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Reconsidering Rest: Interruptions and Invitations (Part 2)

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, MSLS, Founder, Renewals.

(Activation notice: This post shares information about harmful workplace experiences and impacts on the body and may (re-)surface negative memories and/or associated emotions. Please take the time you need to move through this post at your capacity, and contact your healthcare team for support).

We’re continuing our reconsideration of rest practices, this time focusing on somatic interruptions to and reimagining rest invitations for harmed bodies. In Part 1, I explored causes of unrest and disconnections from rest for library workers. In this second part, we’ll look at how traumatized bodies respond to rest after long-term (and ongoing) exposure to harm, and I’ll highlight a trauma-informed framework to apply when considering established rest pathways. At the end of this blog, rather than a prescriptive approach to promoting rest pathways, I offer reflective questions about your experiences of rest and its connection to systems/policies – along with an invitation to a brief practice that gently increases your impressions of rest. I also hope the questions and practices spark reimagination of collective rest approaches in your workplace.

Interruption: The Traumatized Body’s Reaction to Rest

Traumatic experiences impact people despite their proximity to known harm and undermines their attempts to rest. Here are a few ways harm creates proximity-agnostic disconnections from rest practices.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Sufferers not only are subject to intrusive thoughts, but may internalize blame and shame as they remember their responses to harm (See Also, low-morale experience participant data). Comito’s Library Trauma Cycle highlights this blame cycle, implying internal messages and links to enacting harm on others. Additionally, PTSD criteria also include avoiding activities that may activate memories of trauma (think of all the activities we offer to library users!), sleep disturbance, and heightened startle responses.
Hyperviligance: a state of heightened emotional and somatic awareness despite absence of threats, hyperviligance is connected to PTSD, and is also associated with anxiety and depression (the most commonly reported mental health impacts of low-morale experiences). This state interrupts most standard rest practices as sufferers engage in second-guessing their decisions, avoiding conflict, catastrophizing, or rumination. Hyperviligance can also contribute to poorer quality of sleep as sufferers struggle to fall or stay asleep.
Cultural Message/Stereotype Reinforcement: people who identify or present as female, as well as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are often tacitly encouraged and expected to ignore their bodies’ need for rest. From Working Mom/GirlBoss tropes and memes to the Strong Black Woman archetype, these reinforcements are activated outside of work and in employees’ personal lives, taking on additional nefariousness in the predominantly white and female LIS industry (See Also, Oppressed Group Behavior; See Also “Running the Gauntlet“).

Invitation: Collaborating With – Not Against – Rest

Polyvagal theory reveals inadvertent impacts of sudden exposure to rest and relaxation for hyperaroused bodies, and includes formal countermeasures for traumatized bodies to process and release energy stored in the body after adverse events (Somatic Experiencing International 2025). Nervous system regulation techniques like resourcing and titration may help harmed minds and bodies acclimate to intentional rest practices. I’ve invited Sarah Wallace, a Licensed Practicing Counselor, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and Founder of Blue Heron Counseling, LLC to share more. Listen in to hear her brief explanation of these techniques.

Invitation: A Framework to Consider

In addition to engaging in established rest practices, consider how they may be applied through a trauma-informed lens. The Wellness Wheel for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in LIS was created by Amanda Leftwich, founder of mindfulinlis, in 2018. The wheel counters conventional wellness models by considering the lived occupational wellness experiences of BIPOC library workers and offering somatic and system-interrupting responses to events that compromise worker well-being. See a fuller description – and examples – here (click the annotation icons).

Wellness Wheel for BIPOC in LIS — Reproduced with Permission. Image copyright ©2018 Amanda M. Leftwich.

