Andrew Walsh is a well-known academic librarian who is the author of numerous publications relating to library instruction. He is the instructor for a Library Juice Academy course offered next month, called “Getting More Active Learning Into Your Teaching.” Andrew agreed to be interviewed here to give people more of an idea of what the course will cover, his background as an instructor, and a little bit about his other interests.

Our booth is number 144 in the exhibits hall.

We’ve got a Facebook Event set up – feel free to add yourself.

Looking forward to seeing you…

The contest is open to librarians, library students, academics, and others.

Acceptable paper topics cover the full range of topics in the field of library and information studies, loosely defined.

Papers submitted may be unpublished, pending publication, or published in the year of the award.

Single and multiple-authored papers will be accepted.

Any type of paper may be entered as long as it is not a report of an empirical study. Examples of accepted forms would be literature review essays, analytical essays, historical papers, and personal essays. The work may include some informal primary research, but may not essentially be the report of a study.

Submitted papers may be part of a larger project.

The minimum length is 4000 words. The maximum length is 15,000 words.

Criteria for judgment:

Clarity of writing
Originality of thought
Sincerity of effort at reaching something true
Soundness of argumentation (where applicable)
Relevance to our time and situation

The award shall consist of $1000 and a certificate suitable for framing.

Entries must be submitted in MS Word format by September 1st. Entries may be submitted to inquiries@libraryjuicepress.com.

The winning paper, and possibly a number of honorable mentions, are announced on November 1st.

Papers will be judged by a committee selected for their accomplishments in the field, and in order to represent a range of perspectives.

Although we are a publisher, submission of a paper for this award in itself does not imply any transfer, licensing, or sharing of your publication rights.

As an academic publisher, we understand our role in the information ecology, and respect the roles of academics and librarians in the same ecological system. To clarify our understanding of our place in that system, we offer the following pledge to the library community:

1. We recognize the free speech rights of librarians, and respect the fact that criticizing a publisher is sometimes part of a librarian’s professional duty. We will not sue librarians for criticizing us.

2. We will attempt to make money by selling books, not by charging authors fees to publish.

3. We will price our titles reasonably, so that individuals as well as institutions can afford to buy them.

4. We will always use acid-free, sustainably-sourced paper.

5. Our books will include bibliographic references and indexes where appropriate.

6. Contributors of chapters in edited volumes will maintain all their rights (the rights we license from them will be non-exclusive).

7. We pledge to balance timeliness, quality, and “timelessness” in our choice of book projects and our processes for bringing them to publication.

8. We pledge to make our full backlist available as DRM-free PDF files to personal and institutional members of Library Juice.

9. We will explore e-book publishing models with a creative approach and an effort to respond to the new logics of changing media, with the interests of scholars and librarians in mind.

Litwin Books is an independent academic publisher of books about media, communication and the cultural record. We are interdisciplinary in scope and intention, and gather together works from a range of disciplines, including media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, information studies, philosophy of technology, archival studies, communications history, history of archives and libraries, and related fields. Our independence from larger institutions gives us the freedom to offer critical perspectives that cut against the grain, as well as occasionally to give a scholar free rein with a work that is outside his or her usual publishing stream.

With our Library Juice Press imprint we follow the same philosophy, publishing books that examine theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective, for an audience of professional librarians and students of library science.

Auslander & Fox is our new imprint for general readers, featuring books characterized by originality, wit, and perspective.

We are accepting book proposals and manuscripts.

Rebecca Blakiston is an Instructional Services Librarian and the Website Product Manager at the University of Arizona Libraries in Tucson, Arizona. She is the organizer of our 6-course certificate program in user centered design for library websites. She agreed to do this interview to give people a better sense of what is involved in this certificate program – what it covers, who would benefit from it, etc.

Import of the Archive: U.S. Colonial Rule of the Philippines and the Making of American Archival History

Author: Cheryl Beredo
Price: $25.00
Published: June 2013
ISBN: 978-1-936117-72-7
Printed on acid-free paper
Published by Litwin Books

This book a part of the Series on Archives, Archivists, and Society, Richard J. Cox, editor.

Import of the Archive examines the role of archives in the United States’ colonization of the Philippines between 1898 and 1916. During this period the archives played a critical part in the United States’ entrenchment of a colonial state, exhibiting the flexibility and authority to enable arguments of the former colonial power’s incompetence and the native population’s incapacity.

