Eugene librarian honored with American Library Association award

The American Library Association’s “I Love My Librarian Award” recognizes public, school, college and university librarians for their “exceptional” accomplishments and “outstanding public service.” Only 10 librarians across the country receive the award, and this year, one of the recipients is from Oregon.

Claire Dannenbaum is a reference and instruction librarian at Lane Community College in Eugene. We talk with her about the joys — and challenges — of her work.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The American Library Association’s [ALA] “I Love My Librarian Award” recognizes public, school, college and university librarians for their exceptional accomplishments and outstanding public service. Only 10 librarians across the country receive the award every year, and this year, one of those recipients is an Oregonian. Claire Dannenbaum is a reference and instruction librarian at Lane Community College and she joins us now. Congratulations and welcome to our show.

Claire Dannenbaum: Thank you so much.

Miller: How did you find out you had won this award?

Dannenbaum:  By phone. And actually I should clarify, by landline, which is a really unusual way for me to receive any information anymore.

Miller: It seems like such a librarian thing, that a librarian would have a landline. I love it!

Dannenbaum: Well, I happened to be in my office the day that the ALA called and I walked in my office and the phone rang, and that’s very unusual. So I had to figure out first, what was that sound and where was it coming from? And they gave me the news and it was very shocking.

Miller: What went through your mind, through the shock or past the shock?

Dannenbaum: Just, it’s such a huge, huge honor. I think most librarians, US librarians, know about this award. And it’s one of the most, I would say, generous of the awards that are available, and there are not many for librarians. Lots of library awards are for institutions. There are many awards for libraries and library systems, but not many for individual librarians. So it is just an incredible honor.

Miller: I have to say, as a non-librarian, I wasn’t familiar with it, but I was struck by just how colloquial it is. I’m used to awards sounding so official, but “I Love My Librarian” is not a typical name for any kind of award. What is special about this one, in addition to, as you said, the generosity, which I think you’re talking about financial generosity?

Dannenbaum: No, I am talking about that colloquial “big hug from the community” sense. There is a cash prize which is wonderful, but really it is more nomination driven. There was a person here at Lane [Community College], an instructor, who nominated me. The nomination process requires a lot of support material and she managed to wrangle that from folks in the library, a lot of instructors outside the library, and a lot of students and former students. And so that’s what I mean by generous, that it really is very much driven by individuals. And so the name, “I Love My Librarian,” is very apt.

Miller: I want to hear more about what you learned about your impact from some of those letters. But let’s take some steps back. How did you become a librarian in the first place? Was this a childhood dream?

Dannenbaum: Not particularly, although I have to mention that in, I believe it was the fourth grade, I took one of the vocational tests at my public elementary school. And librarian was the profession that I was deemed most suitable for. But I managed to avoid that trajectory for many years, just because I studied all kinds of other things. I got a degree in art and then I got a degree in visual ethnography, and then I started working in libraries for real. And that was a very good match for me temperamentally and also that it’s a content-driven profession in a lot of ways. [It] involves working with people, either individually or in classroom settings, but also working with materials. And I really enjoy that.

Miller: What was your first job as a librarian?

Dannenbaum: My first job as a professional librarian was at University of British Columbia as a student librarian, while I was getting my MLIS [Master of Library Information Science]. But my first job in a library was as an undergrad at Antioch College. I was the slide librarian for the Art Department, and I pulled slides - that’s back in the day of slides and photographs - for one of my professors to organize lectures for her classes. So that was my first real experience in a library as a worker.

Miller: And then she would say, “I need a slide of this Rembrandt painting because I want to give a lecture about it.” And you’d go into the archives and find it in a box?

Dannenbaum: Yeah, more or less. She would give me either names of artists to gather or periods or styles - “I want to do a lecture on cubism” or cycladic art or whatever. And I would go into our slide library and I would pull things and lay them out for her on a light box, and then she would come and do refinement and put them in the order she wanted.

Then, as it happened, about 10 years later, after having other jobs in other cities and other life, I actually had another job in an image library. And I would say that was my very first full-on library position, where it was a library cataloger at UC Berkeley in the Architecture Department.

Miller: You mentioned that you studied visual art and ethnography, but it seems like there was a real visual component to your initial work in libraries. How did you go from that, to Lane Community College without an obvious visual hook?

Dannenbaum: It was a sort of meandering process. I mean, I graduated with an MLIS and just was completely on a trajectory to become an art or architecture librarian, possibly a visual resources librarian. And things shifted over time. I applied for jobs. I got offered jobs, but the place and the time and all of that didn’t work out quite the way I had hoped. So I ended up in Eugene, Oregon, which is a very pleasant place to be. And this was the job that was available. I started as a fill-in librarian, as a part-time backfill librarian. And then it morphed over a number of years into an appointment. Now I’m part of the regular faculty here.

Miller: What does it mean to be a reference and instruction librarian at a community college?

Dannenbaum: We do a lot of different kinds of work here. Reference and instruction, in lay terms, is providing students with resources and opportunities for learning about resources. I teach classes in a classroom setting. I’ve done that for credit, a credit class on library research. But mostly, it’s one or two times in a classroom environment in which there is an assignment and the instructor wants students to learn about certain types of resources, or certain ways of gathering information, or has a particular topic or is open to students learning about or researching something that they’re interested in.

So a reference and instruction librarian is usually responsible for helping students navigate all these tools and behaviors, what does it mean to do research? We, I think, often use this term “research,” but it actually means different things in different disciplines. And it’s also not natural to us. It requires persistence, it requires critical thinking, it requires self-awareness, it requires understanding the kinds of rhetorical communities that are out there talking about your topic or issue or question. And that’s something that is learned. It’s not just something we are born knowing.

