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The down-ballot librarian: experiences running for public office

I wrote this piece about a year and a half ago for the journal The Political Librarian. In the meantime the journal switched editors and it appears that the editor has stopped publishing the journal so I am uncertain if it would ever come out, so I am posting this here. I wrote this in April 2019. Hopefully it is helpful to others.

Introduction

Government is full of non-librarians. There are lawyers, doctors, teachers, factory linemen, farmers, and accountants. Librarianship’s core tenants of access, progressiveness, inclusion, and the public good make them excellent public officials. They have experience dealing with the public. They are excellent event planners. As an academic librarian, I myself have had plenty of experience speaking publicly, especially to groups of sleepy freshmen.

In 2018, more first-time candidates, women, and minorities ran for public office than ever before. In this paper, I will share my experience as a librarian successfully running for county council, ultimately knocking on over 2000 doors. I will chronicle why as an academic librarian I chose to run for public office, what librarians can bring to the table as politicians, and why more librarians should seek public office. With experience in public service, democratic participation, and systems thinking, librarians bring a vital set of skills to elected office as well as to the campaign trail. It is my hope that by telling my story I will encourage other librarians to run in similar representative numbers to that of other disciplines such as teachers and lawyers, as well as to challenge non-librarians to consider how these librarian skills contribute to society.

Why You Should Run

Back in 2017, I was sitting in a library conference program on eliminating late fees in public libraries. The research was all there: charging late fees was an unjust and oppressive practice, and most of the people in the presentation agreed. The question was whether libraries could convince their city and county councils. At the time I mused to myself, wouldn’t it be simpler if librarians were in those positions in the first place? In this era of fiscal responsibility, we need to make sure county, city, and district governments are full of people who understand the value of libraries, especially at a local level.

Certainly we can communicate that value, but the constant re-education of people is labor for librarians. We need people who understand the issues our communities from the beginning.  Public librarians in particular are often on the front lines of the opioid crisis. When naloxone started to become readily available, librarians were some of the first people to get trained (Correal 2018). Librarians often work with our cities’ homeless populations. Children’s librarians know quite a bit about early childhood development. Librarians provide research help for entrepreneurs in the community. In these initiatives and others, librarians are often at the center of their communities.

Librarians should run because we think differently due to the nature of our work. When your whole job is thinking about how to help find and use information, you developed a systems-focused mindset. I think about things in terms of inputs and outputs, processes and outcomes. Even a small policy can have a large impact upon my users, and as a librarian I take that responsibility seriously. Librarians really do believe in the public good. We really believe that our profession is designed for the greater good and librarians are already public servants. We really want to do everything in our power to make the world better, and that includes getting out of our buildings and into the community. What better way to serve your community than to serve on your city council?

Librarians have research super powers that come in handy on the campaign trail as well. Candidates have to dig through meeting minutes, task force reports, newspaper articles, and best practice presentations to find polices that will purposefully help the community. On the campaign trail, I often advised other candidates how to do advanced searches on newspaper archives, how to subscribe to Google Alerts, and how to find government reports on pesky websites.

Reference interview training also comes in handy when talking to people at their doors. There’s a misconception that people don’t care about local elections. People do care quite a bit, but they don’t have the language for how to talk about what they need. I found that often a conversation that started about trash bins often ended in discussing best practices for sustainability. A conversation about roads leads to talking about how to make public comment on transportation commission meeting. Does that mean that I always had the answer to their question? Does a librarian ever have the answer to every question that comes across the reference desk? Of course not, but we know where you might look, how you might think about the problem. Years of working reference desk really comes in handy.

Effects of my Run

I’m a 32-year old professor and librarian located in Indiana. In 2018 I ran against a two-term 75-year old incumbent who was also a retired school principal for a district position on the county council. I ran as a Democrat against a Republican and at the time I was running, there had not been a Democrat on the county council in 24 years. I was also running in an environment where in 2015 and 2016, women candidates had been almost consistently defeated. In the 2015 West Lafayette city council race, three women ran and all lost, leaving a West Lafayette City Council without female representation for four years.

County council deals with issues like roads, bridges, courts, Sheriff’s office, etc. It’s the budget approval body, and that is most of its focus.  I had become interested in running for office when I attended public office candidate trainings to help others. I’m a business librarian and work quite a bit with economic development and local entrepreneurs, so I understood many of the financial aspects from my work with the business community. I am also involved in critical librarianship and was feeling that I was reaching the limits of what I could do from inside of the system. Because I believe that librarianship is truly political, I believe we need to get involved in politics, where many of the decisions that can affect librarians and library partners get made.

