Making the most of pandemic lessons learned
By Jamia Williams, Consumer Health Program Specialist with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Training Office.
The question arises of what should we – any member of the higher ed community – do now to ensure a healthy future for academic librarianship? There’s a range of answers. Hopefully, we learned some things during the COVID-19 pandemic. One is that we can have flexible work arrangements by working from home some days, if not all, of our work days. This allowed us to be present for ourselves and our loved ones. We need to do a better job with boundary setting to thrive at work.
Another thing that we have to continue to grapple with and advocate for is the necessity of academic libraries in our institutions, as there is an attack on being aware of diverse American narratives by labeling information seekers. Furthermore, our students need more accessible access to textbooks, whether by ensuring they have their required texts through course reserve or their textbook is an open resource. Also, we can continue making sure that our institutions are aware of the library repositories so that the research done by faculty and students can be shared and easily accessible.
Jamia Williams, Consumer Health Program Specialist with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Training Office
We need to continue to move forward in open scholarship and open access. As academic librarians that teach, we should have learned ways to engage with students virtually. The virtual space should continue to be explored, and our skill sets should continue to evolve. We can continue using different engagement tools for our in-person sessions with students. From 2020 to now, it has been difficult for most of us because of the uncertainty, grief, inflation, and job creep, so we should take the bright spots of things learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and apply them in the present and future to make our workplaces better for everyone.
Then there are the challenges
The most persistent challenge for the patrons I dealt with in an academic library was students carrying the cost and burden of textbooks. If I had a magic wand, I would ensure that the library purchased all their required textbooks and that they could access them online and in-person. Many of our programs are 100 percent online, so making them accessible online and in-person would be life-changing. In the meantime, our academic libraries can do what they can to get the required texts in their libraries by working with faculty and obtaining grants to fund this expensive undertaking.
This also is an opportunity for open educational resources librarians to continue working with faculty to create or support more open educational resources for their courses. Lastly, we must continue advocating on a local and federal level for this change for students.
And what would I like to see become part of the higher ed canon?
If trauma-informed care practices were part of the higher education canon, it would be life-changing for our faculty, students, and staff. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, has six guiding principles for having a trauma-informed approach:
Safety
Trustworthiness and transparency
Peer support
Collaboration and mutuality
Empowerment, voice, and choice
Cultural, historical, and gender issues
If this were part of the higher education canon, then this would be an ongoing way to assess how we interact with each other at the academy. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control said it perfectly, “Adopting a trauma-informed approach is not accomplished through any single particular technique or checklist…On-going internal organizational assessment and quality improvement, as well as engagement with community stakeholders, will help to imbed this approach which can be augmented with organizational development and practice improvement.” Lastly, it would be a way to be honest about historical and current discrimination that marginalized people face and how we can dismantle these systems of oppression within the academy.
About
Jamia Williams is the Consumer Health Program Specialist with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Training Office. Williams is the co-creator and co-host of the podcast LibVoices, which amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who work in archives and libraries. Jamia founded the Diversity Fellow’s blog, a platform to document her journey as a Black librarian.
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This blog post is part of a series from librarian thought leaders sharing personal insights into the challenges and opportunities their profession faces. Read more.