I had a huge surprise during our in-service day at Merced College on Friday. Convocation is a day devoted to updates, speakers, meetings, and recognition. This year, they announced there was a tie for Distinguished Full-Time Faculty Member of the Year for 2022-2023. One of the honorees is a very dedicated psychology and sociology professor at the Los Baños Campus where I first started my academic librarian career. I am really happy for him because he truly does deserve the commendation.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I discovered I was the second honoree!
Image by Leigh-Ann Thornhill
I’m really, truly so honored to be held in such high esteem by my colleagues across the district. Thank you! 😭💙💛 Librarians do make a difference, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that, last year, our Distinguished Part-Time Faculty of the Year was a librarian, my colleague Leigh-Ann.
When tracking the reach of the Merced College Library’s online instruction in Canvas became unwieldy, the librarians turned to LibWizard tutorials for use as assignments in Canvas modules. As modules are re-launched by individual faculty who have asked for content, librarians are able to monitor usage for the specific LibWizard assignments and tabulate information to input in LibInsights. While there is room for improvement, this has been successful for the small library faculty team.
(I would embed the poster here, but, apparently, WordPress doesn’t support Google Slides, so you’ll need to visit it at the DOLS website.)
It’s been three years and one day since my last post, and so much has happened with work and life, that I think I’ll just have to drop snippets here and there to kind of sort of attempt to capture the gist. Coming back to community college did mean sacrificing conferences and professional development within the library world, but I’m making a difference, albeit slowly, with local matters.
I taught a three-unit credit course as a hybrid in Fall 2022, LRNR 30 Information Concepts and Research Skills. It was my first time teaching a credit course (most of my teaching is as a guest in the context of other courses), and my class was small, but I worked hard on it, and the few students I had did make it fun. I actually had students conduct mini diversity audits on a portion of the library collection as the course project.
As a librarian, though, teaching the course wasn’t part of my load, so I taught it as overload. It was just too hard on my family life to do again in the spring semester as my daughter was 1.5 years old. I might consider teaching it again as a summer class online (no competing work) or in-person during a spring semester (fall is overwhelming), but I would need to make some bigger changes and also change my current work priorities. Also, our course really doesn’t have a good return on investment; there are so few librarians to cover the regular work, and while our course fulfills a general education requirement for the California State University, it will no longer count starting in 2025. California is moving to a single general education pathway for transfer admission to the California State University and University of California (Cal-GETC), which is great news for students, but our class will now only count as an elective, and students have a lot of choices when it comes to electives. One of my colleagues and I do have ideas, but given our staffing, we’re staying put for a little while.
After getting a local $25,000 grant the previous academic year, in Fall 2022, a colleague and I also launched Merced College’s first attempt to incentivize faculty to move to Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) resources, the ZTC/OER Faculty Incentive Program. The program ran out of money at the end of Fall 2023, which was projected. We had a librarian vacancy all of 23-24 as my colleague who was our Open Educational Resources (OER) lead resigned from her position last August, so I just couldn’t do much more last year. I haven’t even put the student or faculty results from our Spring 2023 or Fall 2023 surveys into a report, which covers the inaugural class of faculty. This is one of my goals for Fall 2024. Luckily, the training my colleague and I created will get reused. I need to make some changes to the training, but it seems like I will be able to launch it and use other money for faculty stipends this academic year. I also served as the college’s ASCCC OERI liaison in 23-24 and got Creative Commons certified in December 2023.
It’s been a little slow-going as there aren’t many folks available to dedicate time to OER with all of our college’s initiatives. Our community college also has an inclusive access program–the program was implemented right after my colleague and I received news about our grant. While I have been contributing where I can, I don’t think I can do much more solo.
I got tenure in Spring 2023! You would think I’d share this first, but it was not something I was very worried about given the process. It still feels really good to have this behind me, though.
I’m embarrassed to share this in a blog post, but I also got nominated for Distinguished Full-Time Faculty of the Year this spring. The other candidates really are top-knotch, so, in this case, just being nominated really is nice. We already voted on this at the end of this spring semester, and I think they already let the winner know in advance of the reveal this next Friday during our in-service day.
My little baby is now a big three years old! My husband and I couldn’t be more proud of our bright little girl. This summer, I also got LASIK! I’m still a little nearsighted, which was the plan since I didn’t have a whole lot of tissue to work with, but it’s kind of amazing what I can see now. It’s been just over a month since I had the procedure.
