Feminist+Librarians+on+the+Web,+Updated

Feminist Librarians on the Web, Updated

In June 2010, WiL noted six blogs by librarians who also declare their feminism. We wanted to take a look at the status of those blogs, and see if others had emerged, one year later.

 Most of these women write about their own lives and interests; rather than focusing on librarianship, the fact that they are librarians is simply a part of their daily experience. When they do write explicitly about topics related to their profession, their perspectives are interesting and highly personal.

A new blog came to our attention via an email from the author, Kate Angell, who writes **[|Somebody's Autobiography]**. Angell describes the herself and the blog: "I’m a college reference librarian by day and a zine librarian by (Thursday) night. I created this blog mainly to share links that can possibly be useful to people interested in issues pertaining to librarianship, social sciences (particularly gender/feminist studies), Riot Grrrl, and zines. Occasionally I’ll also write about papers and projects that I’ve been involved with in some way." Since most of Angell's posts are short reviews with links to other resources, using her categories can be particularly useful - check out [|Free Research Resources] or [|Librarianship], for example.

Anna, formerly blogging as **Future Feminist Librarian-Activis ****t**, now **[|the feminist librarian]**, finished her MLS in December 2010. She's still at Simmons, "working on the final draft of my thesis to complete the requirements for my MA in History." She also works as a Library Assistant at the Massachusetts Historical Society and as an Archives Assistant at Northeastern University's Archives & Special Collections. On the purpose of her blog, Anna writes "This blog is a place where I get to muse about ideas that I've often pondered in more private, journal-type settings, or in academic papers -- except now I get to participate in an active conversation, rather than having those ideas locked away in my own head, moribund from lack of use or external engagement." Recent posts include [|releasing books into the wild], about the online book sharing project BookCrossings and [|required reading: jill @ feministe on "call-out culture]: "I'm sending y'all on over to Feministe to [|read a post that Jill published this morning] on the dynamics of 'calling out' the 'big feminist blogs' for being less-than-perfect on the issues you care about."

 **[|The Subversive Librarian]**, subtitled No Shushing Allowed, comes from a Georgia librarian who has revised her interests from " Recovery. Parenting. Politics. Middle-aged lesbian stuff" to "Recovery. Parenting. Politics. GLBT issues. And stuff. Lots and lots of stuff." She's just decided to discontinue a 100-day message series modeled on projects completed by graduate students of Yale art professor Michael Beirut. She was blogging about "100 hand-wrought messages. Messages in all forms: hand-painted onto storefronts, scratched onto walls, scrawled on signs stuck in the ground, carved on a gravestone. Messages with some sort of human touch, or feel, or presence. A hundred of them." But on May 30 she writes "My life is a little crazy right now. My daughter is leaving for college, I'm moving, and gosh darn it, I've got other things I'd rather write about. But I do like taking pictures of signs, so I'll keep posting them from time to time." The May 15 post [|in the end, forgiveness], not a part of the project, is more typical. Emma Carbone is the voice of **Miss Print**, a blog about "books, libraries, writing, quotes, and some other stuff besides." Carbone is a recent recipient of a master’s degree in library and information science at Pratt, with a desire to specialize in youth services. Begun as a site for the book reviews she enjoyed writing, Miss Print is also a repository for Carbone's creative writing and musings on life and "anything else I deem appropriate." Each week she posts a new “Chick Lit Wednesday” review exhibiting "a book written (often if not always) by a female author and (always) featuring a strong, empowered female protagonist." On [|November 8, 2010] she blogged about //The Vast Fields of Ordinary// by Nick Burd, winner of the Stonewall Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
 * Opinions of a Wolf**is subtitled "A 20-something's book and movie reviews, interspersed with random thoughts on librarianship/libraries and culture." There's more personal information on the "about" page than previously, including the information that the author currently works full-time in a medical library but is job-hunting with the blessings of her employer for a job that pays an MLIS salary (she finished her MLS in December 2010). Her posts are primarily book reviews, with a few musings and more personal posts interspersed - her December 31, 2010 post, [|Friday Fun! (Reflections and Looking Forward)], is typical of these. Her earlier posts, noted in the June 2010 version of this article, are still worth a read: January 13, 2010, Why I, A Boston Librarian, Am Not Attending ALA Midwinter, criticizes ALA for, among other things, ignoring special libraries, charging exorbitant membership fees and offering misleading programs; May 6, 2010, Librarianship is a Service Career, discusses her experience of "librarians not wanting to actually have to work at work."

Christina K. Pikas has moved **[|Christina's LIS Rant: Library and Information Science]**to Scientopoa. She describes herself as "a librarian at a university-affiliated research laboratory. We do mostly physical sciences and engineering. I do in-depth literature searching in collaboration with lab staff and I'm also embedded in a few teams. I also work on knowledge sharing initiatives within the lab, do collection development, and teach various how-to courses." She is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland iSchool. Although many of Pikas's postings are pretty technical, she writes on many topics of more general interest, such as her March 5, 2011 post [|The pluses and minuses of merging specialty branches or collections] and, on February 6, 2011, [|Public library ebooks – easier than you may think!]

Antoinette, the part-time elementary school librarian and self-described feminist who blogs at **Social Dispatch** has been absent from blogging for nearly a year, but has a new post (and nearly a new baby), so keep checking back.

Freelance art librarian Heather Saunders has moved her blog **[|Artist in Transit]**; the most recent post with a direct library connection is from September 9, 2010, [|Writing off women], a response to an article about the relegation of female-authored fiction to "chick lit": "As a librarian and as a feminist, I am perplexed by the sexualization of reading in visual culture. I don’t mean to imply that beautiful and sexy women don’t read. However, if the editors are attempting to empathize with, or at least, represent the viewpoints of female authors bothered by male dominance in the industry, they would do well to use an image that doesn’t fall into gender traps, or perhaps they could feature one of the three women mentioned in the article/caption."