Invitation: Holding Space to Practice

With love, bell hooks reminds us that healing is done in community – not alone. Therefore, in addition to sharing information about rest – and even in addition to presentations about how we have applied rest – we must also offer spaces for people to imagine, craft, engage, and be held accountable for protecting space(s) to and practices of rest. Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry collaborative sleep installations are an example of how these spaces can be made available. In libraries, we are aware of the need for these spaces; yet they are often reserved for people visiting the library. In the “back rooms” of our buildings, spaces for employees to rest and decompress are scant beyond a mandated milk expression room or institutional-feeling breakrooms. Invitations to share challenges and apply solutions are met with skepticism as worker recommendations fall into administrative, municipal, or political hinterlands. During the Pandemic, rest/restorative practice spaces were offered to BIPOC library workers, and Renewals offered its inaugural online practice and resonance community space in June 2025 (see the impact). More practice spaces are needed – and additional collaborations with counselors and therapists should be cultivated to increase somatic education and access to LIS practitioners. Whether you’re interested in practice, conversation, or both, here are some upcoming opportunities to engage:

The Reset Experience – mid-winter 2026 (Renewals, February 4, 2026)
Recharging in Challenging Times (American Library Association, February 10, 2026)

Invitation: Questions and an Activity to Inspire Space-making for (Collective) Rest Practice

What workplace supports (did you wish) were available to you when you began your rest practices? How did these supports (or the lack thereof) play out as you identified, advocated for, refined, or expanded your goals? Note which policies provided these supports (or note what policies are needed to offer the supports that did not materialize).
Try a practice that helps you gradually re-engage with rest sensations: Sarah Wallace expands on titration and offers a brief somatic practice.

Works Cited

Brewer, M. (2021). Strong Black woman archetype in organizational life. Dissertation. University of Kansas. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/c2c43dbf-4358-439f-af0b-107e22c04c59/content

Cleveland Clinic. (2023, Nov. 16). Always on alert: causes and examples of hypervigilance. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hypervigilance

Comito, L. (2022, Jul. 25). Library trauma cycle. Urban Librarians Unite. https://urbanlibrariansunite.org/library-trauma-cycle/

Dozier, D. (2025, May 2). Hypervigilance and sleep: Breaking the cycle of restlessness. Anchorage Sleep Center. https://info.ancsleep.com/blog/hypervigilance-and-sleep-breaking-the-cycle-of-restlessness

hooks, bell. (2018). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.

Kendrick, K.D. (2019, Sep. 18). Considering: Oppressed group behavior. Renewals. https://renewalslis.com/considering-oppressed-group-behavior/

Kendrick, K.D., Leftwich, A.M., & Hodge, T. (2021). Providing care and community in times of crisis: The BIPOC in LIS Mental Health Summits. https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/25125

Kendrick, K.D. (2026, Feb. 6). PTSD in the low-morale experience. Renewals. https://renewalslis.com/ptsd-in-the-low-morale-experience/

Kendrick, K.D. (2018, Mar. 19). Running the guantlet: Lives of practicing minority academic librarians. The Ink On The Page. https://theinkonthepageblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/19/the-gauntlet-the-life-of-the-practicing-minority-academic-librarian/

Kendrick, K.D. (2025, July 15). Report: The (inaugural) Reset Experience. Renewals. https://renewalslis.com/report-the-reset-experience-june-2025/

Leftwich, A.M.(2018). Redefining the Wellness Wheel for librarians of color. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=pocinlis

(tenor. (n.d.). Working mom. https://tenor.com/search/working-mom-gifs

Somatic Experiencing International. (2025).Trauma and polyvagal theory – Stephen Porges and Peter Levine. https://traumahealing.org/product/trauma-and-polyvagal-theory-stephen-porges-peter-levine/

The Nap Ministry. (2018). Month: August 2018. https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/2018/08/

A year of reading: 6 books from 2025

Is it too late for a round-up post of the books I read this past year? I don’t really think so (or care, actually); I’d love to talk about a few of the 56 books I read this year. This has been my highest reading year since I was probably a middle schooler, and I’m really pleased with the mixture of work-related books versus the fiction I read for pleasure. I’ll focus on those work-related ones, since this is a blog about academic librarianship, after all, but I’ll throw a few novels in there for good measure (and maybe for you academic librarians to add them to your leisure reading collections?).