Here’s to 24-25! I’m hoping to keep up in this space a little more.
My husband and I welcomed our daughter Morgan into the world on April 24. I, thankfully, had a short labor; my water broke at 11:15am, and she was born at 7:57pm. She weighed six pounds and 1 ounce. She’ll be three months old on Saturday, and she has changed and grown so much in that time.
Now that I’m a mama, I’m starting to get back into children’s books. Before I became an academic librarian, I worked as a bilingual library assistant in the children’s department at my local public library for a couple of years. I mostly planned and performed the Spanish and bilingual preschool story times, and I’m excited to use those skills again.
I made Morgan a Goodreads account to keep track of the children’s books we own / those we read to her. I was really interested in using The StoryGraph to break free of Amazon (you can easily move Goodreads data over to The StoryGraph), but when the first book I went to add wasn’t yet part of their database, I just didn’t have it in me to add the extra details. I know it takes people doing this work to get more established, but I’m just not in that mindset right now. If you would like to keep tabs on what we’re reading, you can friend Morgan here.
I’m also having Morgan participate in 1000 Books Before Kindergarten through our local public library. Many public libraries around the country participate in this program. Our library uses Beanstack to track the books for 1000 Books Before Kindergarten and the summer reading programs for kids and adults. Speaking of summer reading programs, I need to sign up myself because I’ve been reading a lot more, mostly thanks to the library’s Hoopla and cloudLibrary apps. I can listen to an audiobook or read a few eBook pages while tending to the baby. For those who don’t know, my anxiety makes reading books for pleasure a challenge. I’ll try to share what books I read on a monthly basis on the site, but I also have a Goodreads account, which you can find here.
Since the full-time librarians at Merced College have 10-month contracts, I’ve been able to be with Morgan all summer long. My colleagues and I go back to work in person in a few weeks, and while I’m dreading leaving her behind, it looks as though each full-time librarian will be able to work remotely one day a week. Just knowing I will be able to spend time with her during my lunch hour one day a week makes me feel a lot better. (This will also help cut down on my commute as I have to drive two hours round trip.) Despite the pandemic not being over, I’ve had the loveliest summer taking care of the baby and reading books.
Last December, I was struggling with the transition back to community college libraries after a whirlwind research university library experience. It had been three months, and I was worried I had made a mistake. When COVID happened and the library shut down for regular services, I found myself feeling useful again and able to throw myself into what needed to be done. One of my colleagues and I worked really hard this spring, summer, and fall to make changes. You can read about what we worked on in “Pivoting Library Services in a Pandemic: Merced College Library Steps Up to the Challenge,” which was published in the December issue of the CCL Outlook, the newsletter for the Council of Chief Librarians, California Community Colleges. There were many basic needs the library had prior to the pandemic, so some of what has changed will continue when we return to campus.
Our library is also going to experience other major changes in Fall 2021; academic and student support services are moving into the building. I’ve been pretty quiet about my feelings about it among colleagues, but I welcome the changes. I’m sure there will be bumps in the road as we figure out how things will work, but in the end, I think this will actually be a positive change.
However, I am a little worried about when changes will begin to be made since the full-time librarians are off contract over the summer. In any other summer, I wouldn’t mind being contacted, but I am going to spend this summer caring for a new baby and recovering from childbirth–my husband and I are expecting our first child in early May! I’ll be on maternity in April, so this doesn’t leave me a lot of time to help with any decision-making. I’ll just have to defer to my colleagues and go into fall knowing that things in my personal and work life are going to be different. Coming back to work in person in the fall will be challenging enough–leaving my baby, pumping, getting used to driving two hours a day again, etc.
Besides COVID and a baby on the way, another big surprise of 2020 is that the Library Outreach Cookbook was finally published this year! I had almost given up hope. My chapter (55) is about my experience using Smore to advertise new books when I worked as the solo librarian at the Los Baños Campus. I worked there full-time between August 2013 and May 2016, so this chapter is pretty dated. At the time, we had a really cruddy catalog and were using version 1 of LibGuides. Earlier this year, nearly all of the California community college libraries began using ExLibris Alma Primo, so it’s easy to create new book lists, and there are so many other tools that folks can use nowadays to show off new acquisitions.
