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?