During 2025, I spent a lot of time co-authoring a book chapter that addresses Generative AI, libraries, and social justice. I also did a few presentations that addressed GenAI, inevitability narratives, and critical interrogation of the technology. This informed most of my work-related reads, which included two of my seven 5-star reads of 2025: Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin and The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

Imagination is a book I’m going to continue coming back to again and again as a guiding principle for my life as a whole, but most certainly in the career I lead as a librarian. It’s a short read, only 192 pages, but those 192 pages make you remember that imagination as an essential part of social change; there has to be a vision, and you have to dare to have that vision despite what the world is telling you. Imagination is not something that should be relegated to the very young or to the creative professions; it can and should lead us to questions, to answers, to a dream that seems impossible but maybe it’s not. The main voices we are hearing right now are the “techno-utopianists,” those lauding things like Generative AI as what’s going to save us. Save who? From what? This quote from the book continues to resonate with me: “Meanwhile, the dominant story told by techno-utopianists to lull us to sleep is that the world’s major crises can be solved with even more investment in their energy-intensive digital dreams, which usually also means less public participation and collective dreaming” (108).

The AI Con is an accessible rebuke to the AI hype that we’ve been seeing not only all around the librarianship profession, but in the world at large. Bender and Hanna do a wonderful job of laying everything out in an approachable format. Bender has been writing in this field for a long time; she was a co-author on the instrumental conference proceeding, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” from 2021. Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Bender and Hanna run the podcast, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. If you’re going to read anything that addresses Generative AI, make it this book. I really appreciated that they had a section for information literacy and libraries specifically near the end of the book as well. They talk about the inherent lack of friction when you do a “search” with a chatbot LLM interface rather than using something like a database. Many of us as librarians know that friction is a good thing; it forces you to think more deeply and critically about your topic and the keywords, you might find sources that cause you to think differently, and friction will make you more likely to ask for help from the experts. This quote I think captures a lot from the book: “AI hype reduces the human condition to one of computability, quantification, and rationality” (32).

I also read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sara Wynn-Williams and Empire of AI by Karen Hao, which are both deep dives into two of the biggest tech companies and their founders: Facebook/Meta and OpenAI. Wynn-Williams’ book is very focused on her personal experience while at the Facebook company with Mark Zuckerberg, which Hao is an outsider looking in on Sam Altman and OpenAI’s many controversies over the years. Hao also makes an explicit connection between GenAI, empire, and colonialism: “they, too, seize and extract previous resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers” (I read this one on Kindle, so I don’t have a page number). Both of these books gave me a solid foundation and things to consider about these tech companies that infiltrate so much of life and the information landscape these days.

Finally, I wanted to talk about a couple of the fiction books that reminded me of how much I love the written word. The first 5-star read of my 2025 was Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, which is a beautiful pondering on what it means to be human. The premise is that Adina, born in Philadelphia, is able to contact her extraterrestrial relatives via a fax machine. She sends regular reports on how Earthlings behave and act. It’s one of those books where I had to stop after certain passages and just think and feel what I was feeling. One of my other 5-stars was Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, which I read in a single day. It is set in the early 1990s in the Irish village of Crossmore, following main character Lucy as she navigates falling in love with her school friend Susannah in her very traditional small town. Howarth’s prose is truly beautiful and sends you on a winding emotional roller coaster (because that’s how adolescence feels). I bought this one from a local bookstore for our book club, and it is FULL of highlights and notes from me. This book too is absolutely one that I will be returning to.

What were your big books from 2025? Are there any that you’re really looking forward to reading for 2026? I am currently making my way through Critical Data Storytelling by Kate McDowell and, like most librarians, my to-read list is never ending.

Reconsidering Rest: Interruptions and Invitations (Part 1)

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, MSLS, Founder, Renewals.

