Setting aside time for your life, your loved ones, and your hobbies is vitally important. I always like to say there is no such thing as a library emergency. . . That email can wait until Monday morning or the next day.
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
Remembering Self-Care and Vocational Awe in the Post-Pandemic World
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Absurdities of the Juicero and Libraries
Juicero, circa 2013 |
The author relates this to the academic librarian's environment, where career advancement relies on showcasing innovation. I've certainly experienced this myself, having been caught up in the euphoria of Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the semantic web just a decade ago -- a sign of the obsession with innovation in academic librarianship, driven by a corporatized academia that prioritizes measurable achievements and publications. The pressure to constantly innovate, often for its own sake, can lead to impractical projects that consume time and resources without addressing genuine needs.
Glassman recounts a scenario where MLIS students suggested changing a popular reading collection to be less "object-centric" without providing a clear vision for the alternative. Thus, the rush for constant innovation can result in ideas that lack practicality and fail to meet the actual needs of patrons.
The author reflects on personal experiences of succumbing to the pressure to innovate, even when existing methods were effective. The obsession with innovation is deeply ingrained in the academic librarian profession, fueled by the need for immediate and tangible outcomes to justify investments. I've witnessed this myself, playing a hand in accepting directives while secretly scratching my head at the logic of decisions.
As a solution, the article proposes looking to the Slow Movement for guidance, advocating for a Slow Librarianship approach that prioritizes reflection and meaningful practices over a constant pursuit of impressive achievements. This alternative approach aims to provide deeper, more lasting, and more human services to patrons by rejecting the constant need for innovation and allowing for more thoughtful and responsive practices. It's something that I'm still trying to integrate into my own work and approach to my life. It's always a work in progress. Thankfully, it's not considered innovative.
Monday, December 18, 2023
Trauma-Informed Librarianship for Survivors
This colleague looked like a shadow of the cheerful, upbeat, once-optimistic librarian I had once known.A casualty of workplace bullying and harassment, the daily stress of fighting with their organization, followed by the gaslighting they endured, and the confrontations with their boss had finally worn down my mentee. They even brought their own cushion to the restaurant where we were eating and had to stand up every few minutes to adjust their seat to lessen the pain. Unfortunately, this has become more common now that I’ve entered mid-career in my profession and librarians of colour often seek me out for advice and oftentimes, a shoulder to cry on.
I have been researching EDI and anti-racism in libraries for more than a decade now. I’ve felt that I had hit a bit of a roadblock recently, particularly after I completed my sabbatical and put the final touches for publication. But it all feels rather hollow, especially recently. Instead of celebrating, I am dissatisfied. I feel like I have done very little to move forward in the profession. What have I exactly accomplished with this research anyways? Those of us who push for change look at removing systemic barriers and biases through EDI initiatives, but what about those individuals who have been harmed already? What can we do for them in the meantime?
I have listened to many heart-wrenching stories from survivors of toxic workplaces. Bullying. Gas lighting. The list goes on. My interviews became counselling sessions. These very personal and challenging stories were often accompanied by one medical absence or another. There were so many signs of burnout. I felt helpless to do anything but listen and capture a pattern that I was noticing among interviewees. I now realize that these experiences are trauma.
The research literature indicates that there is a large correlation between chronic stress and health challenges. The trauma expert Dr. Elizabeth Stanley has suggested that chronic stress and trauma should be viewed as part of a continuum; stress over time has the same biopsychosocial effects on individuals as acute trauma. It’s very hard for those who haven’t experienced trauma to truly understand it. An event that is stressful for one person may be traumatizing to another.
When people don’t recover from trauma, the suppressed pain may manifest itself through physical and mental illnesses, and chronic pain. There’s an emerging science of mind-body medicine that suggests that emotional pain often manifests itself physically through the body. Studies show that chronic pain and emotional pain emanate from the same part of the brain. There are some in the medical community, such as Gabor Mate (When the Body Says No) and Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) who are part of a movement that explores the mind-body connection. People whose nervous systems are caused by ongoing stress become stuck in a flight-or-fight mode. But this neuroplastic pain is not imaginary: it’s real.
