I’ve always been one of those students who really liked school. I love to learn and understand things, and as I’ve gotten older, that continues to be true. I think that’s one reason I chose librarianship – every time a student comes to me for help on a reference question, I get to learn something new.
However, after so many years of continuously being in school – kindergarten through senior year of college is a long time! – I was ready for a break after I graduated from undergrad. I always thought I would go back to school eventually, but grad school is a significant investment in many ways, and I didn’t want to get another degree just because I felt like it. It took seven years of working in other fields before I figured out that librarianship was the right path and I started my MSLS at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2023. After my time away from education, I knew I was making the right decision and attending the right school for the right reasons.
I loved library school and I love where I went to school. But going to school in-person, full-time, while working one or two jobs and sometimes an internship was also not easy. There were a lot of late nights writing papers and early mornings going to class. I knew early on that I wanted to be in academic libraries, and I was dismayed when I realized that many academic librarian positions either require or strongly recommend a second master’s degree. I knew that I would need another break from being a student before I could even think about doing another degree.
I focused on applying for jobs that didn’t require a second master’s, and landed in a great library at a wonderful institution doing a job that I love. Knowing now that I didn’t have to have a second master’s in order to get my first job in my field, I told myself that I had to take at least a year off from even starting to think about another master’s program or a doctoral degree. I needed to focus on my current position, so August 2026 was when I would reopen the door of potentially being a student again.
What is curriculum mapping?
I promise that this will circle back to the topic of school. During the fall semester, the Vanderbilt library system let us know that all the libraries would be starting to do something called curriculum mapping – each subject librarian would be responsible for creating a curriculum map for each program that they support. With eight programs and counting, that’s no small task for me. Additionally, curriculum mapping wasn’t something I learned about in library school, nor a task that I had ever done before. The idea was straightforward enough – create a map of all the courses in the programs you support so that you can scaffold library instruction and make sure you’re teaching students the information they need at the right times as they move through their degree program. However, I really struggled initially to apply that concept to my programs. I couldn’t seem to take the explanation and actually go do it, and I was getting really frustrated.
Back to school!
I am very fortunate to be a librarian at an institution that values continuing education and professional development for its library staff. Not long after curriculum mapping was introduced as a focus, we found out that Library Juice Academy, an organization that offers professional development courses for library and archive professionals, would be offering a four-week course on curriculum mapping in December – and Vanderbilt’s libraries would cover the cost for librarians who wanted to take it. I said yes right away. If anything could help me learn curriculum mapping, it was a class!
It wasn’t until after we were all enrolled that I realized this could be considered a deviation from my resolution of “no thinking about school for one year.” But, I reasoned, this was just a short class. It was not any kind of degree program, just one that I would get a certificate for. And it was to help me do my job and be a better librarian – definitely worth it.
You can probably guess what happened. I completed the curriculum mapping course and learned a lot. Over the four weeks, every participant completed a curriculum map and shared it with the other students for feedback. Seeing how others had structured their maps and receiving feedback on my own map was incredibly helpful. I feel a lot more prepared to move forward with this project after taking the class.
Also, I’m now counting down until August of this year when I can start thinking about what degree program I want to do next.
What’s next?
After I started working at Vanderbilt, some friends asked me if I missed being a student. I said no, because I work with students every day and get to spend each day on a college campus – that’s exactly what I was hoping for in library school, and I was lucky enough to get it. But I realize now that what I do miss is being in school and everything that comes with being a student. I know I needed the break, and that taking time off instead of jumping into another degree right away was the right thing to do. But I love comparing course descriptions and choosing what to take! I love reading articles and taking notes and writing reflections! I really enjoy researching and writing papers and doing projects and getting feedback from professors! Yes, I know I’m a nerd. I think a lot of librarians are and I’ve learned to embrace it.
Whatever degree I do next will be a very different experience from my library science degree. But now I know that I will do another degree. I’m in a different phase of life, and I’m not going to leave a job I love, so any program I choose will be one that I can complete remotely and part-time. The good news is that there are a lot of programs like that out there. It will just be a matter of finding the right one for me.