In 2023, I shared a short Instagram reel promoting the seven kinds of rest, along with ways to engage in each. At the time, I’d just begun my intentional recovery after leading through and navigating a higher education landscape that was (and is still) grappling with how to center humanity and dignity and balance them with the expectations of capitalism. When I made that reel, I was very hopeful about ways I – and other library workers – could remix and apply these rest practices. A bit more than two years later, I am still identifying and refining my approaches. I recognize that while those established pathways are necessary, more context is needed, especially as we consider the interruptions to rest that workplace harm causes. This two-part blog will share an overview of invitations and interruptions to rest. Part 1 will explore causes of unrest and disconnections from rest; Part 2 will explore relationships between rest and trauma, recenter a recognized framework, and offer reflections inviting you to reimagine and cultivate collective rest approaches.

Interruption: States of Unrest in the LIS Industry

As library worker exposure to library values rejection, systemic harm, and compromised safety continue (and even while we try to protect targeted citizens in our communities), we need to revisit and to acknowledge the very real interruptions to rest practices – especially for truamatized workers and those with historically ignored identities. While established scholars writings on rest practices for these groups is available, the library and information science (LIS) industry continues leaning towards and normalizing passive-aggressive communication and resilience narratives. Consequently, we must recognize that pathways to rest may not be easy to access or practice, even if they are known. Low-morale experiences reveal that even when harm is not immediately present at work, harmed workers are actively anticipating harm. When they are not at work, they are thinking about the harm that may come to them when they return to the workplace. For BIPOC librarians navigating low-morale experiences, the threat of harm is so pervasive that active signals of rest are ignored due to their worries about being perceived as less-than-hardworking (See Also, Stereotype Threat). Acknowledging the spectrum of harm and how it presents, these interruptions have implications for not only for practicing rest, but for somatic awareness and activation when rest of any kind is attempted.

Interruption: Denying Rest in Library Workplaces

Exposure to long-term active and passive harm, vocational awe, and resilience narratives create internal narratives that cause overwork, heighten people-pleasing behaviors, and dampen intuition. If you tell yourself that the harm you’re experiencing “isn’t that bad;” if industrial values tell you to be “good,” but not to yourself; if you’re expected to produce and perform like others who may have more resources, it’s hard to think about boundaries, much less create ones that feel effective – and then build the strength to consistently apply them. There are more hurdles to clear as workers navigate questions about boundary-making – the first step to activating any of the rest types. We must recognize the internal narratives that tell traumatized library workers that they are not safe enough to consider rest practices and collaborate with workers to scaffold support and encouragement as they begin the non-linear journey of reconstitution and recovery.

Workers are often excluded or retaliated against when they engage in health-centered practices – even when they do so within the parameters of their workplace’s stated policies. Workplace wellness is a relatively new concept, and many organizations have policies that read as helpful, but are only tacitly so when applied. Moreover, many of the ways people care for themselves – within policies or informally – can be subverted or denied by authoritarian or toxic leaders and/or colleagues (and with deeper implications for identities who have been historically marginalized or ignored). Consider these examples:

The administrator who endures macro- or microaggressions after salat.
The worker who requests and receives an ergonomic personal work desk, and then is assigned to tasks requiring them to work away from that desk.
The employee who resists taking on extra shifts, and is summarily excluded from important meetings during their regular hours.
The worker who takes FMLA and whose position is phased out soon after they return to work.
The colleague who eats and takes a walk during their meal break – and is surveilled, harrassed, or guilted for not coming back early.
The manager who is told to not take “too long” of a vacation because they are the only ones responsible for their tasks.

Consider how myriad systems and behaviors – from funding to favoritism – may be leveraged by toxic employees or within a dysfunctional organization (or within a toxic department in a healthier organization) when an employee requests support for or engages in rest practices.