Miller: What’s a self-awareness piece that’s required to do research?

Dannenbaum: The self-awareness piece would include things like your own bias or your own personal experience, which isn’t necessarily biased, but could be information about a topic or a question. It’s also patience, awareness that learning is a process and easy answers aren’t always available or maybe don’t even exist. I mean, trying to find ways of helping students understand that curiosity is a really critical part of learning and it’s a really critical part of research, and that’s not something that’s ready made. That’s something that you create for yourself.

Miller: To me, one of the wonderful things about a lot of community colleges is just how diverse the student bodies are in  basically every way, in terms of age, race, work backgrounds and life experiences. Is that true for Lane Community College?

Dannenbaum: 100%. And that’s one of the real joys of being here. I came from an environment - both University of British Columbia and University of California at Berkeley, the two other institutions that I worked in libraries - that was highly competitive [and] also incredibly diverse in terms of cultural background and those sort of metrics, but very competitive. This environment is open.

Community colleges are open to anybody who wants to take on learning. That means that we have students that have incredible levels of precarity. They may have less confidence, they may have a lot of world experience and are trying to make a shift in their life toward either a different profession or different skill set, and things like that. So you’re right, it is diverse. It’s diverse in different ways. That’s one of the exciting things about this environment.

Miller: You were talking earlier about the challenges and the importance of teaching the students at your college what research is and how to do research. Obviously, the context there is a community college. But I’m wondering what you see as the value of those same skills, broadly, for society?

Dannenbaum: I think they are entirely applicable to just being a human being on the planet. Those skills - skills of critical thinking, self-awareness, patience, persistence, curiosity - are things that I think contribute to having a flourishing human life. Obviously, in a community college environment, we have students who are studying welding and accounting, and some are studying literature. Some may go on to other college or university experiences. They’re gonna transfer to get a BA or a BS or even beyond that. But I do think that all the skills that are learned in what I consider to be library learning and research are more about an orientation toward being in the world. And so it’s relevant to everybody. We want plumbers to have critical thinking, right? We want tradespeople to be literate. It’s not just the doctorates that need to be literate, it’s everybody. We all need to be able to think critically about the world around us because so much about democracy relies entirely on that.

Miller: We’ve had a few conversations over the last few years about efforts to ban books, or just broadly, to restrict access to information. Is that something that you’ve had to deal with at the community college level?

Dannenbaum: Not directly. The issue around censoring, banning books, banning individual titles, that is more prevalent in school libraries and in public libraries where there is a lot more accountability to parent groups or public boards and things like that. We have very clear collection development guidelines here, and I’m sure there’s something in our collection that would offend somebody. But we don’t struggle as much as a public library, or even more so a school library, where there’s a lot of direct parental impact. I think higher ed has been a little bit more successful in curbing the more base impulses to thwart thinking and diversity of thinking. Although, certainly intellectual freedom is being challenged in higher ed as well.

Miller: It seems like you have given a lot of thought though, to the broader currents that affect all society and in the libraries that have been affected as well. I’m curious what you see as a flip-side of the effort to restrict access to information, the effort to make information broadly more accessible?

Dannenbaum: Well, that is fundamental to what it is that we do. I mean, library spaces are super vital and vibrant, and people think of books. Well, obviously, books are a big part of that, but books  are repositories for ideas. So ideas are at the root of the whole project, whether those ideas take the form of books, workshops, engagement or public spaces, or access to Wi-Fi, ideas, or libraries of things. Libraries are doing all of that, and it’s all about ideas and the role that ideas have in a thriving society. There is probably not a single librarian in this country, or even around the world, that is not thinking about the huge forces at work right now that are thwarting the free movement and sharing of ideas. This is very real in the world, but it’s not how I think about my job.

I think about my job as creating potential, and helping people align their potential with resources and with ideas. So I don’t think a lot about, “Oh what are we going to do in our library about banning or about our collection development policies,” and things like that. I think more about, “What can I share with students about their place in finding what they need to know?” Whether or not it’s for a school assignment or for personal interest or a personal struggle that they have, all of that’s part of what we do.

Miller: Just briefly, to go back to the beginning, I’m curious what it was like for you to read the letters of support, the nominating letters written by former students, by coworkers, about you, saying why you are one of the most beloved librarians in the country?

Dannenbaum: Well, it was very moving to read the nomination letters. I have to say that I cried when I read them. Some of them were written by students who haven’t been on campus for a while.

One of the things that really struck me and I think has caused me to really reflect on the nomination, is that several people used the word “mentor” in their description of how I had intersected with them in their life at a particular time and place. And that I did something that they called mentoring. That is really kind of profound for me because I never thought consciously that that’s what I was doing. But I came from a background in which that was highly valued.

My undergraduate college, Antioch College, is really founded on a lot of interesting principles around experience and engagement and cooperative learning and mentorship. I had a lot of mentors in my undergraduate education and I think it’s pretty clear that they rubbed off on me, that value of engaging with students. You really don’t know how it’s all going to add up. I feel like I have faith that it adds up, and that was confirmed by the nomination letters.

Miller: Claire Dannenbaum, congratulations again and thanks so much for giving us some of your time. I really appreciate it.

Dannenbaum: Yeah, thank you. Have a great day.

Miller: You too.

Claire Dannenbaum is a reference and instruction librarian at Lane Community College. She recently won one of the “I Love My Librarian” awards from the American Library Association.

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