Resume

Education

Experience

Contact Info

eleighramirez@gmail.com

Reflective Essay

My time at Dominican can be summarized in three aspects: teaching me skills and providing me with experiences that bolster my information interests, helping me discern when to break the rules in order to stay true to my personal and professional ethics, and giving me the resources to perform fulfilling independent research.

Same Me, New Features

My experience in the SOIS program hasn’t really changed my perspective on libraries or my dream pathway within them. I started out wanting to be a radical librarian who utilized library space and resources to address the material and spiritual needs of the community, and I’m still yearning and working towards that. What the program did is provide me with skills that support my interests. For many years, cataloging my personal library has been a hobby, an effort whose biggest outcome was entertaining me. But now, thanks to classes like Organization of Knowledge and Metadata for Digital Collections, I could expand my personal catalog using Dublin Core modifiers and coding it in XML. When I was a young adult, I was interested in family history and bumbled around making family trees based on sketchy evidence. Now, thanks to my classes on Genealogy Collections and Services and Oral History, I have the theoretical and technical skills to gather and evaluate different forms of evidence that will make family and community history more accurate and reliable. My dreams are still strong and present, and now they have credentials behind them, thanks to my time at Dominican.

I also have to thank my experiences in the program for connecting me to people and places. Through interviewing and observational assignments, I’ve met new librarians and strengthened connections with those I already knew; two interviews with former coworkers of mine are included in my portfolio, because I found their perspectives so valuable as I progressed in school and at work. I’ve been encouraged to join professional groups and have been able to find smaller ones that directly speak to my values, such as the Abolitionist Library Association and the Progressive Librarians Guild. Even my mere association with Dominican has helped me connect with the alumni I meet and work with in the Chicago Public Library system. As far as places, the program has helped me better understand the needs of my communities. For the first year of my program, I lived in Utah, and my assignments reflect that, diving into the unique religious and cultural issues of the area. When I moved to Chicago, my schoolwork also shifted, and I was able to learn about my new home through my assignments. I’m grateful for how my program allowed me to explore my own contexts and encouraged me to grow.

Bending and Breaking the Rules

One avenue of growth that the program encouraged in me is an intentionality in breaking the status quo of the field. This is not an aberration for the sake of quirk or an empty challenge. When I go against the grain, it is because I see a better possible future for libraries and their communities, which the program taught me to seek out. For example, my final paper for the Leadership, Marketing, and Strategic Communication class was an exploration of care work as it manifests in library services. I took the opportunity to complete the assignment, where we had to read a book on leadership and then write a paper on one of the leadership aspects inside, to push against the norms. By reading a book about care work, mainly in the fields of health and nursing, I was able to see the issues of care at play within public libraries. With this lens in mind, I was able to ask questions of a librarian about how she saw her work as a supervisor as both providing care work and needing it in return. I was able to push beyond the typical notions of leadership in order to write a paper that was more meaningful for me while still meeting the expectations of the assignment.

To throw an extra bit of sass into the mix and question the norms of the SOIS Learning Goals, I included it in my portfolio as an example of Learning Outcome 2a. While it might make more sense as an example of 5c, especially considering the context of the class, I purposefully included it as an example of describing definitions and concepts. Of course, it’s supposed to be definitions and concepts of information. I could have displayed what I learned in 702 about the various types of questions patrons bring, or in 307 about how oral histories have been wrongly devalued as sources of historical information, or in 882 about the differences between linked data and traditional metadata, or in any other class I’ve taken the past three years. Thanks to my work in this program, I can indeed “describe various definitions and concepts of information.” This program has also helped me gain the knowledge and skills I need to step outside of our narrow frameworks of what makes up information and what matters to the program. If care work for patrons and workers is a vital, overlooked aspect of a healthy library, then it is a vital, overlooked aspect of information, and defining it as such helps to expand the vision of what the profession is and can be.

The status quo keeps library workers trapped in systems that exploit them, and when I push back, I do it for my fellow workers, as well as myself. This is why my paper on care work is important to me. This is why I included a template for a letter protesting the city council’s ban on Pride displays in the children’s department at the library I used to work at. My former coworkers were afraid to speak out and asked for my support in calling attention to the issue. The systems in place threaten library workers into staying in positions that don’t pay enough, that don’t align with their values, where they deal with everything from customer service nightmare to organized attacks by government officials and hate groups and receive no support or assistance from their employers. I obviously can’t change all of this, but a huge part of my schoolwork and my ethos going forward is questioning and rebelling against such environments.