Another area that is implied with promoting these rest types is that rest can happen (more easily) when you’re away from the sites of unrest. But trauma doesn’t acknowledge where the body is now – it’s remembering that the body was threatened or was harmed, and is trying to signal to the body that it must maintain in a state of vigilance even if harm isn’t immediately present (traumatized bodies prep for the danger that could return at any moment, from anywhere). What happens when rest is introduced to the traumatized body after a long state of unrest?

In Part 2, we’ll consider this idea by exploring links to trauma and (un)rest. I’ll also reshare a useful framework and offer reflections that can help harmed and recovering library workers – as well as those who’d like to improve their organizations through reimagined and/or revisited policies and procedures – cultivate incremental, authentic, and trauma-informed routes to supporting and enacting rest practices. For now, here are two reflective questions to think about:

Invitation: Questions for Reflection

Which, if any, workplace behaviors or LIS industrial frameworks or expectations have interrupted your rest practice goals?
What external messages or social/ethnic/cultural/economic contexts come with these frameworks or your responses to these frameworks?

Works Cited

American Library Association. (1999 – 2025). Book ban data. https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

Berg, J., Galvan, S., & Tewell, E. (2018). Responding to and reimagining resilience in academic libraries. Journal of New Librarianship, 3(1),1-4. https://newlibs.org/index.php/jonl/article/view/805

Caldwell-Stone, D. (2025, Jan. 24). Libraries and immigration enforcement. Intellectual Freedom Blog. https://www.oif.ala.org/libraries-and-immigration-enforcement/

Ettarh, F. (2018, Jan. 10). Vocational awe and librarianship: The lies we tell ourselves. In the Library With the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Kendrick, K.D. (2017). The low morale experience of academic librarians: A phenomenological study. Journal of Library Administration, 57(8), 846-878 doi: 10.1080/01930826.2017.1368325

Kendrick, K.D. & Damasco, I.T. (2019). Low morale in ethnic and racial minority academic librarians: An experiential study. Library Trends, 68(3), 174-212. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/113621

Ko, M.E. (2017). Stereotype threat. https://ctl.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj17446/files/media/file/stereotype_threat_handout.pdf

Knox, K. (2024, Feb. 8). Protecting library workers: The ongoing battle for the health and safety of library staff. Public Libraries Online. https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2024/02/protecting-library-workers-the-ongoing-battle-for-the-health-and-safety-of-library-staff/

Miss Julie. (2025, Oct. 18). The call is coming from inside of the house. Hi, Miss Julie. https://himissjulie.com/2025/10/18/__trashed/

Reece, J. (2025, Nov. 15). Baltimore County reinstates 14 part-time librarians after abrupt mass firings. CBS News Baltimore. https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/part-time-librarians-fired-baltimore-county-public-library/

Belonging, Power, and the Big Heart Building Work Between

Belonging is often described as a feeling—something we either experience or lack, as if it is found by chance rather than actively created. In institutions, belonging is frequently seen as incidental rather than the outcome of ongoing relational effort. But belonging is built through care, attention, and the often-invisible work of those who make room for others. Moments of transition make that labor visible, inviting us to pause and give flowers thoughtfully while we can.

This piece is a reflection on what it means to build belonging through librarianship, and on the communities and colleagues who make that work possible. It also asks how belonging is defined and distributed within a profession that is predominantly white and female, and how individual narratives—like my own—fit within, benefit from, and must be accountable to that broader context.

With Intentionality

Within university settings, librarianship and archival work have devoted significant time, energy, and resources to fostering a sense of belonging among students, faculty, and community members—often positioning libraries as sites of welcome, care, and connection within complex institutional landscapes. This was certainly what drew me in to the profession as an undergraduate. At a time when I struggled to understand who I was or what I could offer, librarianship felt less like a calling and more like a possibility. It seemed like it could be a space where belonging seemed not only valued, but intentionally built.

That isolation is not accidental. I’ve always been intensely aware of how lonely a university campus can be, and how much heavier this experience weighs on people who are already marginalized. That awareness drew me to librarianship. I wanted to counter that isolation.