3 months into my first academic librarian job, these last couple weeks have been by far the busiest, but most exciting! From getting posters accepted into conferences, planning a forum (Check out the upcoming student journal forum 2026! ), continuing to teach and do consultations, I have been feeling quite occupied and positively stressed. I decided to be share some of my personal projects and celebrate the week of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA2025) Conference in Baltimore and how it fits into my work as an early-career academic librarian. Seemingly unrelated at first, I continue to be amazed at the different intersections at which film and librarianship continue to meet. Although fundamentally and theoretically very different, the practice of archiving and librarianship hold many of the same important values and ways of providing access to information, building community, and promoting educational engagement across all domains.
Originally from Calgary (a.k.a. cowtown), one of the most exciting things about moving to Toronto for grad school was its proximity and availability of so much culture, and events like the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Film festivals were one of the best ways to not only watch films, but to share oral histories, learn about local diasporic communities, and become introduced to film archives and libraries in the city. This seemingly small interest of mine led me to take a course called “Introduction to Archiving Audiovisual Materials,” then “Film Preservation” where I learned to handle and preserve various film materials. Then I made a map of various Toronto diaspora film festivals because I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing any films or screenings around the city. It happened quite often that I would find about an anticipated screening or a festival after the event had passed, since there was no consolidated resource. It was something I wanted to make for myself but definitely thought it would have more potential as a collaborative community resource. Thanks to the support of a graduate fellowship from U of T’s School of Cities and supportive mentors, this was the project I ended up presenting in Baltimore this week.
Another project I was able to explore was the last one that I completed as a Graduate Student Library Assistant at the Gerstein Science Information Centre at U of T. This project will be presented at the Ontario Library Association conference in January and I am super excited to share the different methods in which health sciences education and cinema share a symbiotic relationship. One aspect of the project I was passionate about was the interaction with students, the idea of receiving input and participation, even as a stand-alone library display. Just having the space to talk about alternative ways of learning can be a beneficial opportunity to learn more about different ways to approach the same material outside of traditional text and articles. There is definitely a lot of potential for film archives and libraries to explore this area of medical humanities, as already seen in the many graphic medicine collections around the world.
My first AMIA conference!
I also continue to be interested in libraries and librarian representation in mainstream culture and on screen. From the idea of library as a “third space” to the notion of a helpful librarian, I hope to do more research on these various topics and really understand how they came about and continue to have an effect on those looking into entering the profession, those interacting with librarians and libraries, and the impact it has on librarians and information professionals. I had thought that this “film phase” would fade out after high school, but as I moved around cities and travelled more, this hobby of mine allowed me to grow as an individual and engage with the world in another way. The various opportunities that I’ve had related to film and librarianship, even over just the last 2.5 years have been so unexpected, but wholeheartedly rewarding.
Attending the Telluride Film Festival’s student symposium program in 2024!
I hope to continue refining my research skills and expand my horizons as a new information professional while continuing to fuel my passions in librarianship and film. I am also so curious if there are other academic librarian film enthusiasts out there or other ways librarians have brought their passions into their jobs. I have found quite a few film blogs and papers on the topic and would love to learn more (my personal favourite: https://reel-librarians.com/). Finally, I have to mention this Letterboxd list (https://boxd.it/tgNBu) that I continue to update whenever I notice a librarian in a movie?
Last month, I gave my first lightning talk at a library conference, the Iowa Library Association Annual Conference (ILA). I’ve wanted to present at a conference since I started graduate school, so this was an exciting milestone. My lightning talk was about conducting an e-journal overlap analysis, and it went smoothly—but that’s not what I want to talk about today.
As I reconnected with old friends, jostled to get morning coffee before it ran out, and relaxed on the sunny patio between sessions, I found myself reflecting on how different I felt compared to when I first attended ILA last year. This year, even though I was a little nervous about presenting for the first time, I felt comfortable and confident navigating the conference and talking to other librarians. But when I first started out as a library professional, working part-time and getting my MLIS, conferences scared me. I knew they were valuable opportunities, but I felt lost and overwhelmed trying to navigate them.
Here are the four things I wish I could go back and tell myself before my first library conference.