I had really hoped to have written more posts this year, but like my reading goals, I didn’t have it in me. Just making it through the year was enough.
I have so much to write about, but I’ll have to start with a fascinating JSTOR webinar I attended about a project to digitize American prison newspapers. The project is led by Reveal Digital, which has been part of ITHAKA since 2012. Their mission is to publish Open Access primary sources from historically excluded groups. Currently, the prison newspaper project is about 45 percent funded, and as the collection is being digitized, only those libraries who have contributed to the fund can access the content via JSTOR. Once the project is fully funded, it will be open access!
Merced College offers courses to students who are incarcerated. These classes are taught in person, but, because of COVID-19, they are correspondence courses this semester. I think this will be a particularly exciting collection for our faculty who teach in the surrounding state prisons and those who teach about mass incarceration on campus.
(If you’re an academic librarian, you may also be interested in the Merced College Library’s correspondence reference service for these students. My colleague Karrie Bullock serves as the lead for this service. It was partially modeled after San Francisco Public Library’s prison reference service. Karrie and I attended a presentation led by SFPL librarians Jeanie Austin and Rachel Kinnon andintern Rosa Hall called “What If Patrons Can’t Access the Internet?: Reference by Mail for Patrons Who Are Incarcerated” during the CLA Conference in 2019, and she got lots of great ideas from the session.)
During the JSTOR webinar I attended, which I discovered was the last of a three-part series, I also learned about the Prison Journalism Project (PJP), which provides an online platform and journalism education to help”incarcerated and incarceration-impacted writers tell stories about their communities.” The original vision was to establish journalism education programs in prisons, but when COVID-19 hit, the founders began an online publication on Medium asking for submissions from those in prison. With the help of the American Prison Writing Archive, they received a substantial number of submissions on a variety of topics. In April, the Prison Journalism Project migrated to their own website where they publish writing and artwork by prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, and friends and family who have been impacted by incarceration.
The organization offers submission guidelines, FAQs, writing prompts, and handouts to guide writers. While these are available online, physical copies are also sent to prisons. Submissions can be emailed or sent through JPay or through the US mail. Stories are scanned and then transcribed and edited by volunteers. (The PJP is currently seeking volunteers to help transcribe or edit stories!) PJP publishes about 10 stories a week. Writers retain copyright of their work, and every writer also gets a portfolio page. On the website, stories are tagged by state and topics. The co-founders are also working to develop a toolkit for educators, which will include a textbook in comic book format.
I also learned about the San Quentin News and the podcast Ear Hustle in this webinar. One of the co-hosts of the podcast is actually inside San Quentin. I had never heard of either of these before, but I’m glad to have more resources to learn from those who are incarcerated or were formerly incarcerated. These resources are also potentially very valuable for reference work!
You can find all three of the JSTOR webinar recordings related to the American Prison Newspaper project below. I will need to watch the others soon.
I clearly had no know idea how the rest of the 2019-2020 would turn out. I can’t possibly update the last 6+ months, but let’s just say that it’s been quite a workload since March. I can’ t believe it’s nearly July!
If you recall, I took on my role precisely to improve instructional services, and COVID-19 highlighted many of the critiques I have been making since returning to Merced College. While I was able to get more support, we’re 10-month faculty, so I’ll have to start some of this advocacy work again in August.
I worked remotely from March 20 until the end of the spring semester. (The week we went remote was fraught with tension; it involved some disparity between the library faculty and the faculty in other discipline.) I was able to make a OneSearch tutorial. (I actually had to make it twice; once in a trial of SideCar, and then a second time in LibWizard when we finally got the add-on to our Springshare subscription in May.) I was also able to make three Canvas modules:
Understanding & Finding Databases
Selecting Databases by Subject
Using Basic Search Strategies
I wish I would have had time to help our librarians get up to speed on LibWizard and Canvas to be able to split up the other materials that we need to make, but we all just didn’t have time. I started an instruction guide in the fall, and I have been adding more documentation and materials in preparation for Fall 2020, as we’ll do some of this work when we come back in August, though it will more than likely be remote.
Prior to the spring semester ending, a colleague and I also started working to populate the library website. The website got a big update a couple of years ago, but there were places that hadn’t been developed yet. We’ll continue to work on it remotely this summer and in the early fall. Our College also created a hub for students within Canvas for student and academic services, and my colleague and I were also able to provide a lot of input for the library’s hub space.
