I am ACRL Member of the Week

Engaged, thoughtful, vibrant.

Professionally, I’m reading "Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity" by Kim Scott, and "Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World" by Rebekkah Smith Aldrich. On my night table at home are "Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene" edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and "Star Wars: Women of the Galaxy" edited by Amy Ratcliffe. I’m not a big podcast person, but I’m pretty much constantly listening to music, and recently I’ve been listening to Mandolin Orange’s newest album, "Tides of a Teardrop", and Hozier’s newest album, "Wasteland, Baby!", nonstop.

Connection, collaboration, education.

I joined ACRL when I joined ALA and my local state chapter, Virginia Library Association (VLA), to have access to the fantastic resources and connections that all three of those groups provide. I know how important it is to buy in to our professional organizations. I’m proud to be able to support ACRL with my membership, so that I can, in turn, be supported by its resources.

I hope to eventually find myself in middle-to-upper leadership in an academic library, and I know ACRL will be a great help at every step of the way! Currently, I turn to ACRL resources and publications frequently for my MLIS coursework through the University of South Carolina’s excellent online program, and for my job as an administrative assistant to the Dean and Associate Deans of JMU Libraries [link: https://www.lib.jmu.edu/]. I’m so thankful and excited to have been honored with a Support Staff Scholarship to this year’s ACRL conference, as I know that staying involved with conference attendance will be a great way to meet others in the field. I’m sure that these resources and avenues for furthering my education and making connections will continue to aid me in my career journey.

One of my favorite parts of academic librarianship is the way in which it touches all areas of a campus – the beautiful way in which the library is an interdisciplinary hub for our students, faculty and staff, and community. Accessibility, sustainability, and the Anthropocene are three major topics of interest that I’ve been so grateful to be able to work on both in my MLIS coursework and in my current job, and I’m so excited to see other academic libraries around the world working on these wicked problems, as well. Donna Haraway writes in Staying with the Trouble that our task, in our current troubled times, is to stay present, to “make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” This call to stay present with our society’s wicked problems is a powerful one, and one that I hope to keep centered in my career journey in academic librarianship.