Students and Scholar Center. Prior to school starting, they held a day-long conference for all incoming international graduate students. This is the second time that the ISSC has put on this conference, and they have generously included me as a breakout session speaker each time. Last time out, around 20 students came to my talk, which I will admit was disappointing. I suppose the competition during that time slot was fierce, but my library-guy pride to this day still kind of believes it can’t have been that fierce and more students should have come to see me.

Arrogance? Sure. But I think libraries could use a little more swagger.

Because of that tiny turnout last time, I had little in the way of expectations going into this second conference. So it was more than a bit shocking when I arrived at my room to set up and saw that there were 240 chairs arranged in the audience. I can take a joke at my expense, but this had the look of something that was going to be embarrassing. I swear I felt my sense of pride start to shrivel. The time ticked down. The previous session finished. I held my breath.

A flood of people poured into my room. 180 of them as a matter of fact.

Floating on air, I did my thing, offering up the library services I wanted them to know about, and keeping them laughing all the way through. When I was done, over two dozen stayed to talk to me further. Like I said: it was incredibly validating. May each and every one of you have a day like that, and soon – that’s my wish for you.

I’ve been working with the international population for over seven years now, and in general, it is always my favorite part of my job (even when it isn’t one of “those” days). The opportunity to meet and teach people from all over the world is truly a gift. It has also put me in a position to speak at conferences on international student topics and to meet amazing colleagues from across the country in the process. It has given me the opportunity to see humanity in an incredible light, and to truly take a stand for tolerance. I would not trade it for anything. My job gives me the chance to continuously learn, both on an academic and on a cultural level.

I have occasionally been asked about best practices for working with international students, and with that in mind, I decided to put into words how I go about working with these student populations and their extraordinary cultural differences. I call it “Test for E.C.H.O.”

E stands for Empathy: The first thing you can do is show your capability for understanding. These folks have traveled thousands upon thousands of miles to be at your institution. Sometimes they have traveled for almost three days depending on long layovers. They’re far from home, they cannot get home easily, and everything is somewhat scary. The signage is in a second language. The odds of any random cashier speaking their native tongue is slim. Local foods may not sit well with their digestive systems for a while and they may get sick for the first few weeks of being here. Oh, and they may not see their families for a year or better. The whole process can be wildly intimidating, and all it takes is one bad interaction with a local to make them question their life decisions.

Don’t be that local. Keep some of the above in your mind and let it guide you in how you approach working with these students.

C stands for Care: After you have shown empathy, follow that up by demonstrating that you believe that they matter. That you care about them as fellow human beings. Don’t allow that physical distance they’ve traveled to become an emotional one as well. (Life need not always batter us with metaphors.) I can’t even begin to tell you how many students I have worked with over the last few years who responded to simple moments of genuine caring. Creating that connection grounds that student to the university and provides them a human connection to their educational experience.

Be that connection. It’s great for them, and I promise it’s great for you as well.

H stands for Humor: Different cultures have different senses of humor, that much is certain. But laughter creates a bond between you and the international student that will be of enormous benefit.

There is a tendency among many in our profession to take themselves very, very seriously. And I get that – we are the gatekeepers for information, freedom fighters against the tyranny of government overreach, yadda yadda yadda. However, that seriousness can also be rather intimidating, not just for our international students, but for all students. This sometimes places our expectations for students far out of reach for where their real capabilities lie. If and when that happens, students start avoiding the library, seeing it as a foreboding place where they do not belong.

We never want them to feel like they don’t belong. Right? So be silly. Tell a joke that revolves around a pop cultural artifact that has worldwide appeal. No matter where we are from, certain things are popular. Star Wars, Beyonce, Harry Potter… it isn’t difficult to find common ground. Use it to get some laughs, put their minds at ease, and create a learning experience they will never forget.

O stands for Optimism: And finally, help these students believe. When you are working and learning in a second language, particularly one as difficult as English, confidence is a fragile thing. Setbacks can be crippling, and doubts about one’s ability to succeed (not to mention the time and money put into coming to the U.S.) can set in quickly. Numerous students have shared their “I almost quit” stories with me since I started working with this population, and they all have pretty much the same plot: a failure of some sort, painful phone calls to friends/confidants expressing regret and fear, worries about how family may react when they go home in “disgrace,” and (for those who stuck it out) a eureka moment where they got the right help to carry them through their struggles.