On my college campus, I already really loved mentoring students, connecting colleagues, and was looking for ways the library could provide unique value. Campaigning is very similar. There were of course some negative interactions, but the vast majority were very positive in a powerful way for me. I knocked 2,000 doors in my district. I ran advertisements on the sides of buses. I attended neighborhood meetings, fish fries, county fairs, Halloween parties, fall picnics.  It sounds scary to put it all together in a list like that, but each of these in itself was less difficult than trying to plan a summer reading program or get a group of cross-campus partners to agree on a logo.

There were many positive effects of my run. First, as a millennial, I helped show the viability of millennial candidates in my town. Second, I was a successful woman candidate who beat a male candidate that year. And lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, I think it meant something to run as a librarian. Every time I talked about running for office as a librarian to other librarians, it blew their minds. Like many, they had never considered how their skill set would fit into being a local elected official.

I also like to think, in my daily conversations and exchanges as an elected official, that I help to reform people’s ideas about what librarians do. People without recent interaction with libraries envision librarians as some of book hoarder and don’t realize we do other things in the community. I’ve been able for these people to update their perceptions of the position and the role of the library in the community. When we talk about making government transparent, librarians already do that. When we talk about accountability, librarians do that. When we talk about open, thoughtful public discourse: that’s where librarians need to be.

Conclusion: But what if you lose?

I was lucky to win my race for county council, but I’m very aware that things could have turned out very differently in my race. About double the amount of people turned out in the midterm locally in 2018 than did so in 2010. I was lucky to have the support of my family, my friends, and many allies across local government. I had many other candidates running that pushed me to work harder.

Running for office comes with risks. It involves making lots of public statements that could be misunderstood. Running for a partisan position means all your friends and neighbors are aware of your political affiliation, and might make assumptions about your beliefs. It changes the way that people see you. And it’s certainly not a fair process. People who have run amazing campaigns sometimes lose, for reasons that have nothing to do with them. Sometimes turnout is low, or people come out to vote for the other party in a different race and in doing so they vote against you without knowing anything about you.

I thought a lot about what this experience would mean if I had lost. If I lost, I would have still started a conversation with 2000 of my neighbors. I still would have shown that millennials candidates can run serious campaigns. If I had lost, I would still have started community conversations about the opioid crisis, about fiscal stewardship, and about transparency in government. I had still influenced people’s perceptions about librarian work. I would have still contributed to the coalition of people that could respond the next time. If I had lost, I still would have shown how someone who looks like me and thinks like me can still be taken seriously as a candidate. Even if I had not won, I would have made real and tangible contributions to the people and systems around me that benefit both the public and the profession.

Librarians advocate in many different ways in many spaces. They write bills, they raise funds, they talk about library value and library needs. I don’t think running for office is something for every librarian. It take a lot of time and a lot of work. But I think as a profession, it offers tremendous opportunity for us to advocate for ourselves. Libraries and librarians matter. While citizens may able to lobby elected officials in office, ultimately the real conversations happen outside the county building and in people’s homes and offices, where they weigh how they will vote in the election. We need you.

Works Cited

Correal, A. (2018, February 28). Once It Was Overdue Books. Now Librarians Fight Overdoses.

Retrieved April 29, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/nyregion/librarians-opioid-heroin-overdoses.html

About the Author

Ilana Stonebraker is an Associate Professor of Libraries, Business Information Specialist at Purdue University. She represents District 1 as a member of the Tippecanoe County Council. She is a member of the Purdue Teaching Academy, a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, and a Greater Lafayette Commerce TippyConnect Top 10 under 40 Award Winner. She tweets @librarianilana .

Where’d you go, Ruby Chen?

Sometimes, it’s the middle of the semester, sometimes right at the beginning, students like you disappear, leaving empty desks, incompletes, forgotten contracts.

Ruby Chen, your smiling face haunts me in the photo roster. I worry you lost someone: a brother, a sister, a mother. How long were your drowning in grief before we asked for your date of graduation? How long before your roommate knocks on your door? Were you left on some southern shore? Did the guard look up from your papers and say, not this time?

I worry that you found someone so callous, so cruel. How long before someone believes you, Ruby Chen? I wonder where you are if you are still with him, her, them. You are naked, dying on your bathroom floor, reaching out for something, anything. My overstimulated academic brain fixates. My email piles up at your doorstep like snow. 

