IACRL Member Spotlight: Christina Norton
February 28, 2025
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Interviewed by Sue Franzen, Illinois State University
Q: Tell me about your current position at Cullom-Davis Library - Bradley University. What kind of work do you do? What do you most enjoy about the work? What do you find challenging?
A: I currently am the Online Learning Librarian, a title which describes the part of my job where I am liaison to our non-health-science distance programs, manage our LibGuides and Canvas content, and work with our office of Marketing and Communication to keep our website up to date. It does not describe that I am also liaison to Art, Music, Theatre Arts, Communication, English, and Counseling, or that I’m the library’s point person for open educational resources. I do all that stuff! The mixture is both the pleasure and the challenge. I like that I can go from teaching art students to find high-quality images to working with instructors to identify OER for their classes to doing custom CSS for our LibGuides. I am rarely bored. But sometimes my larger, long-term projects become even longer than they need to be, because they are frequently put aside for more urgent student- or faculty-facing services.
Q: Tell me about your previous library work.
A: I’ve done basically the same kind of things, though in a previous position I did more outreach work – meaning I represented the library at orientations, resource fairs, and at little pop-up libraries in the dorms. I’ve done my reference-instruction-liaison-LibGuides-person-job at a nice little circuit of Illinois locations – at WIU in Macomb, at ICC in East Peoria, and at Heartland in Normal, before coming to Bradley.
Q: Please describe your participation in professional association activities?
A: Once upon a time I was IACRL Secretary! I did that after a few years on the Communication Committee, doing this very same newsletter 😊 I also had very enjoyable tenures on the CARLI Instruction and OER committees, offering professional development opportunities and workshops. And I’m wrapping up my final year as co-chair of the ACRL Distance and Online Learning Section’s Mentoring and Networking Committee, which – you have probably guessed – runs a mentoring program for distance/online librarians. I loved working with all these committees. I’ll join more in the future once I rotate off my current ones. My committee hunger cannot be stopped.
Q: What do you love most about the library profession?
A: That what is expected of me, on a regular basis, is to just go down the rabbit hole with someone about a topic they’re interested in. Love me a good rabbit hole.
Q: What is your librarianship philosophy?
A: I had to write a philosophy of librarianship once for a job application and I did not get the job so I feel like I wrote my philosophy wrong. I still feel self-conscious about it, and like I don’t know how to come up with something as grand as the word “philosophy” seems to imply. But I would like to embody a sort of “park ranger of the information wilderness” persona. For patrons I want to be a friendly guide and companion along whatever trail we need to follow (or blaze) towards their answers. I also want to be a good steward of my information landscape, respecting its wildness (information wants to be free!) as well as the systems and structures that contribute to making it navigable, and helping shape it to be a welcoming place for all.
Q: If time and money were no object, where would you love to travel?
A: There are so many places I would like to go, but just to pick one, I would visit Lake Baikal in Siberia, home of the Baikal seal, the world’s only exclusively freshwater seal, which lives only in Lake Baikal. I would like to make friends with a seal, to the extent that that is possible with a wild animal (yearning eye contact in respectful silence from a safe distance). You may join me in the “learning about Lake Baikal” rabbit hole if you like.
Q: What have you read or listened to recently that you loved?
A: I recently read both Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil and Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot. These books were both interesting on their own, but reading them at the same time gave me a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about what it means to exist in the world, and what it could mean, both online and as far away from online as one can get.
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