Summer school is online, and the library remains closed to the campus community. We are offering curbside pick-up, but, to be quite honest, print is not the big draw for learners. (I have a lot to say about this, but tenure track…). I did elect to work a couple weeks of summer school to staff the library chat, where the majority of questions have dealt with textbooks on reserve. This is such a huge deal in community college libraries, and while folks do use OER here, it’s not as far-reaching. My last day of summer school is on Tuesday. As part of my advocacy efforts, I was also given 75 hours of additional time this summer to work on instructional projects. I have worked some of these hours already adapting an MLA Canvas module. When summer school is over, I’ll pick this up again. I’ll also be working on an APA and evaluation module.
I’m also taking a 9-week online course through Merced College to be “certified” to teach online as part of the California Virtual Campus Open Educational Initiative (CVC-OEI). The course helps faculty design the first six weeks of a fully online course. While I’m not scheduled to teach the library’s three-unit course LRNR 30 Information Concepts and Research Skills this fall, teaching a course for credit is a long-time dream of mine, and I would like to teach it in the next couple of years. Week 5 starts this week. It’s quite the workload, but it’s going well considering that I’m not exactly adapting a class I’ve taught before. My favorite unit so far is the accessibility unit because it reminded me of things I have learned before but forget to practice. It also helped me fix some LibGuides and other Canvas issues. I’m glad I decided to take the class.
After three years at the University of California Merced, I returned to Merced College in August, though to the main campus in Merced instead of Los Baños. It has not been an easy transition. My work / life balance is much better (I get winter, spring, and summer break again), but the problem is that I don’t what to do with myself. When folks ask me what I’m up to, I, frankly, don’t have much to say because, for so long, work has been my identity. In trying to make peace between the life I thought I wanted and this new trajectory, I haven’t been the easiest person to be around. Managing my anxiety and depression has been difficult. I am grieving.
I had imagined a life where I would be working on research and writing articles and book chapters, maybe even co-editing a book or two. Even though research wasn’t necessarily required at UC, I knew I would be part of a network of librarians engaged in this kind of work. When I was a solo community college librarian, I got involved in ACRL committee work, and it exposed me to folks doing great things in the profession. I felt less isolated. Slow but sure, my confidence grew. I continued this work at UC Merced. I finally got the courage to submit lightning talk proposals, and I actually presented at a few conferences, even though I didn’t feel like what I was sharing was groundbreaking. I even wrote a couple of short trade pieces.
In early 2018, as I was preparing for a two year review (for 18-months of work), I felt, strangely, unaccomplished. I was doing things but not THE THINGS. I was constantly busying myself and worrying about my review. Honestly, coming across Abby Flanigan’s blog post, “Vocational Awe and Professional Identity,” which was about Fobazi Ettarh’s article, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” made me realize that I had turned my job into a lifestyle. I had pushed myself, and I got the standard merit increase, which is the norm at UC, but when I learned that a colleague who wrote a book also got a standard review, I knew I couldn’t continue this pace. Ultimately, I had to ask myself whether this professional activity was actually that important.
But I am sad. I was able to grow as a teacher at UC Merced, and I learned a lot from my colleagues and from various professional development opportunities. I enjoyed our instructional brown bag sessions and various projects. I’m a better librarian because of my time there.
I know this change doesn’t mean that I can’t do some of those things I had previously imagined, but I also know that I want a life that isn’t consumed by the next best thing in academic librarianship. Though I will probably always be a bit of a workaholic, I want to lead a healthier life.
I’m currently on winter break, so I’ll be taking time to figure some things out.
In early May, I presented a lightning talk at the California Conference on Library Instruction about a lesson I designed for an upper-division Critical Race and Ethnic Studies course at UC Merced. I’m a little shy about sharing instructional materials, so this was actually the first time I shared a lesson plan and activity I’ve designed for a class with folks who aren’t my colleagues. I first designed the lesson in Spring 2018, and I’ve tweaked it a few times since then.
As promised at the conference, I got my act together and put up my lesson plan and materials on Project CORA. Let me know if I have typos or broken links. Of course, if you end up using or adapting this, I’d love to know, as well.
Photo by 
Lindsay Ann Davis 