Capstone ePortfolio: Joanna Russell Bliss 

Fifth Term: Spring 2021


April 25, 2021

Wellness @ Fondren.

As another challenging school year comes to a close at Southern Methodist University, we continue to discuss ways to help students not just survive but thrive as their final projects are turned in and they prepare for another finals week where many are not on campus. Finals week events used to create community – for example, I led an in-person event in December 2019 where we had partnered with Pet Partners to bring dogs into the library for an emotional break. We worked with campus dining to have late night nacho bars and waffles, and we had a brain breaks table that encouraged students to play with LEGOs and color pictures when they needed a little rest from chemistry or literature or politics.

[Image description: Several students sit on the floor in a corner of the library, petting a dog on a blanket. Taken in December 2019, before masks and social distancing were a requirement throughout campus.]

When everything shut down a few months later, it was difficult to quickly change what we had done into something that would work remotely. As a group, we interns created a short video to encourage students from afar, but we knew it wasn't nearly enough. The following term, as students returned to campus for Fall 2020, but with masks and social distancing (and the fact that we wanted to discourage too much common use tools), we built a research guide to point students to puppy cams and yoga sequences. But without much marketing, it was little used, and we continued to discuss how to reach out to our students.
 
We are now facing our third finals week under some form of limitations, but I feel we have upped our game to try to encourage students and help them de-stress, knowing that they did not have spring break this year and even lost days off around Easter to make up for the crazy storm we had in February. A lot of this is the result of a partnership with the Meadows Museum that is here on campus. They proposed several craft kits that we could put out for students to pick up at Fondren, and coloring nights at the museum where students can color in the midst of works of art.

We strove to meet their challenge and have worked hard to advertise the partnership and ways for students to take a brain break and stay mentally healthy. We have put up our brain breaks tables again, with coloring sheets and individually wrapped colored pencils (and a bin encouraging students to return pencils for sanitization). A sign above the table promotes the updated research guide, with a QR code that students can scan to open the page. Another table features the craft kits, in individual paper bags that include most of the supplies and a copy of the instructions, with signs encouraging students to take one.

[Image description: A graphic with a piece of art depicting a stressed-out scholar surrounded by books on the right, and text on the left that reads, "Feel like this? DIY & De-stress with Tools from SMU Libraries and the Meadows Museum. Visit our Brain Breaks Tables by study room 101 in the Prothro Learning Commons at Fondren Library: Coloring pages, craft kits, and more!" followed by the logo for SMU Libraries.]

But the difference this semester is that we're working directly with marketing to promote all of this. I've confirmed with our marketing contact that students will learn about these opportunities through emails and social media. And he asked me to create a slide (see above) for the TV screens posted throughout the library that advertise various events in the library and throughout campus. So the students that come to the library in person should see the tables, and the slide promoting them, and the students that cannot come to campus will, at the least, receive notice of the research guide with ideas for how to stay well. It may not be quite as soothing as petting a dog during a study break, but I hope this helps a few more students manage their health as another term comes to a close.

Photograph taken by and graphic created by Joanna Russell Bliss.


April 9, 2021

Teaching information literacy from a distance, take two.

Last year, I was preparing to teach my first class in twenty years. I prepped my slides and discussed the in-person presentation with my boss. I was anxious, but didn't realize a pandemic would completely shift how I had to teach my one-shot session – I had to teach via Zoom three weeks after everything shut down.

This year, we were prepared. In addition, the first-year research and writing class had been completely revamped, so all of the WRTR classes were reading the same texts and writing a research paper about conspiracy theories and their rhetoric and logic. This allowed SMU Librarians to create two modules that the WRTR professors could incorporate into Canvas before our librarian sessions (via Zoom) with their classes.

We met as a team to discuss what should be in the modules. The main module that we asked teachers to assign to their students was on information literacy – how to think about finding and evaluating information, particularly its reliability. The second module, on misinformation, was available but assigned at the teachers' discretion. And a research guide with links to pertinent databases in psychology, history and political science, along with books on conspiracy theories and misinformation, was created for these classes as well.
All of these resources made planning my in-class session much easier (the slides are embedded above; my notes include my narrative script, for accessibility). I used the first part of class to review the module and discuss its points about making connections between sources, good search strategies to use as they looked for more sources, and how to evaluate what they are finding and determine whether they are appropriate for their paper. I also made sure to connect what they had learned in the module with the prompt that their instructor had written for their class, like what types of sources could be used for different sections of their paper.

Then we split into break out rooms so that I could talk to the students one at a time, asking about their topics, where they had already looked for more sources, and whether they needed help. Overall, the students were in a good place for having just started the assignment, and this was confirmed when I asked them to put in the chat the most valuable thing they had learned during class – they liked the search strategies, how to evaluate sources, and were particularly grateful to learn they could schedule appointments with librarians for research help.

My experience confirmed that working as a team to help these students improved my presentations in class, as well as the students' and instructors' impressions of SMU Libraries and what we can do for the students. 


March 31, 2021

Weeding, censorship, and cancel culture.

Libraries and publishers have been in the news again as arbiters of cancel culture and censorship after the foundation that publishes the books of Dr. Seuss decided not to continue to publish six of his books. The foundation had determined that images of some minorities in these books are "hurtful and wrong," (Dr. Seuss Enterprises, para. 2). Somehow this was extrapolated by politicians to libraries censoring children's classics. By the end of the month, a Pennsylvania Representative had proposed an act to protect such literature from "cancel culture." According to Fox News, "the Guarding Readers’ Independence and Choice (GRINCH) Act … will cut off government funding for agencies that censor books," (Giang-Paunon, 2021, para. 2).


