Why These Librarians Care About People, More Than Anything Else

Libraries are often measured by what they contain–collections, technologies, services, systems. Underneath these themes are neoliberal capitalistic features of productivity and competition. I once prioritized technological innovation as the benchmark of progress, but I have come to realize that the modern library is, at its core, an architecture of care. In recent years, I have been inspired by leaders who recognize that library staff are the primary objective. It's based on a philosophy that honours the profound human dignity and emotional labour at our core, ensuring the physical reality of our work isn’t lost to the digital void. Here are the librarians I highlight:

Bobbi L. Newman approaches librarianship as a practice of workplace well-being. A professor at the University of Iowa’s iSchool, Bobbie is also a Certified Wellness Practitioner whose work recognizes that burnout is not a personal failure, but often a structural one. Author of Fostering Wellness in the Workplace: A Handbook for Libraries, Bobbie, reframes care as essential infrastructure, something libraries must build intentionally if they want people to thrive within them. Bobbi is a founder of ThriveLib, a virtual conference specifically designed for library workers, including staff, managers, and leaders, to address issues like burnout, compassion fatigue, and the need for better work-life boundaries.

Jessica Schomberg is a librarian at Minnesota State University, Mankato, who grounds care in access and justice. Her work spans cataloging, collection development, reference, and instruction, but her research focuses squarely on disability and social justice. She is deeply committed to working collaboratively to make libraries more accessible and inclusive, not only for patrons but also for workers. A frequent writer and speaker on disabled adults in libraries and co-author of Beyond Accommodation: Creating an Inclusive Workplace for Disabled Library Workers, Schomberg challenges institutions to move beyond minimal compliance toward genuine inclusion, including those with invisible disabilities.

For Karina Hagelin, care is inseparable from survival and joy. A disabled nonbinary queer femme artist, educator, keynote speaker, librarian, and survivor, Hagelin transforms trauma through cute and colourful art that insists on softness without denying pain. Their work reminds us that libraries are emotional spaces, shaped by lived experience, and that healing does not always look serious or subdued. Karina’s podcast, Healing is the Best Revenge, is a must-listen program that discusses healing, life with C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder), survivorship, self + community care, among many things.

Widely known for her work on trauma-informed librarianship, Rebecca Tolley’s book A Trauma-Informed Approach to Library Services is now used in a number of LIS programs and is one of the first and only in the field that addresses this topic. I found it immensely important in my own work in this area. Her work addresses mental health in libraries, the importance of healthy personal and professional boundaries, and the cultivation of empathy among library workers. Rebecca names what many experience but rarely say aloud: that libraries are shaped by trauma and stress, and ignoring these realities will only do real harm.

Kristen Mastel brings care into focus through mindfulness. As a librarian at the University of Minnesota, Kristen specializes in mindful librarianship, and her work recognizes that information work does not happen in a vacuum. By centring mindfulness, she helps create library spaces where students and staff can slow down, regulate stress, and engage more fully with themselves and others. Beyond the library, Mastel is also a certified forest therapy guide, herbalist, and health coach. After facing career and personal burnout, she found that time in nature was crucial to her mental and physical health and recovery.  

I’ve moved beyond gadget-driven techno-utopianism, refocusing instead on a radical empathy that anchors libraries as human institutions grounded in lived experience. I identify with these librarians' vision of librarianship rooted in humanity. There are probably many more that I haven't included in my short list here, and I will continue to highlight more in the months and years ahead. I’m inspired by these librarians whose work spans wellness, disability justice, trauma-informed practice, art, mindfulness, and nature-based healing, particularly as they converge on a single truth: libraries are human systems first. To care about people, more than anything else, is not a soft value or “weak.” Rather, it's about libraries maintaining their ethical heartbeat while navigating an uncertain landscape of the future of the profession itself.

From Publisher to Data Cartel: The Lifecycle of the Information Industry

In Data Cartels, law librarian Sarah Lamdan names something many in librarianship have long felt but rarely framed so clearly: that the modern information ecosystem is shaped by powerful data monopolies whose interests often run counter to public good, privacy, and intellectual freedom. Currently, the two largest companies in the world, Thomson Reuters and RELX ( Reed, Elsevier, LexisNexis, and Exhibitions), are no longer just in the publishing or media business; they are data brokers who collect and sell data. It’s shocking that RELX's annual profit margin is 30%, while Walmart's is only 3%.