Pace yourself.
This might have been the hardest lesson for me to learn. I’m a little notorious among friends and family for my Scrooge McDuck disposition. At first, I refused to skip a single session of any conference I attended; I figured that I had already paid for the entire conference, so if I didn’t attend the entire conference, I was flushing my money down the drain. I’m sure you can imagine the mental burnout and physical exhaustion that followed.
Some level of tiredness after a conference is inevitable, but once I discovered I could skip a Wednesday dessert reception without the sky falling down, I began to recover faster and feel less stressed about conferences. I slowly shifted my goals from “attend the conference” to things that were more measurable, like “talk to five new people” or “learn about open access.” I finished conferences feeling more successful because I was able to identify which specific sessions and opportunities were in line with my career goals.
Plan your pitch.
As an introvert, I was incredibly anxious about attending conferences. I found it helpful to plan my “pitch” ahead of time, rehearsing it over and over again on the drive to the venue.
My “pitch” is what I’d say whenever I needed to introduce myself to someone new. I soon figured out that an effective pitch didn’t just describe my present; it gave a sense of my future goals as well. I would lengthen or shorten my pitch depending on the situation, but the full version went something like this: I’m a first-year MLIS student at the University of Iowa, and I work in technical services at Iowa’s law library. This is my first conference! I’m here to meet librarians and explore careers in [conference demographic: academic librarianship/libraries in Iowa/liaison librarianship/etc]. Once I was job-searching, I said so explicitly.
I also planned the questions I wanted to ask the librarians I met at the conference. I wrote them down in a notebook and reviewed them in the hallways between sessions to make sure I wouldn’t blank. (Bringing a notebook and pen everywhere also gave me something to do with my hands.) Some examples of the questions I asked:
What are your duties in your current role?
What skills and experiences prepared you for your current role?
What are the biggest joys and challenges of your current role?
What’s it like working at [type of institution—community college, liberal arts college, R1, etc]?
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the field?
Targeted networking is key.
Even though there are usually student discounts and scholarship opportunities, conferences still cost money. It’s important to spend that money as wisely as possible. For example, I always knew I wanted to be an academic librarian, and I hoped to be able to stay in Iowa after I graduated. That meant I needed to target my networking to academic librarians in the state of Iowa. Through trial and error, I discovered that the best conference for me was Iowa ACRL.
Every conference has its trade-offs, and there isn’t one “best conference” for every librarian or library student. For example, the national ACRL conference would have been more valuable to me if I intended to leave Iowa and I wanted to network with other academic librarians across the country. If I were also exploring public librarianship, ILA would have been the most useful, since it attracts both public and academic librarians.
The bottom line: Think about what you want out of your career, and ask your mentors how you can target your networking to achieve those aims.
You deserve to be here.
Seriously. Nobody is going to kick you out because you’re a student. When I started going to conferences, I was worried I didn’t have sufficient “credentials” to be there. But conferences are all about learning and networking. Being a student IS your credential!
Maybe this is the Iowan in me, but I was also worried about being a “bother” or a “nuisance” to others. I would avoid talking to people because I didn’t want to disrupt their meal or interrupt them texting a friend. However, for better or worse, meeting new people is the point of conferences. Don’t be afraid to say “Excuse me, is this seat taken?” and sit down next to someone new. You never know where it might lead.
Here’s an example from my own experience. When I was a first-year MLIS student, I attended my very first conference: Iowa ACRL 2024. I forced myself to sign up for the Thursday evening dine-arounds, and, not recognizing the names of anyone who had already signed up, I just picked the restaurant with the most vegetarian options. But when I got there, I slowly realized I’d ended up at a table populated almost entirely by senior leadership at Iowa State University Libraries, University of Northern Iowa Libraries, and the Iowa Library Association.
My first thought was “Oh my God, I’ve totally messed up. I should not be here. I don’t have anything worth these people’s time to contribute.” But (in true Iowa fashion), I felt even more strongly that it would be too rude to leave, so I forced myself to talk to the librarians at the table. I pulled my pitch out of my back pocket when they asked me about myself, and I made conversation by asking questions about their careers, working at Iowa State and UNI, and the challenges and joys in their work.