Based on extensive research of and in archives in the Philippines and the United States, this book urges readers to consider archival history within the context of America’s imperial history. This book defines the archives broadly, as the accumulation material about a time proclaimed as “historic,” as well as the records of the Bureau of Insular Affairs and the United States’ Philippine Government, and the archives ceded by Spain per the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War.

Taking an historical approach to understanding the political function that archives played in this particular context, this book is intended for classroom use in archival studies curricula. A slim volume, it could be assigned with complementary books or articles on archives in other colonial contexts, critical analyses of libraries and archives, or any number of topics. It will also be of general interest to scholars of archival history and United States-Philippine relations.

Library Juice Press frontlist:

• Jesse Shera, Librarianship, and Information Science, by H. Curtis Wright
• Lenny and Nina are Buried in Books, by Linda Cooper
• Greening Libraries, edited by Monika Antonelli and Mark McCullough
• Libraries and the Enlightenment, by Wayne Bivens-Tatum
• Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, edited by Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria Accardi

Litwin Books frontlist:

• Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century, edited by Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten
• Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era, by Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks
• From Polders to Postmodernism: A History of Archival Theory, by John Ridener
• The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies, by Philippe Breton
• Archival Anxiety and the Vocational Calling, by Richard J. Cox

Library Juice Press backlist:

• Out Behind the Desk: Workplace Issues for LGBTQ Librarians, edited by Tracy Nectoux
• Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights, edited by Julie Biando Edwards and Stephan P. Edwards
• The Demise of the Library School: Personal Reflections on Professional Education in the Modern Corporate University, by Richard J. Cox
• She Was a Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West, edited by Toni Samek, Moyra Lang and K.R. Roberto
• The Great Depression: Its Impact on Forty-Six Large American Public Libraries, by Robert Scott Kramp
• Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship, by André Cossette
• The Politics of Professionalism: A Retro-Progressive Proposal for Librarianship, by Juris Dilevko
• So You Want To Be a Librarian, by Lauren Pressley
• Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book, compiled by Rory Litwin and edited by Martin Wallace
• Information and Liberation: Writings on the Politics of Information and Librarianship, by Shiraz Durrani
• Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian, edited by Alison Lewis
• Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems, by David Bade
• Mrs. Magavero: A History Based on the Career of an Academic Librarian, by Jane Brodsky Fitzpatrick
• Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education, and the Public Good, by Ed D’Angelo
• Alternative Publishers of Books in North America, 6th Edition, compiled by Byron Anderson under the auspices of the Alternatives in Publication Task Force, ALA/SRRT
• Library Daylight: Tracings of Modern Librarianship, 1874-1922, edited by Rory Litwin
• Library Juice Concentrate, edited by Rory Litwin

Litwin Books backlist:

• Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova
• A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace, by Adam Klein
• Rebel Literacy: Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship, by Mark Abendroth
• Forty Years in the Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jewish Anarchist, by Chaim Leib Weinberg
• Library of Walls: The Library of Congress and the Contradictions of Information Society, by Samuel Gerald Collins
• Slow Reading, by John Miedema
• Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, by Richard J. Cox
• Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870, by Lara Jennifer Moore
• Eugène Morel: Pioneer of Public Libraries in France, by Gaëtan Benoît

Martin Wallace is a Science & Engineering Librarian at the University of Maine, Orono, and serves as Maine’s only representative to the Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC), a program administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He is serving his third term as secretary of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association (PTRCA). He is teaching a class for Library Juice Academy next month in patent searching, and he agreed to do an interview to help people gain a sense of what they will learn in the class, as well as what got him to the point of teaching it for us and what he is about as a person.

Cody Hennesy is the E-Learning Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. He has coded a variety of academic library sites and tools and recently developed the front-end for the online resource maintained by Library Juice Press, Alternatives in Print: A Directory of Alternative Publishers and Critical Periodicals. He is going to be teaching a class in Drupal for libraries next month with Library Juice Academy. He agreed to do an interview to give people a clearer idea of what will be covered in the class, as well as a bit about him and his background and interests.

Debra Lucas-Alfieri is the Head of Reference and Interlibrary Loan at D’Youville College in Buffalo, NY, and is teaching a class for Library Juice Academy next month on Marketing the Library in the 21st Century. She agreed to do an interview to give people a better idea about what they stand to learn in the class, her background, and other interests.