It goes without saying that seeking medical and counselling support is vital in the healing journey. But beyond that, what can we do to help others? What can we do if we are in these untenable situations ourselves? Karina Hagelin, who identifies as a chronically ill and disabled queer femme librarian believes each one of us can help by taking care of ourselves and others with self-compassion. Karina argues that self-care isn’t being selfish. Instead, it’s a cultural shift in how we approach our work to move towards healing — not just for our patrons, but for each other, and for ourselves. We are all survivors. I highly recommend everyone watch the webinar Trauma-Informed Librarianship: Building Communities of Care which shares ten concrete self-care strategies.
“Healing is the best revenge” is the name of Karina’s podcast. It’s such a moving and powerful phrase. One that’s so optimistic and hopeful, which is exactly what we need to turn to in times of despair. Libraries do an excellent job in devoting their mission to serving their communities, but often that community does not include their own staff. I recently shared this podcast with my mentee who I think about every day. I hope they know that their healing journey won’t be a lonely one because I will be here by their side.
Monday, November 27, 2023
The Five Labours of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-racism Work by Racialized Academic Librarians
I've been fortunate to collaborate with Silvia Vong (University of Toronto iSchool) and Elaina Norlin (Association of Southeastern Research Libraries) on a project about the retention and recruitment of academic librarians in the United States and Canada.
The Five Labours of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-racism Work by Racialized Academic Librarians (Silvia Vong, Allan Cho, Elaina Norlin)
Friday, September 22, 2023
Care and Compassion: Why We Need to Learn about Trauma-informed Librarianship
I'm really trying to learn as much as I can about self-care and self-compassion which is integral to healing. I've been focusing a lot of attention on challenging topics, particularly during my sabbatical, on discrimination, exclusion, gaslighting, bullying, the list goes on, and much of the effects I witness (and personally experienced myself) is chronic stress of which the effects are only beginning to be understood in the medical world. The trauma expert Dr. Elizabeth Stanley has suggested that chronic stress and trauma should be viewed as part of a continuum; stress over time has the same biopsychosocial effects on individuals as acute trauma. As such, many of my colleagues in this profession who have faced the onslaught of chronic stress have either left the profession due to burnout or have suffered mental or chronic health issues.
Karina is such a courageous and engaging speaker, and being a chronically ill and disabled queer femme librarian, they have lived experiences and expertise to help us create better cultures in our libraries that center healing through radical empathy, collective care, and social justice work. Karina is an Outreach and Instruction Librarian at Cornell University who has a very cool website where you can find more information about her work: http://www.karinakilljoy.com/
Monday, August 07, 2023
Living Well, Living Mindfully in a Post-Pandemic World
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise” – Victor HugoSince the pandemic, I had been living life as if everything was normal even though the world around me seemed to be falling apart. While externally I was fine, internally I was struggling. Early on, I inwardly beamed at a slower pace of life during 2020. But being locked away at home and socially isolated (Zoom actually made things worse) obviously chipped away at my mental wellness. I also hadn’t fully acknowledged life had changed the past few years – my first newborn, the death of a parent, and changing of job duties – just to name a few.
Depression and anxiety are often subtle and brew in the background for years before it ignites. For me, it began with simple insomnia. Then came body aches and pains. Then disrupted sleep. Dread, fear, sadness – all wore away at my psyche. Numerous physical examinations, blood tests and doctor’s visits equated to nothing. Counselling and medication helped for short periods of time.
My body was telling me to slow down my life and figure out what was going on. It was psychosomatic – my body was telling me something, and it probably saved my life. I want to share what helped me get back on my feet.
- Daily exercise – In my darkest moments, even simple walks were strenuous. But the exercise was necessary. Getting up and out of the house and breathing air from nature helped immensely. The saying “motion is lotion” is true; the human body requires it to stay grounded.
- Mindfulness – I used an app, Calm, for its guided meditation sessions but there are numerous others available. YouTube and podcasts are immensely useful, too. Deep breathing calmed my nervous system and mindfulness lifted me out of the noise and chatter that was actually the source of my angst.