The librarian I sat across from a year and a half ago is my supervisor today. You never know the kinds of connections that can take root at a conference. Pace yourself, come prepared, be intentional, and, above all, remember that you deserve to be here.
Some thoughts on the “why” of professional development.
Photo by Bohdan on Unsplash. Alt image: a multicolored ladder leaning on a gray stone wall.
Premium skills
I subscribe to Book Freak, a substack newsletter by Mark Frauenfelder. In short, each newsletter summarizes a few main takeaways from “great books and thinkers to help improve yourself, boost productivity, build the life you want, and generally live better.” I’ve found it a concise way to consider new ideas from authors I would otherwise not have time to read (as my teetering bedside stack of similar books gathers dust in lieu of fantasy/sci-fi).
In a recent issue, Frauenfelder covered some key points from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work. According to Book Freak, Newport advises that the best path to a tailored and meaningful career is via “the accumulation of ‘career capital’ — rare and valuable skills that can be traded for greater autonomy and impact.”
I mention Book Freak a) because I like it, and b) because I want to clarify that I have not read So Good They Can’t Ignore You—only a very short summary of some of its points. I’m sure there’s plenty of nuance I can’t speak to. That said, the advice to “Identify the core skills in your field that are both rare and valuable” and “Make a concrete plan to systematically improve these skills” spurred some thought about what those skills might be for an academic librarian. I asked a few mentors. Their response was mostly that specific valuable skills would depend on whichever area of librarianship one found themselves in, given the disparateness of academic library specializations; or perhaps that rare and valuable skills, like knowledge of scholarly communication intricacies in my case, is what qualifies one for specialized library positions in the first place. I’m curious what readers might posit as rare and valuable skills in their areas, or whether there are skills whose rarity and value would span all academic library positions.
Skills for whom?
Yet, a disheartening counterpoint to all of this is that rare and valuable skills won’t help you thrive or even save your job if your library is being stripped for parts. Brilliant librarians are being laid off at universities around the country (e.g. Duke, Northwestern, UC San Diego, Western Illinois). Some of these layoffs were the result of direct attacks on higher education; some were probably due to structural economic changes to the information landscape; all of them represent a devaluation of library work. In this climate, grinding for new skills doesn’t guarantee job security, although it may help with a career transition. Tressie McMillan Cottom has said in many places that the “institution does not/cannot love you.” Institutions exist to maintain themselves at whatever cost. I feel that a lot these days.
The logic of pursuing skills that might endear us to loveless institutions is a concrete example of how soft power influences the way we move through the world: what is valuable for us to spend our time learning is defined by what is useful to the institution, or to those in power within the institution, or in an even broader sense, by those with power through the generations. But, in a classic structure vs. agency paradigm, we retain some degree of human agency within and despite the visible and/or discursive structures that order our lives. Here, I’ll invoke some (probably tacky) Foucault, or rather a more digestible interpretation of his theory on “technologies of the self” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Subjects are not simply constructed by power; they themselves partake in that construction and modify themselves through practices of the self. They are not just docile bodies, but actively refuse, adopt and alter forms of being a subject. One way of contesting normalizing power is by shaping oneself and one’s lifestyle creatively: by exploring opportunities for new ways of being, new fields of experience, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.”
Threading the needle?
So, I close with two questions: a) what would “technologies of the self” look like for those of us working in academic libraries, and b) could they ever overlap with pursuit of “career capital” skills that are rare and valuable to institutions that cannot love us? In a practical sense, I’m not sure if resisting the institution is the way for more of us to keep our jobs… perhaps you are inherently a subject of the institution when you agree to receive a salary. I generally like what I understand my job to be, and I want to keep doing what seems worth doing. I also want to pursue skills and ideas and actions that align with my interest in stewarding information for the public good, but it’s hard to predict how higher educational institutions may or may not value that ideal in the future.