Jesse Shera, Librarianship, and Information Science

Jesse Hauk Shera did perhaps more than any other figure in defining library and information science in the mid 20th century. He pioneered the application of information technology in libraries and in the field of documentation, as head of the American Documentation Institute (now ASIST), as a professor at the Graduate Library School in Chicago, and as head of the library school at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. At Western Reserve, Shera founded the Center for Documentation and Communication Research. But despite his efforts in introducing information technology to the field of libraries, Shera was a humanist and a historian who emphasized the human side of librarianship and the sociological nature of the profession, especially in his advancing years. His theory of social epistempology provided a philosophy for librarianship as a professional calling and as a research-oriented discipline, where deep subject knowledge and an understanding of the needs of readers are more important than technological tools.

H. Curtis Wright’s study, originally published in 1988 by Brigham Young University’s School of Information Sciences, is the only book-length biography of Shera that has been written. The focus of Wright’s biography is Shera’s role in defining and negotiating the boundaries of library science and information science, as he sought to make the most intelligent use of technology in libraries without getting lost in the capacities of the astounding tools that were being developed. Wright succeeds in showing how over a long career, Shera developed an intellectual foundation for librarianship that was dependent neither or the new ideas of information science and its technologies nor on traditional methods. This book is a superb introduction to Jesse Shera’s life and career and its meaning. Includes a foreword by Kathryn La Barre and an index by Victoria Jacobs.

This book is available from Amazon or your favorite vendor to libraries.

Here is an interview that Emily Drabinski did with Maria Accardi. Maria has a book coming out this summer with Library Juice Press, in the series that Emily edits….

Maria T. Accardi is Associate Librarian and Coordinator of Instruction at the Indiana University Southeast Library in New Albany, Indiana, a regional campus of Indiana University Bloomington. She holds a BA in English from Northern Kentucky University, an MA in English from the University of Louisville, and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. She served as a co-editor of and contributor to Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (Library Juice Press, 2010), and is the author of the forthcoming Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Library Juice Press, 2013). Prior to entering librarianship, Maria taught first year college composition and tutored in a university writing center, and these experiences inform her current practice as a librarian instructor.

1. Why feminist pedagogy? What brought you to this topic for a book?

I came to this topic in part because I wanted to know more about feminist teaching and learn something new, and also because I wanted to contribute to the scholarship in my profession. I am a feminist who is interested in critical, liberatory teaching methods, so bringing together feminism and teaching seemed like a natural place to start an exploration. Sharon Ladenson began the conversation about feminist pedagogy and library instruction in Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods in 2010, and I wanted to engage with and extend this conversation by providing theoretical frameworks and practical strategies for people interested in feminist library instruction. Also, I really wanted to just write a book to see if I could. Apparently, I can!

2. What should readers expect when they crack the spine of Feminist Pedagogy?

Readers should expect a combination of practitioner’s primer, scholarship, and memoir. I didn’t set out to write a genre-bending book, but as I engaged with the feminist literature, listened to my own voice as a writer, and found nurturing support through you, my editor, I had a real breakthrough and realized that this boundaries-straddling approach was the only way I could write this book. So readers should expect a book that doesn’t neatly fit into the typical categories of literature in our field. Readers should also expect a book that is designed to be participative; there are practical teaching strategies and ideas in the appendices that invite, and, I hope, inspire readers to enact feminist pedagogy in their own practice.

3. What did you learn about your own teaching practice as you wrote the book?

When I wrote about the importance of self-care for the feminist teacher, I realized that I was doling out advice that I needed to take myself. Feminist teaching is hard. It is emotionally and intellectually demanding. I learned that I need to give myself permission to take a break, go easy on myself, to be honest and reflective without beating myself up. This fall, when library instruction season starts up once again, I plan to carve out time to keep a reflective journal about my teaching practices as a method of self-care.

4. When you’ve presented on this work before (ACRL 2013), people have noted the connections between the kind of instruction they’re already engaging and the feminist approaches you discuss in the book. Why do you think it’s important to name some of these practices as explicitly feminist?

I think it’s important to acknowledge these things as feminist because this is how we expose the intersecting societal oppressions that are replicated and reified in the classroom. When we make explicit was is normally tacit, we help equip students to transform themselves and their lives. Feminist pedagogy wants students to become not just critical thinkers but critical actors.

5. What else should readers know about the book?

As I say in my Acknowledgements, I have always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a little girl and wrote a poem to read at my school talent show. Writing this book is truly a dream come true, and it is maybe the bravest thing I’ve ever done. This book represents me intellectually and emotionally and it is scary to release it into the world for people to read. I just hope that people will find the book to be engaging, useful, interesting, and, dare I say it? Inspirational. I hope that it is the beginning of many exciting conversations about feminist library instruction and while I’m simultaneously terrified, I can’t wait to see what happens once people read it.