Meet the new IACRL Vice-President/President-Elect: Joshua Newport
September 26, 2024
-
Interviewed by Sue Franzen, Illinois State University
Q: Congratulations on your election! What would you like other IACRL members to know about you?
A: Thank you! Hmmm… what do I want other ACRL members to know? I got my BA in Theater from Illinois Wesleyan University and didn’t know what to do with that, so I turned around and became an enlisted Air Force computer programmer. I’m a geeky renaissance person – I enjoy many aspects of geek culture like Star Trek, Marvel, and games – video games, tabletop RPG games, card games, board games, all kinds. This has led to a professional interest in games as well. At Illinois State University I work with our new game collection, and I serve in the Games and Gaming Round Table of ALA to help promote games in libraries. I’m really interested in using games as a pedagogical tool as well. I love being a librarian because it allows me to really indulge my bardic ADHD tendencies to be a jack of all trades, master of none in a particularly relevant and useful way.
Q: What do you think is the most important thing for you to accomplish in your new position?
A: I think the most important thing for me to accomplish in my new leadership role in IACRL is to help support Illinois academic librarians. We’re all working and pushing so hard to accomplish the many and varied demands in our personal and professional lives and we all need support to help us get through it all. I think that support is one of the many valuable things that the IACRL organization provides, and it is particularly helpful because it is an organization made up of people who know and feel many of the same pressures themselves. I hope to draw on my memories of the way people drew together and supported one another as a team when I was in the Air Force to help us support one another and strengthen our IACRL community. Like the song from Into the Woods says, “No one is alone”!
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing libraries today?
A: I think the biggest challenge facing libraries today is fear. That fear might be about patrons being able to access certain materials, people who are different than us, or broader societal changes going on technologically with large language models. The scariest things are those which are unknown, or their outcomes are unknown, that allow our fears to conjure terrible possibilities in our imaginations. Such imagined results are often worst-case scenarios and, in trying to avoid them, we allow fear to lead us into even worse results than those we sought to avoid. Fear can make us feel separated and alone, divided from one another, eating away at our sense of community.
Fear is not an inherently bad thing though, it’s a part of human’s emotional suite for good reasons. It’s useful for letting us know where we need to be cautious and step carefully. The problem is when we let fear be in control and tell us where to go and what to do rather than taking the emotional input onboard and balancing it with other factors – like knowledge, empathy, and curiosity – before deciding on how best to proceed into the future, neither recklessly nor with cowardice. As librarians, though, we are well positioned to counter fear with knowledge and critical thinking to help work towards the best future possible.
Q: What do you think is the biggest barrier to pushing for more equity and diversity in libraries today?
A: I think the biggest barrier to pushing for more equity and diversity in libraries today are the “filters” structurally built into the basic structures of government, educational institutions, and pervasively throughout society that act to sift the opportunities that exist towards people who look like me – white, older, cis (appearing), men and away from everyone else. I have benefitted from these biases, but I’m trying to make sure that I counteract those biases so I can work in a workplace that really embraces and exemplifies the Vulcan (from Star Trek) philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Our libraries, and our societies at large, will be much stronger and more resilient if we embrace the strengths from all the different people that make up our society instead of preferentially valuing the contributions of some. The most insidious thing about this is that the bias is so pervasive and so assumed that unrooting it requires us to rewrite social structures from the ground up and become better practiced at constantly questioning our thoughts and assumptions on their validity.
Q: What does your typical day look like in your current position?
A: As a subject librarian to six different areas in the sciences my typical day calls to mind the adage, “Change is the only constant.” Whether engaging with my faculty in meetings, emails, phone calls, or in visiting them in their offices across campus, forming and maintaining professional relationships is a key part in making sure I can help them with any needs they may have and make sure that they are my allies in helping students discover the kinds of help they can find in the library. Building relationships with faculty, staff, and students also helps me maximize my ability to serve them with instruction, consultations, and obtaining the key resources that they need. Beyond that I am working on publications in data services and games in libraries and serving the profession and the University. Between all these activities filling my schedule, every day is a unique blend of fun interactions or quiet solitude poring over spreadsheets or text documents, so life is never boring!
Q: Which three titles that have earned a space on your personal or professional bookshelf?
A: The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is certainly one of the books that has earned a place on my professional bookshelf. Most of the faculty in most of my disciplines have their students using APA format and so I’m always going make to the source to make sure that I’m guiding the students well. Towards the end of each semester I particularly get to help the students in the School of Information Technology cite sources that I don’t often deal with such as reddit posts, GitHub repositories, and posts on forums for a group research project about a programming language with which they were not previous familiar, so it’s really fun to stretch myself practicing citing things other than the usual books and articles.
Another book that has been an interesting addition to my professional bookshelf is All the Classroom's a Stage: Applying Theater Principles to Teaching Techniques by Michael Flanagan and Rose Burnett Bonczek. I had the pleasure of reviewing this for Choice Reviews when it came out in 2020 and I found it particularly interesting. I remember engaging in many of the activities discussed in this book as a theater student. As an instructor who all too often gets trapped in the habit of ‘lecture model’ instruction, this is a great inspiration to me to try to shake up my instruction and make it more effective by rediscovering things that I’d learned as a theater student but forgot in the intervening years. I am still working to break out of my bad habits, but this book is a useful tool helping me to work towards eventually being successful.
On my personal bookshelf one of my most frequently used books at present is the 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook. Most of the tabletop roleplaying game campaigns I participate in on my own time currently use this edition of Dungeons and Dragons, so it is one to which I am constantly referring. I am quite looking forward to getting, soon, my copy of the 2024 revision to the 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook and beginning to explore the revisions in depth! Very exciting!
Q: If you received a surprise day off, how would you spend it?
A: I like to joke that, paraphrasing an old commercial, “I’m not an extrovert, but I play one in the library,” so when I’m done, I like to find time with more limited social interactions. I’ll usually be spending time alone with my wife and my Newfoundland dog Athena reading a book (often an audiobook… contemporary romances are some of my favorites!), playing single player video games, or enjoying a relaxing tabletop role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons with a few select friends. There are always more experiences to be had than there is time to enjoy them so I would take the opportunity of an unexpected day off to revel in whichever activities currently have engaged my hyperfocus and dive in deep.
iREAD Summer Reading Programs
Latest Library JobLine Listings