The best answer I can posit right now focuses on the word “creatively” in the encyclopedia quote above. After reflecting on my individual values and goals, I’d like to explore skills that will allow me to approach my work more experimentally and flexibly in alignment with those goals. Creativity may sound like a cliché thesis, but it’s easier said than done; it’s the highest tier of Bloom’s taxonomy, and it’s challenging to even identify how to increase creative capacity. Some of the skills I may explore through this approach to professional/personal development might be perceived as directly institutionally valuable, and some might not – via a course on fiction writing, for example. The overarching benefit would be my ability to do or create something with those skills that feels novel and generative and aligned with my professional values. The ability to be creative in one’s work tends to help the institution in the long run, even if the goal of shaping oneself creatively would be partly to resist normalizing power, in this case. To the institution’s credit: I’m not sure it counts as love, but I do appreciate the professional development stipend.
I occupy an unusual position in academic librarianship. As a continuing appointment performing arts librarian serving the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, I straddle multiple worlds: subject specialist and generalist, curator and reference provider, researcher and daily practitioner. In other words, my work constantly shifts between different expectations and evaluative frameworks.
By comparison, my colleagues in music librarianship benefit from established professional infrastructure: specialized graduate training, the Music Library Association’s networks, standardized practices, and decades of scholarship. By contrast, librarians working with theatre and dance inhabit a professionalization gap. There is no dedicated graduate program, little in the way of shared training, and only fragmentary community infrastructure. As a result,this absence is not simply inconvenient; it shapes how tenure committees evaluate our work, how we articulate our expertise, and how effectively we support our constituencies.
Scott Stone (2023) notes that 40% of Music Library Association members now work beyond music specialization. Nevertheless, evaluation systems often remain grounded in older categories—either the “deep specialist” or the “broad generalist.” Hybrid roles like mine don’t fit neatly into either, even though performing arts librarianship often demands more disciplinary expertise, not less.
Consequently, this essay argues that performing arts librarianship requires frameworks that recognize creative research as distinctive: recursive, embodied, community-centered, and often resistant to the models libraries have traditionally used. To illustrate these dynamics, evidence from five studies—Fleming-May, Marini, Mayer, Dalal & Shane, and Stone—underscores both the gaps and the opportunities. My own practice with students demonstrates why new approaches are urgently needed.
Complementary Studies
Rachel Fleming-May’s (2025) meta-ethnography combines findings from 23 studies on how creative artists seek information (2019–2024). She sees that professional artists and scholars view emotions, memory, and experiences as valid sources of information. They describe creation as “dynamic information making.” This means research happens alongside practice, not before it (558). Artists seldom feel frustrated when they can’t find information. Instead, they see engagement as “an opportunity for creative dialogue rather than [addressing a deficit]” (558). Fleming-May shows how creative research differs from traditional academic work. Similarly, artists see making as a learning process. Even when alone, they keep a dialogue going. They also value exploration and chance discoveries.
Fleming-May examines professional artists in a broad manner, while Francesca Marini focuses her attention on theatre scholarship and its specialized practitioners. Marini’s 2007 study included 41 interviews. She spoke with theatre scholars and performing arts archivists from Italy, the U.S., France, and Belgium. Performing arts information professionals share five key traits with the scholars they help:
Attention to context.
Sensitivity to time and ephemerality.
Creativity
Passionate engagement
Interdisciplinarity
Significantly, many have backgrounds as practitioners, like actors, directors, dancers, and designers. They also point out that there isn’t just one method, like there isn’t one form of theatre. Archivists and librarians are key research partners, helping users spot connections, both inside and outside the material, that might go unnoticed. By documenting proactively—arranging recordings, soliciting materials, they promote the creation of sources that would not otherwise exist. As one archivist puts it, “The archive has to be alive; it has to be an active entity… Theatre cannot be a dead issue” (29).
Impact on student experience
At the same time, these patterns become visible—and often troubling—in student researchers. Jennifer Mayer’s (2015) case study of upper-division performing arts students at the University of Wyoming found they struggled with multimedia discovery, couldn’t reliably distinguish primary from secondary sources, and found interdisciplinary research challenging to navigate. Dance students turned to Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube before library tools—not from laziness, but because these platforms matched their visual and exploratory habits (419). Students’ image selections often diverged from faculty expectations, revealing visual literacy gaps. Costume and scene design students reported unmet research demands and “tension between what sources the professors want versus what is realistically available” (423).