How sick were you this time, Ruby Chen? Chronic aching in your bones, no diagnoses, doctors everywhere, if you are lucky. How long will you be gone? Do you know, or are you still guessing yourself, always wondering, hoping, wishing, one moment from responding, one moment from trying again.

Academia will require you, as penance, to provide your sad story, so that it may be weighed against other sad stories to see if it is indeed sad enough, worthy of your debt to us. I don’t want to hear your story, because no matter how we failed you, we owe you nothing, for bringing you to this college town where there aren’t enough doctors, priests, or friends. We can only provide the salve of assignments to make it up to us, contracts to do better.

I sent email after email, but in the end, if you return, I hesitate to ask. I don’t want to hear your sad story, because if I hear your sad story it will become every sad story of every empty chair, every smiling face in the photo roster.

What did we do to you, as a college? When did we forget to believe you? When we choose not to forgive? Point to our institution policies like shackles, and say, not us? 

Sometimes, as if by nothing, you return again. Sometimes meek, apologetic, but sometimes you return defiant, my emails answered with disrespect, rage bitter on your tongue. YOU. ARE. FINE. In the course evaluation you will point out all of my red marks, salt water poured on wounds from an institution uncertain if I can be trusted. There is often no explanation. But I would rather see your defiant face than 0, 0, 0, 0 growing across my course management system.

Ruby Chen, I will have to fail you. 

But Ruby Chen, we have failed you. 

Using a Timer in Class

I don’t know if you have walked into a college classroom in the last decade, but I think that I have never seen two clocks in college classrooms that were synchronized. You think that with the general centralization of custodial services that people would have figured out how to do time. No such luck.

This blog is often about very simple things that you do when you teach that has often impact. I often put up a timer on the board. I usually google it (pictured), though I am sure that there are better ones on the internet. I do this for a couple of reasons. It helps students keep the time. That’s really important. Second it helps me keep the time. Third, everyone can see it. It’s not disputable.

I think it’s part of generally clarifying expectations. For my class time long activities, I put on the clock as soon as class starts, usually for about three minutes before class ends. I do this because if you are working on something until the end of the wire, you will probably end up not leaving up enough time for putting the final touches on something- making sure that the whole thing works together, etc. Going over by ten minutes in the real world would probably not be a problem, but in the higher education classroom environment there is probably another class coming in right then and the next class would probably have started by the time you would be finishing that up. And there’s no faster way to campus hell than taking up more than your time.

 

Does being a better person make you a better business person?

I had the benefit of having a small research group that worked on critical business librarianship for a year together. They would meet online and discuss how they could implement some of the ideas behind the concept of the business librarianship and critical pedagogy. We found that there was quite a bit of different ways to do it. We found that there was the critical management studies group of scholars to whom I presented a paper last year.

We kept circling back to the concept of social entrepreneurship, meaning the idea that people should do things to benefit society but also try to make money while they do those things. When we thought about how to sell the idea to students, we often thought about it in terms of how it would be beneficial. After all, empathy has been shown to be a very good business practice, especially for students who are just starting out in the business world. Knowing what people want and how to give it to them is always a life skills.

That always seems a little strange to your ears. We wondered if you can help society and make money. Should you want to be a good person because it’s going to get you ahead in life? It seemed like you should do those things because you want to do them, and maybe because you want to be a good person.

On one side, I am not certain that I really have the type of training to teach someone to be a good person. That seems religious. On one hand, my students are adults, they should be allowed to make their own decisions. At the same time, their brains are not currently developed. If they are taught the wrong information about the way that business works, then they might have long term effects on how they understand the business world around them. How can you ask for more time in to make sure that your students are good humans?

Finally: what right do I have to interrupt the behavior of students to try and make them think about the ways that information is presented? While many people give lip service to information literacy and the importance of the right information in the right places, this is by no means a mandate. Do students have a right to the information that they want? Do I have the choice to control what students do with the information that I give them?

 

 

Your Best Students

So every semester, as the school starts, I take stock of the students in my classes. I ask myself, who are going to be my best students? As someone who has taught for six years, I would think that I have started to see what makes students successful in my classes. I tend to highlight the students who on the first day of class have read the syllabus, the ones who introduce themselves to me, who introduce themselves to the students around them, who ask good questions and who seem very attentive.

I try to write down who I think will be my best students. Then at the end of the semester, I do a sort on the who has the highest grade in my class.

