Dr. Abigail Leigh Phillips

Tag: LIS

  • The Impact of Our Work on Ourselves

    The Impact of Our Work on Ourselves

    While interviewing rural librarians and young adults for my dissertation over last summer, I had the most surprising conversation with one high school librarian. We’ll call her Mary to maintain confidentiality. Our interview turned to the topic of how our work with patrons has an impact on us. Being from the South, Mary had been raised in a conservative, Southern Baptist church for the majority of her life. While in this church, she had been taught a harsh and judgmental perspective regarding sexuality, gender identity, and non-traditional lifestyles. When Mary began working teens in a high school library, she carried these views and assumptions with her. However, as she started engaging more and more with her young patrons, Mary saw her views begin to change in major ways.

    During the interview, Mary explained that she saw herself becoming more accepting and welcoming of those who lived and loved differently than she did. By interacting with her gay and transgendered high school patrons, she realized that the church that she had been a member of was flawed and destructive. Eventually, Mary broke away from this church and now sees herself as happier because of it. This turned into a very inspirational moment for me. Having also been raised in a Southern Baptist church, I knew exactly the type of mentality that exists in these churches and how challenging it can be, for some, to separate from church teachings. It is much easier to continue along in the highly critical and mentally harmful world in which you have been raised. Mary’s experience keeps coming back to my mind over and over again.

    The more I thought about this interview, the more I realized that this is not a conversation that I recall ever having during my MLIS or PhD program or even through my research. In LIS, we talk a lot about the impact we have (or may potentially have) on our patrons, particularly the impact children and teen librarians have on young patrons. Yet, we rarely discuss or consider the impact of this work on ourselves. The librarian I interviewed had been directly and personally impacted by working with her high school patrons. Out of all my interviews with librarians, only Mary mentioned being changed through her work with youth.

    After an admittedly cursory look at existing research about the impact of our work on ourselves, I have found little in the way of scholarly or even practitioner research. Most of what I found that somewhat relates are discussions about the impact on job satisfaction, workplace stress, and motivation. But I haven’t found anything about how our work as librarians impacts our personal lives. (Please prove me wrong! There must be something.) This is disappointing. Our everyday work with patrons, especially younger patrons, must and perhaps should have some sort of positive impact on our personal and professional lives. At the same time, I can think of several examples from my work in the library where interactions with patrons has not been the best and impacted my personal life in negative ways. Obviously, our work can have both a positive and negative impact of our personal and professional lives. Yet, why aren’t we talking and writing about this topic? More research is needed into the positive and negative impact of our work on ourselves. More conversation is needed. More questions are needed.

  • Falling In Love With an Article (And Other Strange Experiences)

    I feel as if this post is a bit of a nerd confession. I fell in love with a journal article during my spring semester of the doctoral program. In addition to the wonders of this article, I look forward to using  the diary-interview method in my research on young adults one day. Here is the citation for this glorious article:

    Zimmerman, D. (1977). The diary: “Diary-interview method.” Urban Life, 5(4), 479–489.

    The Zimmerman article for your reading pleasure

    Part of me loves Zimmerman’s writing because it reads (at least to me) slightly cheeky. I have a great appreciation for humor in scholarly work. It’s difficult to pull it off and I’m not entirely sure humor is “approved” of in academic writing.  After reading so many well-written but dense and dry during my first year , coming across a piece of writing that studies “the counter-culture” and asks the question, “why had a particular diarist not gotten stoned before going to a Chinese restaurant…” (1977, p. 492). Why not indeed.

    Along with this unusual (?) love, I’ve become drawn to a few theories . It has been an interesting experience to find myself fascinated by an area that only a year I found extremely intimidating. Savolainen’s Everyday Life Information Seeking, Dervin’s Sense-Making, and  Siemen’s Connectivism. Maybe lecturing undergrads on IB models inspired me more than it did anyone else….

    Other current social media and tech obsessions include infographics, 3D printers, MakerSpaces, and memes (of the cat variety in particular).

    In closing, I will leave you with my favorite quote from Zimmerman’s article.

    We should note that if the diaries we collected were to be constructed as exhaustive records of the diarists’ activities, we would have to conclude that this group was characterized by extraordinary bladder and bowel capabilities, since no instance of the elemental act of elimination was reported.” (Zimmerman, 1997, p. 487).

    Anyone else have a strange love or obsession? Am I all alone in my strangeness?

  • This is the beginning….

    In an effort to create more of a online presence for myself, I have started this blog. I’ve never thought much about “branding” myself, but it is seems necessary to make yourself as marketable as possible. At the moment I am doing quite a bit of reading for my research collaboration with Dr. Marcia Mardis. Cyberbullying is a research area which needs more attention from the library and information studies world. One interesting aspect of cyberbullying and traditional bullying is the lack of agreed upon definition for both. It seems a bit like the unsolvable definition of ‘information’ within the LIS profession. It is my intention that my research in this area will be of use to school media specialist and public librarians serving young adults, particularly those who are victims of cyberbullying. I am aiming for producing research that is relevant to both the academic and professional librarian worlds.