Column Editor:  Daniel L. Huang-Talbot  (Library Resources Specialist, Lived Places Publishing;  and Acquisitions Librarian, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA) 

Against the Grain V38#3

“Prrt Prrt” and a velvety black tail across my (allergic) nose was his initial response to my thought.  “Okay, Sirius, do you think I should stay here?”  I asked the black cat as he continued to knead his paws into my thigh.  The question was whether I should move in with my then-girlfriend and her two fellow medical student roommates.  A loud purr and vibration told me that Sirius’s priority was more treats and attention.

“No really, if I stay would I get in the way of their ... oof!” and my question was cut off as Sirius climbed onto my ribcage and then placed a vaguely litterbox scented paw on my lips as if to say “hush!”  He leapt off my chest and sat on the floor, tail curled around his jet black body as he stared at me, before narrowing his eyes and leaving the room, tail whirling as if beckoning me to follow.

I followed Sirius down to the living room and he jumped onto the glass coffee table, where he stared at an empty red plastic cup.  He doggedly pushed the cup off the table with a clatter and then jumped after it, purring as he nudged the discarded cup towards an already overflowing trash can.  “I guess you’re saying that …”

Before I could finish the thought, I heard doors open quickly and then cries of “no wait, you first” as young doctors in training exploded out of their bedrooms, unshaven and exhausted, to rush to pull on scrubs and short white lab coats before they were late for the next day at the St. Luke’s School of Medicine here in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  My future wife Brianna was no less frantic than the other two students and didn’t even have time to kiss me goodbye before tearing out of the driveway at maximum speed.

“I guess you’re saying that I should stay and help out in the ways of old, Sirius,” I said, giving him pets since I could finish my thought now.  He chirped with some annoyance and wriggled out from under my hand and then stalked over to his food bowl and stared at it.  Wait, was it dry AND wet food in the morning or only at night?  I walked into the kitchen and saw that Bri also had left her lunch box on the counter.  I had my work cut out for me!

After taking out several bags of trash I climbed into my old Subaru and made the drive to the Lehigh Libraries for my usual day of work, which gave me a great view of the now defunct steel stacks of the Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces.  The town of Bethlehem had its heyday as one of the two largest steel-producing communities in the United States, but post-bankruptcy, the blast furnace stacks now remain as a symbol of as much as people think things won’t change, they actually tend to change.

Life at Med Student Haus

“Med Student Haus” saw a constant stream of different students, most of whom looked up to my then-girlfriend for advice since she was one of the few Millenials in their cohort.  I noted the way she spoke to them gently about their anxieties and fears about their careers, learning, relationships, families, and so many other topics.  During a house party, I was listening to Brianna talk about the dearth of medical texts in the medical school library (this is a mystery I’ll explain in a future column about student perceptions of library systems).  I ventured a suggestion that perhaps I should speak to her librarian since the medical school had only been founded a few years prior.

She shot a terse response back at me that librarians were not the kind of people who understood the life of someone who is actually under real pressure.  I was embarrassed and later asked one of Brianna’s roommates what that meant.  He spoke to me at length that the main issue for their generation was feeling welcome and knowing that they would be taken seriously, since apparently nobody had actually “shared the rules” about how young people fit in with more established and secure (older) people.

After the next day of acquisitions work, I found myself mopping floors, loading dishwashers, cleaning litter boxes, carefully writing down cat feeding schedules, and packing lunch boxes for a hungry medical student.  In between those chores, I talked more to the three housemates about their experiences and they all concluded that yes, it was nice that a librarian could purchase them books but a core issue was others understanding the unique struggles that students faced in their time, which they suggested were not something I had faced in my nearly two decades earlier university days.

The Question of “Adulting”

On a summer evening, I cracked open a bottle of Yuengling with one of the Med Student Haus guests and asked if video media, such as Kanopy or Docuseek, would help the question of being adequately seen or heard.  He laughed at my suggestion and asked if any of those options allowed him to share his thoughts or “is it just a less good Netflix?” and if anything there could help him solve the issue of “adulting” while balancing the strain of being a first-generation medical student.

His reason was that learning how to “adult” could help him feel more confident, and perhaps other adults like myself would take him more seriously, especially if he learned “adulting” plus knowing more about the intricacies of faculty-student relations and expectations.  Upon speaking to another med student about the same concept, she explained that well, yes, that sort of thing existed but that was on social media, and it was cool that a university library could think about that, but really they already had YouTube, so I didn’t need to do anything.  Also that I was lucky to have been from an ancient time of dinosaurs where university faculty spent a lot of time explaining “adulting” to their students.

Working with Kanopy and Lived Places Publishing

Flash forward several years later after many more similar conversations with medical students and graduate students at both St. Luke’s and here at Lehigh University, I decided that aligning library acquisitions from the perspective of the students and their lived experiences was an important consideration for libraries.  At a recent Charleston Conference, during a lunch meeting, I approached our Kanopy rep, Dylan McGinty, and proposed this project on developing a media delivery platform that gave students not only access to lessons on “adulting” but also a platform to write down, video record, or otherwise express why they felt connection between the media and their own lived experiences.

Dylan found this topic not only curious but also sobering, as if somehow we had all let down young university students through an oversight on our part.  I asked Dylan that perhaps somehow in the acquisitions world, we were so hyper focused on the delivery of books, journals, and media that we had forgotten to slow down and ask the very people we served if they felt seen and heard.  Dylan asked me if this was solely a focus on students, because he saw that, in his experience, even faculty and campus staff had untold stories and also deserved to share.

While putting spoons into bowls of shrimp and grits, we both mused that perhaps it was true our jobs had moved beyond content delivery, and now our job was to provide both context and platform for our users to express their own lives and experiences.  Dylan urged patience when working with vendors since reorienting systems to allow this type of freedom would take a very long time, even with him advocating for these features.

Some time later, I wondered if David Parker from Lived Places Publishing approached me because he had heard of this project I was proposing to publishers.  I jumped at the opportunity to work with David and Lived Places because of this important consideration of lived experiences.  What better place to give everyone, not just university students, a platform to speak about their lives and their many perspectives and struggles.  Life at “Med Student Haus” had put me on a mission to emphasize shedding light on the lived experiences of others.

Our Mission

My new recurring column “Stacks of Steel” is centered around the topic of how library acquisitions interfaces with the real lived experiences of students, librarians, university staff, faculty of all types, practitioners, and anyone else that interacts with the library.  Just like Bethlehem Steel, library acquisitions is trying to find a place in a world that has changed dramatically.  It is my hope that in writing this column that we start a conversation about how both the library and publishing worlds can collaborate to better see and hear those that we serve, in addition to facilitating an ongoing conversation between user and provider about their needs.