Universities are often described as communities, yet within contemporary higher education–shaped by market logics, austerity, and increasing precarity—that language can feel aspirational at best. Even while benefiting from significant racial privilege, I did not experience the university as a site of meaningful belonging beyond my relationships with library staff colleagues. And even within that space, class distinctions between staff and librarians created points of tension that shaped how belonging was felt, distributed, and sustained.

Measuring success

It was at Arizona State University Library that belonging began to feel less aspirational and more tangible. While libraries are embedded wIthin the same institutional structures that shape higher education more broadly, they can have the possibility of operating through relational rather than strictly heirarchical practices. Care, attentiveness, and responsiveness are not abstract values but daily requirements of this work. And, I genuinely believe, values that ASU Library both champions and accomplishes through direct action. In this environment, belonging has emerged as something built collectively through trust, shared responsibility, and sustained relational labor.

At ASU, I experienced that sense of belonging most clearly through my colleagues. I was trusted to bring my full self to the work, encouraged to take intellectual and professional risks, and supported in ways that made sustained engagement possible. That support mattered profoundly. In a field where emotional and relational labor are often undervalued—and where isolation and burnout are common—experiencing collegial belonging shaped not only how I worked, but how I move through the world. It made the work feel shared rather than solitary, and it affirmed that building belonging is not an individual effort, but a collective one.

This did not mean the absence of tension or inequity. Librarianship remains shaped by the same racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics that structure the academy, including disparities in status, pay, and authority. And yet, within those constraints, I encountered colleagues who modeled what institutional belonging can look like in practice: collaboration, partnerships, and growth rather than competition.

The Potential for Repair

But my ASU story was also about complexity. Even when you believe in the work, it is exhausting to make a change. I discovered how draining it is to care deeply in spaces where change outpaces relationships. And I recognized how tenuous belonging can become when university politics shift around you.

That sense of belonging grew stronger and became real through the work itself, especially by caring for the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection. Working with this collection showed me that archives are not neutral, but shaped by who is included, who is invited, and whose stories are kept, and offers a chance to repair.

This potential for repair became most evident to me in moments when students encountered materials that reflected their own identities, communities, or creative lineages—sometimes for the first time. Watching a student recognize themselves in the historical record underscored how deeply representation matters. Importantly, these encounters were not incidental; rather, they resulted from intentional stewardship, collaborative description, and sustained relationship-building with artists, donors, and communities. As a result, belonging here was not symbolic. It was experienced.

At the same time, while these moments were powerful, they also revealed the significant labor required to build that sense of connection. Activating a collection in ways that feel inclusive, ethical, and responsive demands time, trust, and profound emotional investment. This experience is often in contexts where such labor is undervalued or under-resourced within an institution.

It is important to name the irony here: the sense of welcome and even belonging I found was largely cultivated by colleagues who themselves occupied marginal or precarious positions within the academy—arts faculty, staff members, colleagues with disabilities, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ librarians and archivists whose labor has historically been feminized, undervalued, and structurally constrained.

The Cost

Building belonging through librarianship is deeply meaningful work, but it is not without cost. The same relational labor that makes libraries feel humane can also be exhausting, especially when it is unevenly recognized or structurally unsupported. Care, when treated as an individual disposition rather than a shared, structurally resourced, institutional investment, becomes difficult to sustain.

At ASU, I became increasingly aware of the emotional weight that accompanies this kind of work. Advocating for community-centered collections, ethical archival practices, and inclusive engagement often meant navigating institutional constraints that moved faster than relationships could be built. The work required patience, persistence, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity. While I was fortunate to experience strong collegial support, the broader systems in which the work unfolded did not always make time and care for relational practice.

This tension—between the values that draw many of us to librarianship and the structures that shape how that work is resourced—was one of the most difficult lessons of my time at ASU. It sharpened my understanding of how fragile belonging can be in transition, and how quickly care-centered work can slip into burnout. And yet, naming that cost also clarified what I believe the work requires: not less care, but more collective accountability for sustaining it.

