Colleagues and collaborators who have taught, catalogued, organised and argued alongside me over the years were kind enough to write a few words about the work. They are collected here.
Priya Ramnath
Instruction coordinator, urban community college
I have watched a lot of people talk about critical pedagogy at conferences. I have watched very few of them come back to campus and rewrite a first-year seminar around it, then share the lesson plans with everyone who asked. That is the difference, and it is why I keep assigning these talks to new librarians.
Desmond Okafor
Cataloguer, academic library
We spent two years arguing about subject headings and I learned something in every one of those arguments. The work here is careful about description in a way that respects both the reader looking for a book and the person the book is about.
Hannah Lindgren
Serials and acquisitions librarian
Budgets are boring until someone shows you that a licence renewal is a decision about whose research gets read. I now bring that argument to my own director, and it works.
Tobias Renwick
Library director, small college
Plain-spoken, evidence-led, and never content with a slogan where a number would do. When I need someone to read a draft strategy and tell me what is wrong with it, this is who I ask.
Ines Vasquez
Archivist, municipal archive
The essays on infrastructure gave me language for work my colleagues and I had been doing for a decade without a name for it. Invisible maintenance is still maintenance, and it still costs money.
Aaron Feldbaum
Instructional designer, university library
We co-taught a workshop on assessment and I expected a fight. Instead I got a genuine question about what our measurements were for. The workshop was better for it, and so was my teaching.
Yewande Adeyemi
Reference and outreach librarian
Generous with credit and unusually honest about what did not work. The write-ups here include the failed version of the lesson as often as the successful one, which is rare and useful.
Martin Kellerman
Union officer, faculty federation
Through a lockout and a long contract fight, the notes and minutes were accurate, on time, and readable by people who had not been in the room. That is organising work, and it matters more than it sounds.
Sofia Brandt
Scholarly communications librarian
A careful reader of licences and an even better reader of the politics behind them. The open-access pieces here helped our library flip a journal without pretending it was easy.
Nikhil Sarangi
Systems librarian
Rare combination: understands the metadata standard and understands why the person at the desk hates it. Both things end up in the writing.
Clara Beaumont
Teaching faculty, information studies
I use these talks as course readings because students argue with them. That is the point of a reading.
Owen Trethewey
Public library branch manager
Academic writing about libraries usually stops at the campus gate. This does not, and my staff recognise their own work in it.