- Joy – To rediscover my hobbies in life – reading, writing, community – including new ones like yoga all enriched my life. It’s hard to do when in the doldrums of life, and might feel counterintuitive, but joy resurfacing became the light that led me out of my tunnel.
- Community – I didn’t quite realize how isolated I was until it hit me hard emotionally. I felt I was ready to jump into the ocean if that meant I could reconnect. After a couple of years of isolation helped me appreciate that colleagues and friends are important reminders that life is more than work. I cherish time for relationships now, old and new.
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This was published in Notes Between Us (NBU), a blog about conversations and topics of interest to writers. The writers are expressing their personal opinions solely. The essays represent their personal beliefs and not those of their workplaces or any organization they are associated with.
Monday, July 10, 2023
Academic Freedom and Academic Failure
Naoko Shibusawa is a 20th-century U.S. cultural historian who studies U.S. imperialism and political culture with an interest in the ideas and ideologies that undergird the U.S. empire and foreign policy. I was surprised to see Asian American Studies scholar Naoko Shibusawa suspended from her faculty role. Certainly, with all the strange occurrences, Shibusawa's article, Notes on Solidarity From the Field is a must-read as it has sparked controversy within the academy. This is concerning considering the infringement of academic freedom.
Brown has silenced Shibusawa by banning her from faculty meetings for two years for an alleged violation of confidentiality in her article, "Where is the Reciprocity? Notes on Solidarity from the Field," published in the Journal of Asian American Studies. https://t.co/R7PiLb6XUO
— mtp (@tsengputterman) February 16, 2023
Sunday, May 07, 2023
Bamboo Ceiling Reframed: The Impact of Social Practices in Management on Asian Library Managers
It was such a pleasure to moderate a session featuring my friend and role model librarian, Silvia Vong. Silvia and I are conducting a research project and it has been an eye-opening working with such a talented individual. As the Associate Chief Librarian for Scholarly, Research and Creative Activities at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Silvia has worked in universities for over a decade. She's completing her Ph.D. research which focuses on the impact of neoliberal conventions and managerialism on equity and anti-racism work in Canadian universities. Silvia draws on the works of Critical Race Theory scholars, Postcolonial Theory, and Bourdieu to examine issues in librarianship. Her talk is based on a chapter that is published in Libraries as Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces.
In 2005, Jane Hyun, a management consultant, wrote a book titled Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians. Though the text was intended to “introduce” Asians to dominant management practices and workplace culture, the text was problematic in that it essentialized Asians, reiterated deficit narratives, and narratives of the “other.” In an effort to add another perspective to the issue of the lack of representation, Silvia's research was designed with a structuralist approach. Rather than blame or point to a group, the study focused on examining social and organizational barriers through a Bourdieusian and Critical Race Theory lens to identify how dominant structures exclude, reward assimilation, and build into a system, of invisible or taken-for-granted rules. The talk's presentation slides on Bamboo Ceiling Reframed are here.
Monday, April 24, 2023
Creating an Edge by Turning Adversity into Advantage
Harvard faculty Laura Huang researches interpersonal relationships and implicit bias in entrepreneurship and in the workplace. The wonderful aspect of this book is that it’s not limited to any particular subject domain or just the business stories of successful people. Rather, it’s extraordinary stories of ordinary people who came from disadvantaged backgrounds infused with evidence-based research. Huang calls this approach EDGE – enrich, delight, and guide – to make your effort go further. These concepts make up the core structure of succeeding within an imperfect system and success ultimately requires knowing who you are so that you can turn that knowledge into an advantage. Here is Huang's approach to creating one's edge.
Enrich - The ability to provide value to and enrich those around you. The difference between those who truly enrich and bring value to others and those who don’t actually bring value. Those who have an edge demonstrate and communicate the value they bring, rather than leave it up to others to determine.
- Hard work should be enough; oftentimes, it’s not.
- Know your weaknesses will help you identify your circle of competence, or “basic goods.” You’ll know not only where you’re valuable, but where you’re invaluable.