Going Grief

Leaving ASU for a new role in early 2026 has stirred a grief I was not entirely prepared for. Stepping away from students whose growth I have witnessed, from collections I have stewarded with care, and from especially colleagues who offered trust, generosity, and challenge in equal measure. This is not the grief of regret, but of genuine gratitude and connection that form when work is shared and deeply invested in.

There is a particular ache in leaving a place where you have poured vision and labor into something ongoing. Much of the work I was engaged in at ASU was iterative and future-facing: collections in the process of being reimagined, relationships still unfolding, students still finding their footing. To leave knowing that some of those seeds will continue to grow without you is both a testament to collective work and a reminder that belonging is never owned by a single person.

That grief is also evidence. It shows that something real was built. The ability to grieve a workplace and miss colleagues is rare and meaningful. It reflects a model of librarianship based on being changed by the work.

Carrying the Work Forward

As I move into my new role at the University of Chicago Library, I carry this work with me not as a completed chapter, but as an ongoing practice. The context will change. The questions will deepen. The communities and institutional cultures will be different. But the commitments that shaped my time at ASU remain the same: to build relationships grounded in care, to approach librarianship as an ethical practice, and to treat belonging not as an abstract value but as something made through daily, collective effort.

To my ASU Library community: Thank you for giving this early-career librarian a shot, and for showing me the way. Special thanks to Shari Laster, Nancy Godoy, Renee James, Harold Housley, Jessica Salow, Seonaid Valiant, Jasmine Torrez, Vina Begay, Elizabeth Dunham, Suzy Morgan, Rachel Leket-Mor, William Yates, Josh Maki, Zoie Ypsilanti, Allinston Saulsberry; and, of course, my Humanities Lab chapter writing crew, especially Matt Harp, Rachel Fernandez, and Joyce Martin.

I Have a Budget to Buy Books?!

Like many librarians, I love to read and can happily spend hours in pretty much any bookstore or library. So when I started my position at Vanderbilt, I was excited to explore the shelves in all the libraries on campus, including my library (the education library) and the main library (which has most of the popular reading material). You never know what you might find just wandering up and down the shelves – once in an academic library, I found all the bound scripts for the tv show The West Wing and spent several hours happily reading them when I should have been doing research for a project. All of this to say, I love browsing the shelves and choosing books to buy or check out. What I didn’t know when I started this job is that I would be doing exactly that for the department that I liaise with – or what the similarities and differences would be for buying books for a library versus my own bookshelves.

I have a budget to buy books?!

Starting this position, I didn’t have a lot of experience with library collections. I took Resource Selection and Evaluation in library school (my school’s name for our collection management course), but a lot of the course felt theoretical to me. “Select materials that your patrons will use” – of course, but how? It wasn’t clear to me at the time, but I wasn’t too worried. I wasn’t planning on being a collections librarian. I did get a little hands-on experience with collection development through my Graduate Assistant position at UNC-Chapel Hill, but because our library budget was very limited, we weren’t able to purchase any books. We were only able to sort through physical books donated to the library and decide from those materials which ones we wanted to add to the catalog.

When I started in my current role at Vanderbilt’s Peabody Library, one of the first things I learned was that I have a budget to purchase books and e-books that are relevant for the students and faculty in the department that I liaise with. Having a budget to buy books for the library sounded both like a lot of fun and a significant responsibility. I wasn’t sure where to start. Luckily, one of my colleagues at Peabody Library is an expert in collections, so I scheduled an hour with him during my first few weeks on the job to go over how everything works. I had a lot of questions: what is my budget and how does it work, how do I purchase books, how do I know what books to purchase, should I purchase e-books or print books, and more.

As we logged in to the online ordering system that Vanderbilt Libraries uses, I was overwhelmed. There were thousands of books, each available in multiple different formats, any of which was fair game for me to purchase. My colleague assured me that with time, I would get a good sense of what books would be most relevant for my specific department. In the meantime, he recommended setting up email alerts for newly published, pertinent books – and that the best way to set up those email alerts was by relevant call numbers.