A librarian can be that help. Be that help.

When working with an international learner, using phrases like “yes, you’ve got this” or “I can tell you understand this stuff” can make a massive difference as that student continues working through their assignments. The reassurance of an expert goes a long way towards solidifying confidence and building a strong mindset for success. And they’ll remember the part you played in that success, I promise you.

The world isn’t slowing down anytime soon, and neither is the influx of international students to U.S. schools. Cultural literacy and competency is going to become one of the most critical skills our library staff can possess. So as you find yourself working with this population – whether individually or whole classes – take just a moment to remind yourself to test for E.C.H.O. Trust me – you’ll be glad you did. And you’ll have more than a few of those kinds of days.

News From An Academic Library in Japan

It is now just over two weeks since the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. We have all seen the images of massive destruction, heard and read the stories of death and suffering, and witnessed the fortitude of the Japanese citizens as they attempt to return to normalcy despite the ongoing severity of the crisis in their country. There’s nothing I could say or tell you about what is happening in Japan that would be more insightful or eloquent than what Garr Reynolds shared.

In 2009 my library was visited by three academic librarians from Tohoku University. Even though we spent just one day together, we learned a great deal from each other. They were eager to hear about our information literacy initiative because that is something still rare among academic libraries in Japan. We were curious about the Japanese system of higher education, and how academic libraries were operated (for example, the Dean of Libraries is often a non-librarian faculty member). Tomoe Hanzawa was the lead librarian of the visiting group; she was the best English speaker and did the translating. In the wake of the news coming out of Japan my thoughts turned to Tomoe and her colleagues. She is the librarian at the Science and Engineering Library at Tohoku, which I thought was in the region where the earthquake struck, but I needed to check on that. Sure enough, Tohoku is in the Northern region of Japan, but not among the cities that took a direct hit from the tsunami.

I e-mailed Tomoe to try to get some news. I was hoping to hear that she and her colleagues were safe, and that hopefully her institution had been spared much damage. I heard nothing for a week. Then finally, last Tuesday I received a response. The good news was that she and her colleagues had survived the earthquake and were safe. Tomoe did not have access to e-mail until the electricity was restored, but she said she was glad to hear from me – and she was thankful that American academic librarians were seeking news about their fellow librarians in Japan. While Tohoku University was spared the complete destruction that occurred in other cities owing to its more Northern location, there was still extensive damage to the campus. Yesterday, Tomoe shared a few photos with me so I could get a sense of the damage at her library:

This first photo is a scene from the Reading Room:

Scene from the Library Reading Room. The stacks are still standing.

The journal collection was hit hard:

Hardly a volume is left on the shelves in the periodicals stacks - but again - the shelves are standing

As you might expect, given the first two photos, a great deal of clean up work will be needed in the main book stacks:

Significant damage in the library book stacks

The severity of the damage appears worst in the microforms area:

Heavy cabinets tossed around like toys by the quake

Tomoe sent me photos that showed other damage caused by the earthquake including cracks in the interior walls of the Library, and cracks and other problems on the building exteriors. But given the severity of the earthquake it’s amazing that the buildings are still standing – and we’ve all heard much about how the Japanese engineer their buildings to withstand quakes.

I was glad to learn, that despite the physical damage at Tohoku University, Tomoe and her colleagues are safe and starting to recover – and that is going to take a long time. But things are far worse in other parts of Japan. I hope to learn more about anything specific that we can do to help our academic library colleagues in Japan. Right now, they are just trying to figure out the extent of the damage, and how they can restore some degree of normalcy. I will stay in touch with Tomoe to see if there is any way we can provide assistance. For now, the best way to help is to make a generous contribution to any of the several charitable organizations accepting donations. If you have any news of other Japanese universities impacted by the earthquake or tsunami please share what you have learned.

Many of us are headed to ACRL in Philadelphia to learn, to share and to enjoy each other’s company. As we have these experiences, let’s not forget that our fellow academic librarians in Japan are having a completely different experience – and let’s think about how we can help them as they seek to recover from what will likely be one of the worst natural disasters of the 21st century.

UPDATE – 3/30/11: I received an update from Tomoe in which she let me know she and her colleagues are already hard at work putting the library back to normal. See here. AMAZING!