- To use your basic goods in distinct ways, go where others don’t.
- Embrace constraints as they provide the most opportunities.
- Trust your intuition and your experiences – your “gut”
- Before people let you in, they need to be delighted.
- Don’t over plan. Instead, aim for flexibility and opportunities to delight.
- Stay authentic and embrace how delight occurs in situ.
- "Being yourself” means guiding others to the best versions of your multiple identities.
- Know how others see you, so you can redirect them to how they should see you.
- Guide others to what is within you by recognizing what is around you.
- Guide how others see your trajectory. It’s not where you’ve been; it’s where you’re going.
- Turn adversity into your edge.
“Your past is not something that you should lament; it should be another asset in how you gain your unique advantage. Let your past make you better, no bitter.”
Friday, April 07, 2023
Rest is Resistance as Liberation
“Students are being trained to be workers who can follow orders, memorize facts, and be on time no mater what. Imagination and critical thinking skills are replaced with cookie-cutter learning and standardized testing"
“We have been socialized, manipulated, and indoctrinated by everything in culture to believe the lies of grind culture. In order for a capitalist system to thrive, our false beliefs in productivity and labor must remain"
“We center rest as a means for healing and liberation. We believe sleep deprivation is a racial and social justice issue"
“Rest is resistance because it is a counternarrative to the script of capitalism and white supremacy for all people"
“Unlike white feminism, womanism holds space for race, class, and gender and understands the family and community of Black woman are collaborators in the struggle for liberation”
“We can . . . begin to honor our bodies and trust our ability to learn new ways of being. We don’t have to be burned out, sleep-deprived, painfully exhausted, or disconnected from our selves and each other"
“I name academia as one of the main sites of grind culture. The headquarters of pushing through exhaustion, competition, expectations, and a lack of balance. people live in the library never once leaving, bringing sleeping bags to lay under tables and in between bookshelves. . ."
“The stress, anxiety, overloaded curriculum, and pressure we normalize in public schools and higher education are toxic and dangerous for everyone involved, but particularly toxic for young children and young adults who are still developing a sense of self . . . we seek external validation from a violent system void of love"
“. . . resting is a connection and a path back to our true nature. We are stripped down to who we really were before the terror of capitalism and white supremacy"
“The system has been lying and guiding us all blindly to urgent and unsustainable fantasies. We have replaced our inherent self-esteem with toxic productivity"
“You don’t have to always be creating, doing, and contributing to the world. Your birth grants you rest and leisure as well"
Naps are about a “deep journey toward decolonizing and returning to our natural state before the terror and the lies were given to us"
“We are going up against such violent systems in our attempt to disrupt and push back: white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, patriarchy, classism, anti-Blackness, homophobia, etc"
“Go to your beds. Go to your couches. Find a hammock. Go into the portal of naps. Go there often. You don’t have to wait on permission from the dominant culture"
Tricia Hersey suggests a 30-day sabbath, a quarantine and liberation from our grind culture, and focusing instead on rest. It means not only detoxing from technology and social media but announcing and making it clear as possible to everyone in your spheres that you will not be available during this time. Without a model from our culture for what it looks like to stop and pause, a sabbath is an opportunity for “intense imagination work and collaboration with Spirit” even if it’s for ten minutes, a weekend, or a month.” Whatever it is, this rest should be unique to us and only us.
Monday, April 03, 2023
Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities
Across more than twenty chapters, Future Horizons explores the past, present, and future of digital humanities research, teaching, and experimentation in Canada. Bringing together work by established and emerging scholars, this collection presents contemporary initiatives in digital humanities alongside a reassessment of the field’s legacy to date and conversations about its future potential. It also offers a historical view of the important, yet largely unknown, digital projects in Canada.
Future Horizons offers deep dives into projects that enlist a diverse range of approaches—from digital games to makerspaces, sound archives to born-digital poetry, visual arts to digital textual analysis—and that work with both historical and contemporary Canadian materials. The essays demonstrate how these diverse approaches challenge disciplinary knowledge by enabling humanities researchers to ask new questions.Introduction
The collection challenges the idea that there is either a single definition of digital humanities or a collective national identity. By looking to digital engagements with race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality—not to mention history, poetry, and nationhood—this volume expands what it means to work at the intersection of digital humanities and humanities in Canada today.