Categories and Call Numbers and Cataloging, Oh My

Of course, I can read call numbers, find a book on a library shelf, and shelve a book in the right place (Shelving Wizard, anyone?). But cataloging was only offered once during my two years in library school, and I couldn’t take the class the one semester that it was being taught. I have friends who can reel off both Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress call numbers and their corresponding topics, but unfortunately that’s not a skill I have. To tackle this, I tried to think through all the steps: to buy relevant books, I needed to set up email alerts by call number; to set up email alerts by call number, I needed to figure out the topics that corresponded with those call numbers; to figure out those topics, I needed to be a lot more familiar with the Library of Congress system – and my liaison department.

By working backwards with this logic, I figured out where I needed to start – and then I worked forwards from there. I have almost the entire academic year to spend my library budget, so I decided to give myself a runway. I took the first couple of months at my job to make notes of books professors asked for and topics that students were researching. Then, in mid-October, I pulled up the list of Library of Congress call numbers and their corresponding topics. Any time my notes overlapped with an LOC topic, I wrote down that LOC call number. Finally, I set up my email alerts based on the LOC numbers I had written down.

Libraries can’t purchase books on Kindle

Finally, for the last couple months, I’ve had emails arriving in my inbox with books that were relevant for my students and faculty members that I could consider buying. The first, and probably the biggest, hurdle is now behind me. There are more steps to the process of actually purchasing a book, but the one that I really want to talk about is e-books versus print books – specifically the difference in cost.

Every time I decide to buy a book, I have to decide whether I want to purchase that book in print or as an e-book. There are pros and cons each way, and I’m starting to understand that balancing those is an intangible part of collection development. For instance, a lot of the students and programs that I support are distance learners. If there’s a book that I think would be particularly useful for those students, buying it in print won’t help them much, because they’re scattered all around the U.S. and internationally. I really need to buy electronic books for them.

The catch is that e-books are more expensive – typically, a lot more expensive.

One of the readings that stuck with me most from library school is a blog post titled “Hold On, eBooks Cost HOW Much? The Inconvenient Truth About Library eCollections.” In the blog post – complete with charts and graphs – the author breaks down exactly how much more expensive e-books are compared with print books. Libraries can’t just buy $1.99 Kindle e-books and then allow their patrons to access them – something that I’ve had to explain to quite a few friends. Because of copyright laws and other restrictions (again, I’m not a collections librarian so I don’t know all the ins and outs), libraries have to buy special library licenses for e-books which can often cost several times the price of the print book.¹ (Just as a note, the blog post I linked to is older, but a google search for “library cost of e-books” yielded many more recent articles.)

The big collections budget I thought I had definitely isn’t going to stretch as far as I thought now that I’ve purchased several e-books with price tags of a few hundred dollars each! It’s one thing to read about it and a totally different thing to see the price tag in my cart. But it’s also a bigger issue than I can solve as an individual, new librarian – right now, I just have to figure out how to spend my budget the best way I can to support my students and faculty.

I still have a lot to learn about collection development and managing the collections for my students and faculty. At some point, I would like to do a survey of faculty (and maybe students too) to find out what they would like to see in our collections and items that we don’t have which they would find useful. I also want to continue getting more familiar with Library of Congress call numbers and investigate whether there are any additional LOC topics I should add to my email alerts. But for my first semester, I feel good about the progress I’ve made in setting up alerts, putting in several book orders, and getting more familiar with the overall system. Next semester, I hope to continue refining my strategies in what I purchase and how I work with faculty to be more strategic in purchasing.

References:

Rothschild, J. (2020, September 6). Hold on, eBooks cost HOW much? The inconvenient truth about library eCollections. Smart Bitches Trashy Books. https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2020/09/hold-on-ebooks-cost-how-much-the-inconvenient-truth-about-library-ecollections/