I am wrong every single semester. EVERY. SINGLE. SEMESTER. What’s worse, I’m usually dead wrong.

I tend to assume that the extroverts will do better. It’s not an impossible thing to imagine, since I teach a team-based class. But it’s not just the great team players. I also tend to assume the students who do best are those who reach out, who check in when they are struggled. There are student often (I teach large classes) where the students who are doing best often haven’t built a relationship with me at all.

I also tend to assume that it’s the students that are outwardly engaged, and by outwardly engaged, I mean students who are friendly. And probably those students are more likely to get the lions share of the recommendations and the mentoring, but in terms of the grades, those people aren’t the people who are killing it.

Sometimes I think it’s my point system, like it rewards some type of perfectionist behaviors (like making sure you do an assignment perfectly) or perhaps overly stresses turning things in over graded work. But I have founded that when I revise my grading schema, I still am surprised by the results.

The point of this story is that you may think that you know your students, and you may consider yourself a “fair” professor, but your attempts to understand what will make someone successful in your class is flawed because we all make assumptions about people. We think we know what types of behavior that makes people successful, in reality we just scratching the surface.

I’m a pretty complicated computer. I know a lot about my students and I know a lot about what makes them successful. I teach the same class over and over again so I see what works for students and what makes them less successful. But even I can’t predict what will make the students successful.

In some ways a computer algorithm is going to be better than me because it probably has less implicit bias. I’m not sure though. A lot of the socio economic indicators that makes a student seem more extroverted or committed to class could also show up in lots of other data. What about the common correlation between “at risk” youth, or students who come from “weak” high schools? They could easier thrive in this new environment. Additionally, as a qualitative human, I process lots of other behaviors and attitudes that a computer would probably not see. For example, I can tell if a student says my name right on the first day of class, or bring a pencil to write on the syllabus, or introduces themselves to classmates. That’s not stuff that I would hope that a university would gather on their students, nor would I think that a computer could guess all the things that might affect how I guess who will be my best students.

What I’m going for here is that people are complicated, and we think that because we give out the grades we understand what going to make students successful. I’m not we do, and I don’t think that we ever will. The important part is to make the interventions and the changes as they happen and when we see them, so that people can become as successful as I would like them all to be, as I eagerly scan my first day of class.

 

Gimmicks in Teaching

Sometimes I imagine doing a class where the theme is “College is kind of stupid like all the things that you have done previously and it has dumb rules, and that’s okay.”

As a teacher I am very aware that lots of things that I do are very, very stupid. Life is silly. A little bit more learning is silly. How dumb it is that you don’t know things? How can you not know things?  If it was important than you should have known about it already. You are a grown adult. You know plenty of things.

Which brings to gimmicks. Gimmicks are dumb. You might have good reasons for using them, but they are suppose a little stupid. Because learning is important, but it doesn’t have to feel like every moment is live or die. Most of it

Some gimmicks I have in my teaching

  1. Prizes- Okay no one needs another prize. Despite what you have been told about Gen Z, they don’t need a trophy all the time. But it can be fun.
  2. Competition– People like to win. Students in management are often very competitive with one another so.
  3.  Audience participation– Sometimes legitimate active learning isn’t possible, such as in a large lecture hall. For those moments, there’s audience participation! I use the Delphi method wherein you plant questions in the audience. It’s a great way to get ther to be some back and forth without having to change very much about the classroom dynamic. I think that there should be a formula, for however much you choose to change the classroom dynamic, the more you change the way that people experience the class.

Ease-Resentment: What to Do When You Get What You Want and You Still Feel Salty

When you struggle at something for a long time, and suddenly you get what you wanted, it often feels terrible. I thought of this when I was recently talking to an undergraduate student. This student had been trying for a full semester to get a department to start putting information about a specific program on their website. And it just seemed like she couldn’t get anyone to listen. Then she got into the right room with the right people, and suddenly everything was easier.

People had listened to her, they had seen that she was right, and they had done what she had asked. Why was that so hard? She should be over the moon. But instead she was bitter.

She was bitter because of all the time she spent trying to get people to understand. She was bitter because it was so obvious. It was the sort thing that had been a no-brainer for the department. When people looked back at that process, they would never again think about how that page once was.

There’s no word for this experience, so I decided to make up a word. It seemed like the sort of thing that might exist in the German language, so made up a German phrase: leicht wütend, or ease-resentment.