1. Digital Canadas? Transforming the Nation — Sarah Roger and Paul Barrett
Part 1. Situating and Disrupting Digital Scholarship
2. Where Is the Nation in Digital Humanities, Revisited — Roopika Risam
3. Rerouting Digital (Humanities) Scholarship in Canada — Andrea Zeffiro
4. Closed, Open, Stopped: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Possibility of Decolonial DH — David Gaertner
5. “This Game Needs to be Made”: Playable Theories ⇌ Virtual Worlds — Jon Saklfoske
6. Reimagining Representational Codes in Data Visualization: What Contemporary Digital Humanities Might Learn from Visual Arts-Based Disciplines — Julia Polyck-O’Neill
7. Making, Conversation: An Experiment in Public Digital Humanities — Kim Martin and Rashmeet Kaur
Part 2. Digital Poetics
8. Canadian Poetry and the Computational Concordance: Sandra Djwa and the Early History of Canadian Humanities Computing — Sarah Roger, Paul Barrett, and Kiera Obbard
9. Canadian Poetry and the Computer — Sandra Djwa
10. “saga uv th relees uv human spirit from compuewterr funckshuns”: Space Conquest, IBM, and the Anti-digital Anxiety of Early Canadian Digital Poetics (1960–1968) — Gregory Betts
11. From the Digits to the Digital: Bodies in the Machines of Canadian Concrete Poetics — Eric Schmaltz
12. Nations of Touch: The Politics of Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities — Dani Spinosa
13. STOP WORDS — Klara du Plessis
Part 3. Digital Canadian Archives
14. Wages Due Both Then and Now — Pascale Dangoisse, Constance Crompton, and Michelle Schwartz
15. Analog Thrills, Digital Spills: On the Fred Wah Digital Archive version 2.0 — Deanna Fong and Ryan Fitzpatrick
16. Humanizing the Archive: The potential of Hip-Hop archives in the digital humanities — Mark Campbell
17. Sounding Digital Humanities — Katherine McLeod
18. Unsettling Colonial Mapping: Sonic-Spatial Representations of amiskwaciwâskahikan — Kendra Cowley
19. Beyond “Mere Digitization”: Introducing the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project — Graham H. Jensen
20. “A Legacy of Race and Data: Mining the History of Exclusion” — Allan Cho and Sarah Zhang
Saturday, January 28, 2023
Remembering Jim Wong-Chu: Happy 74th Birthday
Today is Jim Wong-Chu’s birthday and he would’ve been 74 years old. It’s been five years since the passing of my friend and I dearly miss his presence and mentorship. Jim was a “writer, photographer, historian, radio producer, community organizer and activist, editor, and literary and cultural engineer,” but to me, most of all, he was a role model for young people finding their way in this world. He was a polymath of ideas and very inspiring and had a moral compass. Jim was born in 1949 in Hong Kong. In 1953, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Canada as a "paper son", a term which referred to the practice of children who immigrated to Canada by using real or falsified identification papers of relatives living in Canada.
Though his formal education was never completed, Jim inspired me that formal education never ends, and learning is lifelong. He wanted to learn more about the publishing business, so he also worked as an associate editor for Douglas and McIntyre and as an associate editor for Arsenal Pulp Press. Jim attended the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) with a focus on photography and design from 1975-1981. He also attended the University of British Columbia for creative writing from 1985-1987, all the while working as a letter carrier at Canada Post. He was a founding member of various community and cultural organizations including:
- Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (ACWW)
- Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society
- the Pender Guy Radio Program, Asia Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR)
- Go for Broke Festival
- B.C. Sinfonetta Society
- Federation of British Columbia Writers
- The Chinese Community Library Association
- B.C. Heritage Trust
- Chinese Cultural Centre in Vancouver
- Chinatown Ghosts
- Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Fiction;
- Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians;
- Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
C.I. certificates -- A Key to Unlocking The Past
There once existed a dizzying array of special identity documents – called C.I. certificates – that were issued by the Canadian Government exclusively to its Chinese residents. These pieces of paper were intended to control, contain, monitor and even intimidate this one community.