One sustained intervention demonstrates how to address these challenges. Heather Dalal and Robin Shane’s (2023) seven-year collaboration at Rider University embedded the librarian in courses and shifted toward collaborative, in-class research. Instead of demonstrating databases, they had students share images in Google Slides and conduct peer evaluation using prompts: “Is this first-hand research? What helps you know that? Does this feel like good research?” (1). Pairing iterative practice with ongoing feedback reduced anxiety and improved outcomes. Their approach succeeds because it treats creative research as distinctive practice requiring specialized support—not deficit remediation.
These studies mirror my experience: the gap between struggling students and expert practitioners is significant; traditional systems don’t fully serve creative researchers; and effective support begins by reconceptualizing what counts as research and how libraries partner in it.
Supporting MFA students
I work closely with MFA students whose research challenges assumptions about information-seeking. They often investigate connections between and embodied experience and knowledge; direct plays through non-linear, emotionally driven, community-centered processes where performance itself becomes research—creation and investigation happen simultaneously, not sequentially.
When they request research support, traditional frameworks often fail. Their processes are recursive: create, reflect, research, create again. Students draw from personal experience, community knowledge, and bodily understanding alongside scholarly sources. These are sophisticated behaviors, yet library systems and instruction models don’t consistently recognize them as legitimate scholarship.
Here, Marini’s framework helps me understand why certain approaches work. When I function as research partner rather than service provider—actively suggesting connections, participating in interpretation, understanding the ephemeral nature of their work—students respond differently. When I acknowledge my own theatre engagement (attending performances, understanding rehearsal processes), I build credibility.
Further more, theatre research still contends with Eurocentric frames that push materials into anthropology or religion rather than “theatre.” Play discovery remains challenging: cataloging rarely enables browsing by practitioners’ actual access points—theme, playwright demographics, historical setting. Eurocentrism persists not only in who appears in standard histories, but in the very definitions of “theatre” those histories assume.
Meeting these needs demands subject expertise most LIS curricula barely touch. These studies, combined with my observations, illuminate where library frameworks don’t yet align with creative research processes:
Gaps Between Traditional Library Models and Performing Arts Research
Performance as research. Artists don’t separate research from creation—performance itself generates knowledge. Traditional library models assume research precedes creation; systems do not yet account for knowledge emerging through practice.
Embodied knowledge. Academic and library frameworks often do not recognize bodily practice, kinesthetic learning, or experiential understanding as legitimate forms of research and knowledge generation.
Community expertise. Students focus on lived experience alongside published scholarship. Traditional hierarchies that privilege formal publications can undermine the legitimacy of community-based work.
Non-linear processes. Creative research is recursive and is frequently characterized by strong emotions. One-shot library instruction focuses on systematic searching. This often misses intuitive leaps and unexpected connections.
Visual information primacy. Artists across disciplines rely on visual representations, creating image “morgues” for research. Text-based discovery systems don’t yet serve visual searching well.
Serendipity over efficiency. Artists value browsing and accidental discoveries as sources of inspiration. When plays collocate with novels and poetry, or scores scatter across classifications, browsing becomes challenging. Library systems optimize for known-item retrieval, creating tension with exploratory investigation.
Interdisciplinary navigation. Students investigating trauma draw simultaneously on psychology, neuroscience, performance studies, and feminist theory. Disciplinary call number organization scatters related materials across locations.
Ephemeral materials. Theatre requires an understanding of materials that are “instantaneously past”—social, political, and artistic contexts and creative processes that disappear without documentation.
The Dalal and Shane Model: A Practical Approach
Fortunately, Dalal and Shane’s collaboration demonstrates several principles applicable to broader performing arts librarianship:
Sustained embedded partnerships rather than one-shot sessions. Developing evaluation sophistication, strategic approaches, and comfort with ambiguity takes years of practice. Mayer found that students who missed classes or transferred stayed behind. This shows that front-loading alone isn’t enough.
Peer learning occurs through practice rather than abstract instruction. Students build a “critical eye” by talking about real research choices and learning from their mistakes. Students develop intuitive judgment alongside analytical skills.
