Academic librarians and archivists from the US and UK provide 16 chapters on the role of librarians in fostering reflective dialogue during a time of political polarization. They offer case studies, essays, and authoethnographies on the limits and possibilities of libraries as dialogic spaces and librarians as catalysts and participants in these spaces, first addressing the use of intergroup dialogue, dialogue-centered workshops for library workers, the complexities of libraries as dialogic spaces in the context of the 2017 Charlottesville riot and aftermath, and expressing gender identity and sexual orientation in library workplaces. They then discus the difficulties of promoting and engaging thoughtfully in dialogue in environments that are influenced by polarization, distrust, and extreme skepticism of information sources, with discussion of information literacy in the post-truth era, a syllabus for informed citizens, environmental issue advocacy in libraries, critical information literacy and critical media literacy, and the QAnon Storm conspiracy; the role of special collections and archives, including the use of special collections in information literacy; and the use of dialogue in the information literacy classroom, including teaching information and scientific literacy, the use of humorous political satire videos to help students engage with social issues, how information literacy education can counteract the negative effects of political rhetoric and discourse, encouraging students to develop critical consciousness, and the role of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Andrea Patricia Baer is the History and Political Sciences Librarian at Rowan University. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Washington and a master's in information sciences from the University of Tennessee. Andrea's work in libraries and education is informed by her prior teaching experience in writing and literature and by her interests in writing studies, critical pedagogy, and reflective practice. She is the author of
Information Literacy and Writing Studies in Conversation (2016).
<Robert Schroeder is Professor Emeritus at Portland State University, where he was a faculty member/librarian and AAUP union member. He was the liaison to the School of Education, the Urban Honors College, the University Studies (general education classes) in local high schools, and the McNair Scholar and Summer Bridge programs. His recent research interests include critical librarianship, Indigenous and autoethnographic research methods, and the ways (his) social class and (his) identity interact with (his experience of) the academy. Schroeder is coeditor of ACRL's The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship (2017).
Ellysa Stern Cahoy is an education librarian and Assistant Director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book in the Penn State University Libraries at University Park. A former children s librarian and school library media specialist, Ms. Cahoy has published research and presented on information literacy, evidence-based librarianship, affective learning, and personal archiving. In 2014, she was awarded a $440,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund the further exploration of faculty's personal scholarly workflow practices and needs (building upon the work of a 2012 grant). Her article (coauthored with Smiljana Antonijevic), Personal Library Curation: An Ethnographic Study of Scholars Information Practices, received the 2014 Best Article Award from the journal portal: Libraries and the Academy. Ms. Cahoy is a past chair of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Instruction Section and in 2013 received the Instruction Section's Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award.