If there are family members who were in Canada in 1923, they would have been required to register when the Chinese Exclusion Act passed. The C.I.44 was issued to certify that an individual had registered under Section 18 of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Registration was required for every person of Chinese origin in Canada. The certificate recorded detailed identifying information and bore a photo and related file numbers. Files were kept of foreign-born Chinese in Vancouver, Victoria, and Ottawa.
However, the Chinese Immigration records currently stored at the LAC are somewhat messy. According to my colleague June Chow, who is a highly respected activist and organizer in the community, the C.I9s do not appear to be complete. There are microfilm reels that are scattered, as the records were separated by port (Vancouver or Victoria) and by foreign-born versus native-born Chinese. Some reels are digitized while some are not; some records are indexed and some are not. "It's quite a quagmire."
With the newly released CI.44 record set, the hope is that they can lead to finding other existing record sets. This CI.44 record set documents the mass registration required of all Chinese living in Canada when the 1923 Exclusion amendment passed. I have submitted an ATIP request to LAC to open those records. I'm hopeful that my search for my ancestry can continue.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
In Search of My Genealogical Roots - The Records Remain a Mystery
From the mid-to-late nineteenth century, more than 15,000 labourers from China arrived in Canada to conduct construction work on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Many faced discrimination, such as being paid only paid a third less than their co-workers while given the most dangerous assignments in harsh conditions. As part of the anti-immigration sentiment in British Columbia at the time, the federal parliament passed in 1885, the Chinese Immigration Act, which stipulated that all Chinese entering Canada must first pay a $50-dollar fee, later referred to as a head tax. This was amended in 1887, 1892, and 1901, with the fee increasing to its maximum of $500 in 1903.
My great-grandfather, Choo Hang Wai, great-grandfather, Chow Bing Fai, and many ancestors, were among the more than 97,000 migrants who had to pay a headtax for the entry into Canada. Between 1885 and 1923, the Government of Canada collects about 33 million dollars ($544 million in 2022 dollars), from about 97,000 Chinese headtax payers. The headtax system also had the effect of constraining Chinese immigration; it discouraged Chinese women and children from joining their men, so the Chinese community in Canada became a "bachelor society".
For the past 15 years, this journey to rediscover this lost part of history has been both rewarding and frustrating. My colleague at SFU Library, Sarah Zhang, and I are working on a project that ‘hacks” the historical dataset of the Chinese headtax registers (the records of migrants as they stepped off the ship and onto Canadian soil). Both a professional to personal endeavour, there have been twists and turns to how much the archives that my country is holding onto and how much it wants to release.
During the pandemic, the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) quietly rehauled their website earlier this Fall, to reflect new guidelines for Government of Canada websites. I was perturbed that this happened and worried that everything had been wiped clean. Thank you to my friend and colleague June Chow pointing me in the right direction.
Go to LAC
https://library-archives.canada.ca
- Select English or French
- At mid-page, select Most requested > Collection > "Search the collections"
- Select "Collection Search"
- Select "Advanced Search"
- Select from the Database: "Immigrants from China, 1885 to 1952"
- You can leave Type of record as "All" or Select from:
(a) "General Registers of Chinese Immigration" for records of arrival/entry; or
(b) the various C.I.9 certificate series, based on Vancouver/Victoria issued and/or people born in/outside of Canada
I've been disturbed by this level of difficulty for a simple search. I had a challenging time, but I do this for a living. How can we expect the public to use this tool for finding anything? I really hope that this is a temporary measure by the LAC!
Saturday, November 05, 2022
Practicing Anti-Racism in Information Spaces: Notes From the Field
- Explore the concept of diversity and intersectionality of identities
- Examining how power and privilege shaped libraries
- Understanding microaggressions/subtle acts of exclusion in the workplace