Of course, as the above video explains, such decisions to not publish titles are not "cancel culture." For a start, just because they are no longer published does not mean they are removed from the shelves at a library. In fact, some libraries would argue they are more fitting now, as a way to discuss the imagery and how it can be hurtful. In conversations with the Education Librarian, Evelyn Day, at Southern Methodist University about what books to add in order to increase representation of BIPOC characters in our children's literature collection, Day noted that a professor at SMU that teaches about diverse learners has requested that certain problematic titles remain on the shelf just for that reason.

I have also been working on a weeding project with our collections department to remove duplicate titles that also are held by our law library. Such removal of duplication on an academic campus can be considered the least problematic of weeding proposals – the books are still readily available on campus, and they can be recycled or resold in order to make more room for either new books or new spaces in the library. But libraries need to do a better job of conveying why weeding is a part of every library, and not just duplicate copies of a title or those that are falling apart and can't be used anymore. As Kagan (2018) explains so well, libraries need to constantly weed in order to make sure the latest titles are readily available. As he notes, "the Library is not where books come to die," (para. 15). In my estimation, the library is a place to learn. Perhaps such learning should include teaching patrons about the cycles of information, and when something is no longer important to have within reach on a shelf. 

Dr. Seuss Enterprises. (2021, March 2). Statement from Dr. Seuss Enterprises. https://www.seussville.com/statement-from-dr-seuss-enterprises/ 

Giang-Paunon, S. (2021, March 26). ‘GRINCH Act’ introduced to protect children's books from cancel culture: ‘No one is safe’. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/grinch-act-dr-seuss-kids-books-cancel-culture 

HuffPost UK. (2020, July 13). What is cancel culture? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bisnMOujqFs

Kagan, O. (2018, August 22). Where do the books go after the library? EveryLibrary. https://medium.com/everylibrary/where-do-the-books-go-after-the-library-915db40d7f49


February 25, 2021

(Pleasure) books for librarians.

As we approach one year under our strange conditions, I find I'm weary. Of staying at home. Of juggling grad school and parenting and an internship and other work. And I'm tired of being tired.

For a long time, I didn't have the attention span for novels. My son was younger, and I had found that non-fiction was easier to put down and pick back up. But now that he's self-sufficient, and I spend so much of my days focusing on articles and textbooks about library science, I need fiction to help my brain relax and recover – from work, from separation, and, lately, from the storm that shut down Texas.

Of course, even when I'm reading novels, I find that I'm drawn to those that write of literary lives. Here are three that touched on my library science studies while exploring worlds vastly different than my own.

[Sidebar: I have been an avid reader my entire life. To see other reviews of my latest reads, visit my profile at Goodreads.]

Cover of the book The Midnight Library

[Image description: Cover of the book The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. It includes repeated zeroes to indicate the time of midnight; the zeroes also act as windows or doors, where people, animals, landscapes and other scenes come and go through the openings.]

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

The book focuses on Nora Seed, a woman that has decided she no longer wants to live. She commits suicide fairly early in the book; after she loses consciousness, she finds herself in a library with her high school librarian. Of course, this library is different: It houses her Book of Regrets, as well as all of the variants of what her life could have been with different choices: If she had become a professional swimmer, if she had married the man she left two days before their wedding, if she had moved to Australia with a friend. 

The book is an excellent exploration of the "what if"s we all consider – would our life really have been better? Or would it just have been different, with other challenges? A thoroughly engaging novel that I could not put down.

Cover of the book The Liar's Dictionary.

[Image description: Cover of the book The Liar's Dictionary, by Eley Williams. It features a drawing of the head, body and legs of a peacock with an image of an open book (looking down at the open pages and binding) as the peacock's tail.]

Organized into 26 chapters headed by the definitions of obscure words, this novel is a wonderful escape for logophiles like myself that love little-known words and their histories and meanings. The location is consistent – a publishing house in London – but the narrative jumps back and forth between the creation of a dictionary in the late 1800s and an intern digitizing the remains of the unpublished masterpiece in modern times.

The central mystery is the discovery in the modern period of a variety of mountweazels in the dictionary that date back to the narrative in the 1890s. The intern begins hunting for these extraneous words while trying to figure out why a clerk would have added them; we get clues as to why in the older narrative. As the story jumps back and forth, both narrators display their love of language while navigating the highs and lows of life in each era.

Cover of the book The Paris Library

[Image description: Cover of the book The Paris Library, by Janet Skeslien Charles. Its central image is a woman sitting on a ledge looking out at Paris, with the Eiffel Tower to the right.]

The Paris Library, by Janet Skeslien Charles

Last summer, I read about the American Library in Paris for the first time. Celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2020, the article in American Libraries explored the history of this subscription library, created after the First World War, that became an essential part of the literary resistance to German occupation during the World War II.

This novel, like The Liar's Dictionary, jumps between two time periods, but in this book, they feature the same woman, Odile Souchet. In 1939, she is hired as a librarian at the American Library, and the one storyline follows her experience as war approaches and Paris is occupied. In the 1980s, she is now a widow, Odile Gustafson, who moved to Montana as a war bride. Her young neighbor befriends her and begins to learn about her past. The story seamlessly jumps back and forth, creating an engrossing narrative that kept me reading long after my bedtime.

Alford, H. (2005, August 22). Not a word. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/not-a-word

Kniffel, L. (2020, May 1). We'll always have the American Library in Paris. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/05/01/well-always-have-american-library-in-paris/ 

Penguin Random House. (n.d.). Cover of The Liar's Dictionary [Image]. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/656259/the-liars-dictionary-by-eley-williams/

Penguin Random House. (n.d.). Cover of The Midnight Library [Image]. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/575653/the-midnight-library-by-matt-haig/ 

Simon & Schuster. (2021). Cover of The Paris Library [Image]. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Paris-Library/Janet-Skeslien-Charles/9781982134198 


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