In this well-researched monograph, Lamdan traces how these two corporations control legal, academic, and commercial databases, extract immense profits from publicly produced knowledge, and lock institutions into costly, restrictive contracts. For academic libraries and librarians like myself who use these databases and products to support our students and researchers, this resonates immediately.

Escalating journal and database prices are not simply budgetary annoyances; they are symptoms of a cartelized system that treats access to knowledge as a luxury rather than a collective right. Libraries, especially publicly funded ones as the one I am working at, end up paying repeatedly for research produced by scholars whose labour is already subsidized by the public. While academic libraries are opting out of big package deals with the likes of Elsevier, it is certainly not making a dent in the businesses of the data cartels. As long as there is a tenure-track system, academics will continue to publish and sign away their copyrights to journals in Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis, and be exploited in the process.

If it only costs Elsevier $600 to publish an article and Elsevier makes $4000 from selling it, what happens to the other $3,400?

Sarah Lamdan, Data Cartels

 

What makes Data Cartels a critical read today is its urgent attention to surveillance. Lamdan documents how data brokers and database vendors increasingly collaborate with U.S. government agencies, like ICE, by allowing personal information to circulate beyond traditional legal safeguards. In this environment, libraries are no longer just access points to information but are potential nodes in surveillance networks. As librarians, we face challenges that test our core professional values regarding user privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent.

As a librarian, I see Data Cartels not merely as a critique but as a call to action. It asks us to rethink licensing practices, advocate for open access, interrogate vendor relationships, and prioritize privacy as a non-negotiable ethical commitment. At a moment when data extraction, market consolidation, and state surveillance are accelerating, I worry whether we are too late to the game. Whereas the Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks of the world are sometimes monitored by the government for antitrust violations, there don’t seem to be the same guardrails in place for these data cartels.

Mental Health and LIS, Are We The Interruptors?

Even as I enter my own library at work, engulfed by its calm, quiet and orderly spaces, places of refuge for our students and staff, I feel the inner anxiety and unease of the morning, of the news stories and frantic awakenings at night. My anxiety has increased since the pandemic, probably even before it, if I really think about it. My mental health never much concerned me until more recently. Like me, I believe that behind the service desks, in staff rooms, and across institutional hierarchies, library workers everywhere frequently carry invisible burdens into the workplace. But within the realm of library work, conversations about mental illness are too often pushed to the sidelines, whispered behind office doors, or softened for others’ comfort. Silence becomes a form of policy, professionalism a mask.  In our era, library workers learn, implicitly or explicitly, that struggling is to be done quietly.

One of the monographs I came across confronts this silence head-on. Amazingly, LIS Interrupted seems to be the only title that fully provides firsthand accounts from library workers. The book brings conversations about mental health into public view, where they can finally be named and understood. By centring lived experiences, LIS Interrupted refuses to admit mental illness as a personal failing or a mere “inconvenient interruption” to work. Instead, it reveals how mental health is deeply entangled with the conditions of library labour itself, work that is emotionally demanding, undervalued, increasingly precarious, and shaped by systems of power.

In weaving together personal narratives and critical analyses to explore how mental illness intersects with labour, race, gender, disability, culture, stigma, and identity in the LIS field, this book explores structural inequities, namely, ableism, racism, colonialism, and managerialism. It’s a rather chilling notion that these very inequities determine who is supported, who is surveilled, and who is expected to endure harm in silence.

However, this book is not solely about suffering, but about connection and possibility. For library workers who have felt isolated or unseen, LIS Interrupted offers affirmation and solidarity. For educators and students, it serves as a critical text that challenges dominant narratives of resilience and vocational sacrifice. For institutions, it is a call to action to transform workplace cultures to better support their staff's care and dignity. In my work on trauma-informed care in libraries, I’m deeply interested in how mental health is not addressed. Karena Hagelin, an LIS trauma-expert, frames saneism as a “systemic and structural oppression of mad, crazy, and mentally ill” individuals and is a manifestation of ableism. For those who have experienced trauma, which is many of us, the norm has been to hide and disregard these feelings during work hours. In the case of the institution, to rid itself of these workers who disrupt the calm and order if it gets out of hand. I’m fortunate to have some tools and support to get through some challenging days, but thriving is still the goal.   I’m not the only one.  Let's have this book on the shelves of every library and on every desk.