The need for explicit visual and primary source literacy teaching.
Recognition of legitimate differences. Framing creative research as distinctive rather than deficient validates the sophisticated behaviors that Fleming-May and Marini document.
Ongoing feedback and adaptation. By embedding themselves in courses and providing non-graded comments on individual submissions, Dalal and Shane offered point-of-need instruction. When they shifted to flipped classrooms with collaborative in-class research, “collaboration and source-sharing improved outcomes and reduced anxiety” (3).
Challenges and Ongoing Conversations
However, implementing these approaches faces significant challenges, particularly for tenure-track librarians in these specializations:
Within libraries: How do we prioritize sustained embedded relationships when staffing is limited? How do we assess impacts beyond traditional counts? How do we build subject expertise when LIS programs don’t teach it? Sustained partnerships, proactive documentation, and creative programming require resources many libraries lack.
For tenure and promotion: How do we make cases when creative research support doesn’t fit established categories? Stone notes the shift toward generalists means broader subject coverage, yet evaluation criteria remain designed for specialists or generalists—not hybrid positions requiring deep expertise across multiple performing arts.
Between libraries and academic units: How do we partner with faculty who may not recognize libraries as collaborators in practice-based research? The tension between desired sources and realistic resources means librarians must educate faculty about expectations while advocating for improved collections.
Professional infrastructure: We need more interconnected communities of practice like those music and art librarians have established. The Theatre Library Association (founded 1937) exists but remains largely inactive.
Training and standards: How do we advocate for specialized training in practice-based research? ARLIS/NA Core Competencies call for understanding users’ “research behaviors” and “visual literacy,” but no comparable framework spans music, dance, and theatre together. No specialized educational program for performing arts archivists and librarians matches film archivist training.
Community engagement: Prioritizing materials from BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and historically marginalized creators requires transparent stewardship models and long-term commitment. How do we balance proactive documentation with ethical engagement that doesn’t extract or appropriate?
Moving Forward: What This Means for Practice
Taken together, these studies argue for reconceptualizing library practice across many domains:
Information literacy. Shift from one-off sessions to embedded, semester-long partnerships that blend deliberate practice with ongoing feedback. Teach visual and primary-source literacies explicitly; treat creative research as distinctive rather than deficient; address strategic information avoidance as a legitimate professional boundary; emphasize synthesis and argumentation alongside tool mechanics; and confirm embodied ways of knowing as part of inquiry.
Collections & discovery. Foreground visual browsing invites serendipity, supports robust multimedia search, and proactively documents ephemeral performance. In practice, build thematic (not only disciplinary) pathways for discovering plays; furnish designers with heterogeneous formats (such as photographs, ephemera, pattern books, and technical manuals); surface increasingly interdisciplinary sources for dance; and collect popular/non-scholarly sources when they best serve creative work.
Reference & research support. Develop deep subject expertise—including knowledge of creative practice. As Marini shows, this often emerges through practitioner backgrounds, sustained engagement with performances, or targeted study—not LIS training alone.
Archives & collection development. Adopt proactive—rather than reactive—approaches. Following Marini, “promote the creation of sources” by arranging recordings, soliciting documentation, and engaging artists during their processes. Stone describes symposia that teach dance companies fundamental archival practices to preserve ephemeral work. This challenges traditional neutrality, but the ephemerality of performance makes intervention necessary; without it, evidence disappears.
Professional development and evaluation. Recognize performing arts librarianship as specialized expertise even when roles span multiple disciplines. Build competencies through ongoing learning, practitioner engagement, and institutional support.
The Specialization Question
Stone’s data reveal a striking trend: between 2009 and 2016, MLA members not solely focusing on music increased from 31% to 40%—a 9% shift in seven years. This acceleration toward generalist positions reflects budget constraints that make specialists seem inefficient, pressures to “do more with less,” and assumptions that information literacy skills transfer seamlessly across disciplines.
Yet paradoxically, the work demands deeper specialization. Mastering dance knowledge, visual skills for theatre design, community research methods, and archival documentation requires years of practice. The result: a professional identity crisis. Are we generalists serving the performing arts, specialists spanning multiple disciplines, or something neither framework describes?
