Callan Bignoli, library director at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA, was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in 2021 for her work advocating for the health and safety of library workers during the pandemic. Much has changed since the early days of COVID’s arrival and spread, including the development of vaccines and boosters, but the need to speak up for library workers remains. LJ recently spoke with Bignoli to learn what’s changed—and what hasn’t—since then.

LJ: What has been the longer-term result of the work you did in 2020, including the #ProtectLibraryWorkers campaign and the online LIBREV Slack community?

Callan Bignoli: I definitely don’t want any kind of solo credit for anything that I did, because every single action that I took part in was absolutely a collective effort. All the people who did do advocacy, either for themselves or other library workers within the field, really pushed a conversation about the condition of library labor and how librarians are treated in the workplace. There had been a long overdue conversation around basically trying to treat people within our own field with respect, dignity, and humaneness that I think had been curiously absent for a long time, and setting healthy boundaries around things like mission and scope creep for all the various things that library workers are expected to do. I remember, early in my career, a colleague of mine mentioning that they always thought it was significant that we have an American Library Association [ALA], but not an American Librarians Association.

What has changed in the field since those 2020–21 advocacy efforts?

Just about every library worker I communicate with has this feeling they’re doing the jobs of two-plus people. The conversation has shifted away from the urgency around, “We have to get people out of these buildings; they can't be expected to be open when the rest of the world isn’t; they can’t be expected to be essential services selectively when governments want them.” The urgency has dropped because the overall imminent danger in general has dropped, at least for able-bodied people who don't have comorbidities, into more of what do we do in the aftermath of slashed budgets? It looks like things are going to get worse, too. We’re certainly in an economic downturn. I work for engineers, so when the tech sector starts to lay off massive numbers of people at companies like Facebook and Google, it’s time to start being worried about the rest of the economy.

Are you currently involved in any work in that area?

Because of my own personal limitations, I had to back away from that wider-spread advocacy that I had been trying to do during 2020. I found quickly that kind of sustained energy is impossible for any one person to muster up. To be perfectly honest, it did burn me out. It was an enormous amount of emotional labor. For a while there, in the thick of it, dozens of people were reaching out to me, looking for advice, looking for a name to amplify their stories on Twitter, things like that. I got to a point where I couldn’t be that person anymore.

There were some efforts among a bunch of vocal advocates to try to create a group that would continue the work together on these issues. I found it incredibly hard to see that come to fruition because one of the reasons why there’s a very uneven landscape of unionization in libraries comes from how incredibly overworked and overburdened all individuals in the field are. They can’t muster up that extra 10 percent or 20 percent to do that important work, which is unfortunate. People are suffering in a different way now. Our personal boundaries have been eroded down to nothing. There are so many people in service-oriented fields, like [library workers] or educators, who are grinding themselves into the ground.

At least we have people like [ALA President-Elect] Emily Drabinski in positions where they can amplify the importance of workplace solidarity, treating workers humanely, and protecting our colleagues. That’s obviously great. But I’m not sure how that’s filtering down at a more granular level. I teach at a library school program and see a lot of students who are working in libraries either full-time or part-time in addition to going to school part-time.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, or is this something that’s going to keep getting worse before it gets better?

That's a great question. The more successful advocacy that that I see out there, and this has been true for the last few years, is more localized. In the case of some of the issues we saw during the pandemic, what I observed is that patrons were really willing to come out and fight for the library. And we’ve seen a fair number of libraries unionizing in the last couple of years. That is all enormously encouraging. But I have always held that we need an American Librarians Association. I think part of Emily’s plan is to revitalize [ALA] a bit. Having people in positions where they can have influence on the profession, who have a worker-oriented or labor-oriented perspective, is going to help. But it’s tough, because I feel like there are so many layers.

One of the most shocking things to me at the beginning of the pandemic was how many library workers felt they had to go to work—they had to be there for their community, they had to risk life and limb. That feels like a deeply internalized struggle that probably comes from [librarianship] being a feminized occupation, and from the type of people who are drawn into it because of the service element. The only thing that can be done in the short term is continuing to talk about it, honestly. And getting people in positions of power who can use that power in a distributive way, not just hoarding it for themselves and grandstanding, but doing it in a way that gives something back to the rest of us. That seems like the way forward to me.