Educating the Central Asian Librarian: Considering the International MLIS in Kazakhstan

Why do Central Asian librarians enter the profession, and how do they decide which educational strategies to pursue in developing their careers? Using 13 conversations and 10 qualitative interviews with Kazakh and Kyrgyz librarians, this chapter finds that librarians enter the profession due to personal interest, by happenstance, or for university funding and continue when they perceive an opportunity for career growth as well as salary mobility. Central Asian librarians evaluate their educational options, including local bachelor's degrees; distance education from Russia; MLIS programs in Asia, Europe, or America; and short-term online training, while balancing family responsibilities and career prospects in and outside of librarianship. Prospects for creating a local MLIS or other improved professional training programs are discussed

Reading Between the Lines: Using Citations to Understand Anthropologists’ Reading Patterns

Academic libraries want to collect the materials most useful to researchers, yet how can libraries know how successful they are? While Berkeley’s George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library collects data on which books circulate, it is difficult to evaluate how materials are actually being used to further the discipline of anthropology. In this article, we examine sources cited by our a) faculty members, b) dissertation writers, and c) honors thesis students to better understand how anthropologists read when conducting research. This paper compares materials used across subfields and research levels to highlight patterns in citations within this discipline, leading to new insights that will improve collection development among anthropology librarians

Delay, Distract, Defer: Addressing Sabotage in the Academic Library

Short paper submitted to The Maintainers III Conference, October 7, 2019.In 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services released the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Originally intended to aid the WWII-era citizen saboteur in committing small, undetectable acts of sabotage within an enemy organization, the Field Manual developed a second life on social media after its declassification, as its advice to “make faulty decisions, to adopt an uncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit” echoed the pitfalls of modern office work. In the context of academic libraries, seemingly neutral actions that actively work to delay production may include our insistence on following proper channels, creating committees, haggling over precise language, and holding unnecessary meetings. In this paper, we argue that academic libraries find themselves uniquely susceptible to unintentional and willful saboteurs alike. As higher education’s hierarchical culture meets professional norms that stress collaborative decision-making and emotional labor, we create an environment ripe for exploitation by those unhappy with the direction of an organization. As workers charged with the stewardship of information infrastructure, and as individuals who create and implement best practices in digital cultural heritage systems, library saboteurs have the potential to derail and impede the care work essential to information maintenance. This paper explores aspects of the Field Manual that apply to modern organizations, how academic libraries can fall victim to sabotage, and ways that individual librarians and staff can identify and resist the saboteur in the next cubicle--or in their own learned library behavior

Naming a New Self: Identity Elasticity and Self-Definition in Voluntary Name Changes

This article considers how personal name changes are situated within their sociological context in the United States. Reviewing both popular and scholarly texts on names and name changes, I draw on recent work on identity and narrative by Oriana to argue that voluntary personal name changes are made in relation to a sense of narrative elasticity oridentity elasticity, and act symbolically to make a shifting identity or self-narrative manifest in the social context. Drawing out these themes through an exploration of name changes for ethnic self-definition or religious purposes, I conclude with a reflection on the unstable social balance between an individual’s interest in self-expression and society’s priority on the stable identification of persons within a given social sphere

Interviews, focus groups, and social media: lessons from collaborative library ethnographies in America and Kazakhstan

Ethnography is a way of understanding not just what people say, but what they do within their larger environment. In libraries, ethnography is used to understand how patrons interact with each other and with our information resources. Ethnographic methods includes tools such as observation, interviews, photo diaries, mapping, and in-person focus groups—and the digital age has expanded our toolkit to study users using things like digital surveys and observations. This paper presents reflections on ethnographic and user experience projects at the National Academic Library and Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, and at Colby College and UC Berkeley in America, highlighting the methods used and the ways in which collaboration strengthened the outcome. A final section notes both challenges and opportunities for truly effective collaborative work—and how important collaborative study of social science research is for developing libraries that fully meet these users’ needs

On Scholarly Book Awards in Anthropology

A brief article that explores how and why academic book awards are proliferating, and how anthropology book awards may be used in academic library collecting