Browsing by Author "Leebaw, Danya"

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    Academic Librarians and Academic Freedom Survey Data
    (2021-08-14) Leebaw, Danya; Logsdon, Alexis; leeba005@umn.edu; Leebaw, Danya; University of Minnesota Libraries
    The data is a spreadsheet downloaded from survey responses in Qualtrics. The authors surveyed academic librarians about their attitudes toward and experiences with academic freedom in their workplaces. Of the nearly 750 people who began the survey, just under 600 qualified for the survey as current academic library employees who gave their consent to the survey. The authors have only included the survey data for this subset of respondents. Also included is a set of comments made in an optional free-text field at the end of the survey. They are presented separate from their authors’ survey responses to ensure anonymity.
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    The Benefits and Drawbacks of Moving into Management at Mid-career
    (ACRL, 2023) Leebaw, Danya; Tomlinson, Carissa
    For some of us, climbing the career ladder feels like a natural progression, something we are supposed to do. We find ourselves consciously or unconsciously working to position ourselves for the next leadership opportunity or job without necessarily realizing what the next role entails. Moving up the ladder often involves choices that do not get a lot of explicit attention and for which there are few opportunities to discuss, and a lack of clear models or step-by-step paths. What does it mean to formally lead in a library, and how does this vary by library type and size? What do you give up and what do you gain? What are the benefits and what are the drawbacks? This chapter will offer responses to these questions by reflecting on the authors’ experiences moving up the career ladder within academic libraries, taking on new positions, and eventually moving to much larger libraries in new leadership roles. We will discuss our choices and their impacts on us as individuals, as well as our organizations. We will reflect on our specific experiences, while acknowledging what makes these distinct and/or privileged. Our goals in this chapter are to highlight a potential path for early career librarians who have ambitions for leadership later in their career, while also surfacing issues to consider when deciding if and how to move into leadership roles.
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    Beyond the Books: Libraries Pivot to Role as Hub in the Innovation Ecosystem
    (Deshpande Symposium, 2020-07) Tomlinson, Carissa; Leebaw, Danya; Burhanna, Kenneth; Messing, Julie; Langston, William
    The goal of this session is to facilitate a dialogue on how campus libraries are evolving as the nexus of entrepreneurship. As many universities prioritize building and growing an innovation ecosystem, libraries are uniquely positioned as an ideal partner. Not only are libraries historically a central and popular gathering space on their campuses, they also offer deep expertise in information and technology, substantial resources, and experience connecting people across silos. This joint panel of library and entrepreneurship leaders from three different universities will introduce examples of how the library fits into the innovation ecosystem at their institutions
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    The Cost of Speaking Out: Do Librarians Truly Experience Academic Freedom?
    (2019) Leebaw, Danya; Logsdon, Alexis
    Academic librarians might believe they are protected by academic freedom policies, but how extensive are their protections and what is their lived experience when it comes to freedom to speak and act in the workplace or in public? In the United States, the 2016 election and the rise of the Far Right and state oppression of marginalized communities brought urgency to these questions. Many librarians feel compelled to speak and act against oppression in and outside of the library. Academic freedom protection for librarians is far from settled practice, and is complicated by the profession’s focus on the broader concept of intellectual freedom for library users. The authors are interested in studying the experiences and perceptions of academic freedom among academic librarians, a topic which has not been widely studied. We are also interested in studying the relationship of social identity and financial status to academic freedom for library staff. Doing so raises interesting questions about academic freedom more broadly, such as the extent to which academic freedom policies matter when library staff stay silent out of fear of negative repercussions. In order to study these questions, we developed and issued a survey to academic librarians in the Fall of 2018. We hypothesized that most academic librarians would value academic freedom but not believe they are completely protected by academic freedom policies. We also hypothesized that librarians who belong to socially marginalized groups and/or are economically insecure would experience fewer freedoms in the workplace. In this paper, we provide a preview of our overall findings and also a more detailed analysis of the relationship of race and financial security to freedom of expression and experiences of infringement. Our initial findings support our hypotheses: academic freedom is very important to a sizeable majority of academic librarians. However, the degree to which they experience or perceive their own freedoms varies by scenario and by their racial identity and financial situation. Indeed, we find that non-white librarians and financially precarious librarians feel less free and experience more infringements than their white and financially secure counterparts.