I know you should be happy, but you can’t be happy because you remember all the lost time you spent caring about that thing. That’s time you are never going to get back. You are never going to know what you could have done instead. Instead of trying to change a couple of minds, you could have been doing something else.

I think leicht wütend is something that is particularly a challenge for women and people of color. Most of the time you are just trying to get people to see something they should see. I know that some people will be surprised to find out that women and people of color do not want to spend all their time trying to persuade white men. They could spend that labor on something more important, like trying out new ice cream flavors, spending time with their family, or reading a good book. You will probably only think of that thing when you remember how hard it was to do that thing in the first place. When you get someone to understand their own assumptions, they often want to their change their behavior. But then you get ease-resentment: why was that so hard?

Understanding the range of emotions one has is important. I think leicht wütend is real and valid. Sometimes you feel guilty because you think that once you get whatever it is that you wanted done, you think that your life will be easier.

Some tips for dealing with leicht wütend:

  • Look on the bright side. Try to focus on something positive that came out of what you did. For example, you might have been recognized. Maybe you are getting to do something now that you have been really interested in doing for a while.
  • Don’t gaslight yourself. What you did really was scary and hard, you really did work on it for a while, and you should be proud.
  • Let it go. It’s hard to do, but sometimes you need to pick your battles and understand that things are better now.
  • Knowledge is power. Know that you are going to feel bad, and that’s okay. We have a culture that prizes happiness over all things. Sometimes you need more.
  • Practice self-care.
  • Be salty. You know, maybe if you do you’ll feel better. Go and bitch to a friend about it. You will probably feel a little bit better and less alone.
  • Go find something else to be passionate about. The good thing about struggle is that here is always more of it. Go out and find anew thing to get involved in.

Guilt (and Academia)

I went to the International Critical Management Studies conference this last summer in Liverpool, England. For sure, I was most interested in understanding how management, arguably one of the most neoliberal parts of the academy, arguably the inventor of neoliberalism, arguably the force behind many of the problems that we see in the world today. In my studies I have found this to be a very robust community and at the conference I was not disappointed.

In my own work I see a lot tension within the work I try to do in terms of empathy and sometimes the practicality of making things “work” for now. I wondered if they saw this problem as well, or perhaps they were too focused on their own struggles (the struggle for a recognition for qualitative approach and against free market, for example). Critical management scholars (or critters as they are most adorably called) were very aware in some ways of how their work affects themselves and others often in ways they can’t control or anticipate.

During my time with critters, we talked of many things. I was in an action research track that was interested in making an impact on the community in which they work. Towards the end, there was an activity where people tried in our smaller group to draw findings. One thing we talked about, which was quickly dismissed but was incredibly interesting to me, was when someone pointed out how guilt played so much into what we did. I found that so incredibly interesting, I wrote it down on the piece of paper, and that was the thing that I ended up taking home. How do we process our work as academics, in writing, thinking, action? That was my momento from my short time in England.

So many things I do are motivated by guilt, especially when I do things involving social justice. There’s guilt I feel as part of being in the librarian community, as being an academic person, being a business educator, being part of a double-income no-kids family where both of us are paid living wages, being white and female.

I didn’t think about it until this conference, but I have done a lot of good because of that guilt. But not all good. The thing about guilt is that it feels good when you are doing it. You feel bad, you want to do better, and the best way to do better is to learn to do better, and actually do better. You feel like you have gotten beyond your guilt when that happens. You feel like you know more.

The thing about guilt is that doing things from a place a guilt is probably the most selfish thing you can do. Because in the end you are doing it because you want to feel better. You are ultimately not doing it to make the world a better place, or because it should be done, but simply for your own feelings Once you feel better, you are not going to motivated to do other things. And if you can’t feel better, in fact if you actually feel worse, you are likely to do even more destructive things in the future.

Guilt often motivates you to do things that are wrong for the people involved. In academia, we are really interested in getting involved in the community. I think that academics do try to understand the world all around us. We really want to get involved. We often push each other into working more with community often out of a place of guilt. I think that’s the most destructive type of guilt – the guilt that we have as a community. We also should know that the world is always, always more complicated than academia, so our attempts to change it might be slow, much slower that our guilt allows. Yet still we push and pressure each other into getting involved. We suggest that people make themselves burn out doing things for community because that is only way.

I think it’s very dangerous to do things out of guilt. It feels good, but guilt isn’t what should motivate you. So what should you do if you are motivated out of guilt? I think it’s important to use reflection to find ways other than guilt to motivate you to do good work. Motivation is so important. Maybe we do things for that moment where we make a difference. We might also do other things because we want to try something new, or maybe we like the thrill of learning new things. Maybe we like to do things because they challenging.