For tenure-track librarians, this tension is acute. Traditional evaluation rewards either deep specialization or broad excellence. Hybrid roles must prove both: generalist flexibility and specialist competence. Current frameworks rarely account for that duality.
The irony is stark: the interdisciplinary nature of performing arts often requires more specialized expertise, not less. Supporting a dance scholar exploring trauma and embodiment involves performance studies, psychology, neuroscience, somatics, and feminist theory—far more epistemically varied than guiding a chemistry student to journals. This isn’t about “different databases.” It’s about how practice produces knowledge, how to evaluate embodied evidence, when strategic information avoidance is appropriate, and how community knowledge interacts with scholarly sources.
Proactive documentation depends on relationships built over time—impossible through transactional, generalist reference. Closing representation gaps requires community history, trust-building, and culturally responsive practice. Visual and primary-source literacy demand specialized pedagogy—the sustained, embedded collaboration Dalal and Shane demonstrate. Flexibility alone cannot deliver this.
Making the Case for Expertise in an Era of Generalization
How, then, do we make the case institutionally? Casting generalist breadth as “transferable skills” rarely satisfies promotion committees or honors the depth of expertise required. The question may be less “specialist or generalist?” than whether we need new frameworks that recognize boundary-spanning expertise anchored in deep disciplinary knowledge. Music librarianship built such infrastructure over decades; theatre and dance have not received equivalent investment. Building it now will require long-term advocacy—or a redefinition of specialization itself when disciplines are inadequate to the work.
For now, many of us are improvising hybrid practices while documenting their impact in promotion-readable ways: publishing on the epistemology of creative research, presenting at library and performing arts venues, developing adoptable frameworks, leading professional initiatives, and evidencing sustained intellectual partnerships beyond service statistics. We argue—often from positions titled “generalist”—that the work requires specialized expertise.
The structural contradiction remains: institutions want flexibility and efficiency; the work demands long-term, deep engagement. Until evaluation criteria recognize hybrid expertise—or positions are re-scoped to acknowledge it—individual librarians will continue bearing the burden of reconciling incompatible expectations.
Conclusion
The professionalization gap in performing arts librarianship beyond music creates both challenges and opportunities. We can build frameworks that recognize creative research on its own terms—including performance as research, embodied knowledge, affective experience, community-based practice, and non-linear processes.
What does this mean in practice? For those of us in tenure-track positions, advocating that supporting creative research forms scholarly work deserving of promotion and advancement is essential. Moreover, it means publishing not only about collections or instructional methods, but also about epistemological questions: What is research? How is knowledge generated? What role do libraries play in creative and community-based inquiry?
Fleming-May’s meta-ethnography reveals that creative information behavior differs fundamentally from academic models. Marini demonstrates that performing arts specialists who share characteristics with the scholars they serve can function as true research partners. Mayer documents that students cannot intuit the skills their work requires. Dalal and Shane prove that sustained, practice-based, collaborative approaches can bridge these gaps. Stone illuminates the breadth of support needs across theatre and dance, from play discovery to interdisciplinary collection development to emerging technologies.
Together, these studies provide evidence-based foundations for reconceptualizing performing arts library practice. The work ahead includes turning insights into action, building support systems, and advocating for resources. That future requires us to question traditional models, build new frameworks, engage in ongoing conversations across institutions and disciplines, and commit to supporting creative research with sophistication and resources.
I am most hopeful when I see the library function as a living partner in the creative process—alive to context and generous with curiosity.
References
Dalal, H. A., & Shane, R. I. (2023). Taking the stage: Theatre design students and research. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 49(6), 102795. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102795
Fleming-May, R. A. (2025). The information needs and behaviours of creative artists: A meta-ethnography of research, 2019-24. Information Research, 30(CoLIS), 551-566. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir30CoLIS52315
Marini, F. (2007). Archivists, librarians, and theatre research. Archivaria, 63, 7-33.
Mayer, J. (2015). Serving the needs of performing arts students: A case study. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 15(3), 409-431. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2015.0023