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    "CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices" as it appeared in the journal In The Library With The Lead Pipe
    (In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 2011-12-11) Jastram, Iris; Leebaw, Danya; Tompkins, Heather
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    "Is Corporate a Bad Word?": The Case for Business Information in Liberal Arts Libraries
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018-04) Leebaw, Danya
    Literature on business information literacy primarily focuses on business students. This paper instead explores business information literacy for students in liberal arts colleges: aside from career preparation, are there reasons to teach them to critically grapple with business information? This paper brings together survey findings, concepts from critical information theory, and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education developed by the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries to bear on this question. It argues that business information is a powerful genre for teaching core concepts central to both information literacy and liberal arts: critical inquiry, authority, access, incentives, rhetorical practices, and more.
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    Mapping Prejudice: The Map Library as a Hub for Community Co-Creation and Social Change
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-06-14) Mattke, Ryan; Delegard, Kirsten; Leebaw, Danya
    The John R. Borchert Map Library was the ideal incubator for an experiment that has changed how a wide range of people are thinking about structural racism and the history of race in American urban environments. Mapping Prejudice used a cartographic visualization of racial covenants as the intellectual nexus of a project that transcended disciplinary boundaries and invited community members into cutting-edge research work. The Map Library provided the physical space, resources, and geospatial expertise necessary for community-driven mapping work. It also served as an intersectional hub necessary for this transformative research initiative, illustrating the synergies between map librarianship and other disciplines. The work depended on the unique contributions of the map librarian: project management; experience networking with researchers, campus departments, and community groups; and knowledge of best practices surrounding data management, curation, and reuse. This article explains how Mapping Prejudice changed academic scholarship and public understandings by engaging volunteers in meaningful research. It concludes by providing a description of future directions for this project and calls on librarians to lead more work of this kind. The example of Mapping Prejudice suggests ways that map librarians can be leading new modes of inclusive, equitable and community-responsive research.
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    Participatory and Ethical Strategic Planning: What Academic Libraries Can Learn from Critical Management Studies
    (Library Trends, 2019) Leebaw, Danya
    This paper introduces a subfield of management studies, “critical management studies” (CMS), in order to rethink mainstream management practices in academic libraries, with strategic planning as an illustrative example. Mainstream management models from the corporate sector prioritize efficiency, productivity, and numerical measures for assessing impact. Academic libraries have generally borrowed uncritically from this mainstream management praxis, but how well does this serve our needs, especially when it comes to the most complex issues we face? CMS draws on critical theory to interrogate the methods and goals of mainstream management, with an emphasis on denaturalizing “taken for granted” practices and prioritizing ethics and worker equity. After providing a brief overview of the history and adoption of mainstream management in academic libraries, this paper focuses on strategic planning as an illustrative exploration of CMS principles in an academic library context. Strategic planning is a common managerial practice that has been embraced by academic libraries and generally modeled after mainstream approaches. Yet, CMS scholars contend that traditional strategic planning reproduces workplace inequities and universalizes managerial interests. In this article, I employ ideas from CMS to rethink library strategic planning by opening participation, reframing problems, and embracing our ethical agency.
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    Power and Status (and Lack Thereof) in Academe: Academic Freedom and Academic Librarians
    (In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 2020-09-16) Leebaw, Danya; Logsdon, Alexis
    Academic librarians do not experience full academic freedom protections, despite the fact that they are expected to exercise independent judgment, be civically engaged, and practice applied scholarship. Academic freedom for academic librarians is not widely studied or well understood. To learn more, we conducted a survey which received over 600 responses from academic librarians on a variety of academic freedom measures. In this article, we focus specifically on faculty status for librarians and the ways this intersects with academic freedom perceptions and experiences. Even though all librarians who answered our survey share similar experiences when it comes to infringements on their freedom, faculty librarians are more likely to feel they are protected in their free expression. We find it useful to situate librarians within a growing cohort of “third space” academic professionals who perform similar duties to traditional faculty but lack tenure and its associated academic freedom protections. We argue that more attention needs to be paid in the library profession to academic freedom for librarians, and that solidarity with other non-traditional faculty on campus is a potential avenue for allyship and advocacy.
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    University of Minnesota Libraries Response to Request for Information: "Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data, and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research" (2020)
    (2020-04) University Libraries; Farrell, Shannon; Langham-Putrow, Allison; Kubas, Alicia; Bakker, Caitlin; Molls, Emma; Riegelman, Amy; Leebaw, Danya; Johnston, Lisa