People

Sometimes taking the long path fits the work.

In May 2022, Elizabeth Szkirpan was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her advocacy work promoting technical services professionals within libraries. LJ recently reached out to Szkirpan, director of bibliographic services and federal depository coordinator for the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, to learn more about why this work is important and needs more institutional support.

Poet, memoirist, attorney, and MacArthur Fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts recently partnered with artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar on Redaction (Norton), an innovative collection of art and poetry confronting the abuses of the criminal justice system, drawing on his experience of incarceration. Retired researcher/librarian Eldon Ray James spoke with Betts about the collaboration and where politics and poetry meet and about Betts’s Freedom Reads project, through which he plans to install Freedom Library book collections in every residential prison unit in the United States.

This will be my last editorial for LJ. For me, this news is bittersweet; I’m excited to begin a new role elsewhere in libraryland, as managing editor of CQ Researcher at SAGE Publishing. But I will miss my colleagues, the opportunities I have had here to learn from and collaborate with librarians across the country, and my chance to bend your ear every month.

Virginia Cononie, assistant librarian/coordinator of reference and research at the University of South Carolina Upstate Spartanburg Library, was named one of Library Journal’s 2022 Movers & Shakers for her library advocacy work. LJ recently reached out to Cononie to learn more about her Share Your Story campaign, a collection of success stories from libraries in South Carolina that were compiled into a book and sent to South Carolina lawmakers.

Library advocates have become increasingly sophisticated about collecting the emotional outcome stories that bring to life how libraries change lives. We may, sadly, need to start applying that savvy to collecting the outcomes of what happens when libraries are lost or gutted, whether due to pervasive underfunding, as in the UK, or ideologically driven campaigns against books, displays, and programs that represent LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC experiences, as is being attempted in the U.S.

Barbara Alvarez is a PhD student in Information Science at the University of Wisconsin (UW)–Madison and adjunct faculty at multiple universities. Her work using information science to study the pandemic’s effect on abortion services in Wisconsin won her a 2022 Movers & Shakers Award. Library Journal recently reached out to learn more about her other work in this area.

At LJ’s recent Design Institute in Missoula, MT, the term places of refuge came up several times. It was new to me, but the meaning was clear from the context: individual-scale spots within the larger, communal library. But the refuge the library can offer is inherently temporary. For libraries to help make their whole communities places of refuge, libraries need to facilitate long-term planning for resilience to disasters that are more frequent and severe—plus, support government policy changes to slow and perhaps reverse that progression.

Elisandro Cabada has worn many hats during his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Assistant professor for the university library, interim head of the Mathematics Library, and 3-D printing project coordinator, among others. His commitment to developing and using technology for library service and outreach won him a 2022 Movers & Shakers award. Library Journal recently reached out to learn more about his innovative work.