Let’s try to not do things because we want to be better, let’s try as academic to do things which we think are valuable. If we are teaching on purpose, let’s teach not for the purpose of making ourselves feel better. Let’s teach because we believe we can make the world better. That’s vital.

Choose your collaborator: a company analysis informed leadership assignment

I like to use cases in my classes. I especially like to make cases that reflect things happening in my community. There’s a very large innovation district project happening in my community. It’s a really interesting project from a couple of different perspectives. I for one have never heard of a university leveraging Tax Increment Financing, especially not for improvements to state street that happened before they were recruited into the area (I’m a bit of a planning and budgeting nerd if you can’t tell).

I originally made this assignment when I was designing my Greater Lafayette greater class 1.0, which was a branded version of MGMT 175 learning community class. This was one of the easy first assignments to make fit the more local feel while still leveraging something that students may know quite a bit about: Purdue University.

This project also has another one of my favorite concepts, which is the idea of implied logic. The idea of the assignment is that you should built a method for how you are going to look at a problem, then you should use that same logic. It can be surprisingly easy cognitively to make a decision making framework and then not use that framework when make decisions. This project encourages students to make a framework for how to make their decision, and then make sure they check it so that they can figure out where they want to go. It’s really interesting because it’s very easy to go through the full project of making a framework and then not use that framework when they make their decision.

This project is a bit old, I haven’t used it since the fall, so some of the facts and figures may be a little out of data. Pictures data from Purdue’s website.

Enjoy!

Group Challenge 1: Manufacturing is King

Purdue is an important part of the Greater Lafayette area economy, as it employs the largest number of people in the Greater Lafayette area. However, private companies are also an important aspect of the economy, and manufacturing makes up the largest percentage are private companies.

For this Challenge, you will investigate the feasibility of a collaboration between Purdue and one of these large companies. Purdue plans to turn one of the larger fields on the outer edges of its campus into a research park. It wishes to invite one of the following companies to join the park. Due to space and budget limitations, it wants to choose only one collaborator. Purdue wants someone who will employ a large number of locals. These could be people previously employed by other companies, or unemployed members of the community. It also wants to choose a company with a good outlook for the long term (high probability by profitability), as this project will involve a sizable investment by Purdue in a new location.

Suggestion for breaking up time:

9:30-9:50 three group members each take a team and look up the companies in the financial databases. The third team finds the company websites.

9:50-10:00 Group members check each other’s work and also scoring companies

10:00-10:10 Members discuss question 3 and 4

10:10-10:20: One student writes up 3, another 4. Submit.

  1. In one of the library databases (Mergent, Privco, or OneSource), find the report for each of following companies: Wabash National, Alcoa, and Cargill.

In which database did you find this company?

What kind of company is it… private, public, or subsidiary?

How large is the company in terms of employees?

Take a look at the past 3 years of net sales, net income, or revenue. Have these figures gone up or down?

Google the company and find the recent news on the companies’ website. Is there anything that would make them a good fit for Purdue? (Examples are awards, sustainability, growth, etc)

Overall, how easy was it to find information on this company?

  1. After you have completed this for the three companies, bring the information together and score the three competitors in terms of size of budget, outlook for the company, demographic fit, and transparency (1-10, with 1 being low). Put you numbers below. Create a bar chart to illustrate your recommendation.

Wabash National:

Size:

Outlook:

Fit:

Transparency (How easy it was to find information about the company):

Alcoa

Size:

Outlook:

Fit:

Transparency (How easy it was to find information about the company:

Cargill

Size:

Outlook:

Fit:

Transparency (How easy it was to find information about the company:

  1. As a group decide on a weighted ranking. What is most important? The size, the outlook? Fit? Write a 50-100 word rationale.
  2. Decide: Write a 100 word recommendation: Who should Purdue partner with? You can base this on size, outlook, fit, or all four.

Turn in on Blackboard what you have by the end of the class period.

 

WAAL 2018 “All Hands on Deck: Social Justice, Empathy in the Age of Information Literacy”

I was invited to give the Keynote at the Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians’ Annual Conference. It was a blast! Not least of which because I won beer.

I won delicious home brewer beer for tweeting. #waal2018 pretty much best library conference ever pic.twitter.com/yUZWYKLg9Q

Slides below:

Thank you to everyone who attended!