This sense of rebellion was also cultivated in me through the independent research I performed during the program, a project that I will discuss further in this essay. As I interviewed librarians who serve incarcerated patrons, I found time and time again the ways that their ethics as abolitionists overrode the traditional ethics of librarianship. The most indicative example came from an academic librarian who regularly flouts copyright in order to send dissertations to people trying to learn and research while in prison. She said she never feels bad about printing hundreds of pages of scholarship to provide access to people who literally have no other way of accessing this information. Her story, and others like it, have strengthened my resolve to keep my sights on the people and issues that most need our advocacy and to reevaluate ethics that get in the way of that work.

Even the way I went about constructing this portfolio speaks to my desire to do things differently, in service of lifting up the philosophies I value as a library worker. Rather than using a mainstream service and making things look “professional,” I leaned into the DIY spirit, using a service called Zonelets that helps you code blogs in HTML. Zonelets was created specifically to push back against the corporatization of social media and website creation, allowing users to express themselves creatively and learn basic coding skills. It’s been somewhat difficult and frustrating to use, with slow servers dragging out the process and a forgotten comma sending me into a panicked frenzy trying to solve why the entire website went blank. However, this raises the perennial question that was so often asked in my classes: should we give ourselves over to companies that make information more readily available? The fact that my portfolio might take a few tries to load properly and resembles my middle school blog from 2007 is intentional. It is not meant to display a lack of professionalism; rather, it is to highlight open access software, a trial and error approach to education, and the democratized creation of information, all of which I value more highly as part of my professional identity.

The Ultimate Project

The artifact I am most proud of is the research presentation, because it represents multiple avenues of growth and engagement. It all started when I took Dr. Tony Dunbar’s Critical Race Information Theory class. Our class consistently produced rigorous and enriching dialogue, and we kept it going past the end of the semester through the summer. As part of our Summer Writing Institute, we each worked on research papers with the ultimate goal of publishing them in peer-reviewed journals. For my paper, I interviewed library workers and volunteers for information organizations that a) serve incarcerated patrons and b) identify as abolitionists. I’ve done interviews before, many for classes at Dominican, but none were as powerful or inspiring as these. I was able to take that data, along with research on reading and censorship in prisons, and work on the most in-depth paper of my academic career. Unfortunately, I did not finish it during the Summer Writing Institute, as I had planned; in fact, it is still not finished, though I crawl ever closer any chance I can. This has been a lesson all its own about how I manage my workload and what kinds of support I need to accomplish difficult projects, important lessons for my future career.

I would have loved to be able to share my completed paper, published in a journal, as part of my portfolio, but the presentation is a good stand-in for that work. I was able to share my original data, i.e. the interviews and my analysis of their contents, during an online event hosted by the Metropolitan New York Library Council and the Prison Library Support Network. Over sixty people were in attendance, asking me thoughtful questions about my presentation and expressing excitement about my future article. Participating in this event gave me a chance to be seen and heard by members of the field and to assert my identity as a librarian interested in qualitative research and radical politics.

The presentation, and the entire process surrounding it, arguably fits within all five Learning Goals. First, my professional identity and philosophy were certainly shaped and solidified as I focused this overlooked subfield within librarianship and further understood the ethical obligation we have to serve incarcerated patrons. Second, I better understood the nature and relevance of information in our society, because I researched the people with the most tenuous and restricted access to information in this country. Third, I created information by capturing people’s lived experiences, capturing and converting it into data, and sharing that data through my presentation and someday through my paper. Fourth, I synthesized theory and practice by researching and writing with the end goal of educating readers and ultimately calling them to action, with the paper almost acting as a how-to guide to help library students and workers get involved. Finally, I could not have done any of this work without collaborating with Dr. Dunbar, the other students in the Summer Writing Institute, the Abolitionist Library Association, the people I interviewed, and the organizations and individuals that were part of the event I presented at. Through their help and support, I’ve been able to strengthen my efforts to advocate for abolitionist librarianship and the information needs of incarcerated patrons. For all these reasons and more, I am deeply proud of my still in-progress project.

In Conclusion...

This portfolio cannot contain all the thought, time, and labor I have put into my degree. However, it can give you a sense of the things that are important to me now and in my future career: connecting with the community, advocating for workers, and serving the most marginalized among us. Though my time in the program is ending, my becoming the librarian I want to be is an ongoing process, and I can thank my education for giving me a monumental boost on that journey.