Lisa A. Raney

Things have been a little busy since arriving back in town from ALA's Midwinter Meeting in January: almost as soon as I set foot back in town, most of my free time was devoted to an interview process with an out-of-state library in addition to extra hours I had picked up in my library's Outreach Department and later, my own department, as well as providing weekly tutoring at Chase Elementary. This spring and summer has been largely devoted to volunteering within my community and learning about entrepreneurship and starting a small business. I am preparing to offer freelance information services when I return from the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in July.

To expand a little on the above...

The interview process that I referred to above culminated with me being flown to the university for an on-site interview. It was very exciting, and a great experience during which I met some very friendly people. However, it was not meant to be, and so I remain in Cincinnati working in my part-time position in the Genealogy and Local History Department.

I primarily put together deposit collections in the Outreach Department -- some of the larger ones were 300 and 190 book deposit collections for correctional facilities, and there were also some smaller teacher collections and collections for convents.

In my own department, we spent the spring adding more points-of-interest to our Panorama, and currently have a very fun exhibit in our Rare Books and Special Collections room of prints displaying new "American Style" from the turn of the century, especially many produced by Currier and Ives. I proofed many of the new Points of Interest and the labels for the exhibit, spent a great deal of time helping to fine-tune our Veteran's History Project by fact-checking and verifying information for close to 400 vets, putting together countless binds and tracking down missing periodical issues, and have been busy checking in the hundreds of books we've received to the department in the past few weeks!

More to come about my adventures in community work later!

Above: Dawn in Dallas

I started writing a blog detailing my time in Dallas for ALA's Midwinter conference, but at this point I've been back in Cincinnati for almost a week, so I'll be more succint:

The next time I go to conference, I will be staying longer. My time in Dallas ended up being shorter than planned due to a number of flight rebookings and delays.

Regardless, it was a wonderful first conference experience. I met many fabulous librarians in the span of a day and a half, caught up with my colleague/friend/roommate Liz, took advantage of ALA's Job Placement Center, and even did some brief sightseeing of Dallas' Arts District.

My favorite parts were the Occupy Wall Street Peoples' Library lecture series and meetings with the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) and the Progressive Librarian's Guild (PLG). Those took up a good portion of Saturday. On Saturday evening, I traveled with some of the OWS Librarians and some members of the PLG to the YALSA happy hour and then had a delicious dinner at with the PLG group.

What stuck with me was how natural it all felt, being surrounded by librarians whose opinions and actions on librarianship, social justice, and humanity are similar to my own. It gives me encouragement to continue being the sort of librarian that I want to be as I begin my professional career and to put into place a mode of critical librarianship. This is not to say that I am not surrounded by supportive people at my current position, because I am, but interacting with a larger network of librarians throughout North America through debates and exchanging ideas puts into perspective the bigger picture of what every single librarian is doing.

And so it follows that our actions together is huge. It is not always easy, especially in the example of the OWS Librarians at Zuccotti Park, but it is a wonderful thing. And is a grand time to be a librarian.

photo credit: me

In just a few weeks, I will be Dallas-bound. I'm heading to the American Library Assocation's Midwinter Conference. It will be both my first conference and first trip to Texas. (I am well-prepared with Radical Reference's Alternative Guide to Dallas.) I'm very excited for the opportunity and will be rooming with a friend from library school who I haven't seen in a year and a half. She graduated a semester before me and is now an electronic resources librarian at a university in Florida.

I'm excited for the opportunity to meet librarians from across the country (and world!) and to hear what's going on in the world of libraries outside of my branch. I keep up via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and  journals, but I anticipate great discussions in Dallas and hope to make some new connections as well.

I also plan to attend some events held by my roundtables (SRRT and NMRT) and want to become more involved, especially with SRRT. There is going to be an event about the People's Library at Occupy Wall Street, which I plan to attend. Despite a hectic schedule this past year, I have been keeping up with the Occupy movement and would love to hear more about the grassroots organizing and involvement of librarians with the People's Library.