Steve Thomas: Billey, Elizabeth, and Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.
Billey Albina: Thanks for having us.
Steve Thomas: Before we get to the book, how did you each get started in librarianship in the first place? And then Billey, I know you’ve moved on from librarianship, but how did you get involved in the first place in the profession?
Elizabeth Nelson: Hi, this is Elizabeth Nelson. I am the cataloging and collection development librarian at McHenry County College. But as many started, I think, in libraries, I actually started at the public library in high school, shelving books and then never looked back from there. I have worked in public libraries, in special corporate libraries, and now in academic libraries.
Rebecca Uhl: This is Rebecca Yule. I am the principal cataloger at Arizona State University. And I guess I did shelve when I was in high school, but that was so long ago. I don’t remember it. I worked actually in a museum for a year and decided I didn’t like it and moved home and then went to library school. I’ve been in libraries ever since.
Billey Albina: And this is Billie Albina, formerly known as Amber Billie, and I was the Associate Director of Bibliographic Services at Bard College, and I am now an MSW candidate at the University of Toronto. I got into libraries also from museums. I was a research assistant at the Field Museum in Chicago, where I had a project to catalog every millipede described by science. I cataloged over 10, 000 species of millipedes. And by the time I was done with that, the librarian at the museum was like, you’d be a really good librarian. And off I went to go get my library science degree. And yeah, the rest is herstory. .
Steve Thomas: That is a lot of millipedes!
Billey Albina: It was a lot of millipedes.
Steve Thomas: Well, the book is Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context and Reparative Approaches. Just so we get listeners all on the same page, can you sort of define just what inclusive cataloging is?
Billey Albina: So inclusive cataloging is trying to create systems of organization that allow for anyone to find what they’re looking for, that are not based in a certain lens or a view or a bias, and in fact, trying to correct or rectify or address the systemic bias that was inherent in our legacy systems that were built during what I call “eras of oppression” through the 19th and early 20th century that had built into it the social dominance and prejudice of the time period So we’re looking at that from a social justice lens to create a more inclusive way of describing materials, classifying materials, and organizing them and providing subject analysis of those materials.
Elizabeth Nelson: I really like that definition. I think also from the user standpoint that users are able to see themselves and to see themselves reflected appropriately, not being put into a box that they don’t belong in just because it’s easier for libraries to organize things a certain way. So it’s both thinking about our own processes, but then really from that public standpoint, our users, to make sure they’re feeling included and feeling like they belong in these library spaces.
Steve Thomas: And I think you bring up a good point that the whole point of cataloging in general is not just for us to be super catalogy and putting things in order but the whole purpose is so that people can find things easier and better. It’s putting them in a good order so that they can be found. So getting them found in a way that people are actually looking for them, and they will find themselves in it is really important. So that’s a lot of good work there.
What’s been your own experience with inclusive cataloging? When did you start thinking of it through this lens?
Rebecca Uhl: Well, I guess for me, it started in 2016 with that first “illegal aliens.” I have always, always hated that term, but I didn’t really have any idea what to do about it because that was the official subject heading. So I kind of, at least locally, jumped on that bandwagon and did some changes in our local catalog and have just been doing that a lot ever since.
Steve Thomas: And for context, is that the time that the Library of Congress proposed changing it, and then Congress said no, so they didn’t change it, or they changed it to something that was still was not as good.
Rebecca Uhl: They were proposed to change it and Congress went ballistic pretty much, and so they withdrew that, and after that, libraries started making the change on their own, and then, I don’t remember, was it 2019 or 2021, that they finally made the change to something that nobody really liked and so, I pretty much just adjusted our catalog using authority records to what worked for us.
Billey Albina: And for me, I would say, considering inclusive cataloging, it started back in, I’d say 2013 when I was a new cataloger. I was at the University of Vermont, and we were doing RDA training. The Library of Congress had just rolled out RDA, and they had introduced the new elements for describing persons, in which you could describe a gender for a person. And in the training, they talked about how there were just three genders to explain a person, and they were just male, female, and unknown. And being a queer person, gender non-conforming, masculine, female, I was pretty upset because it really affected people in my own community.
So I worked with some other librarians to draft an article that was published. And I then appealed to the RSC, the RDA Steering Committee. I went through lots of processes to try and get the rules changed and that just sort of sparked… you know, my life has always had a social justice lens, and I mean, that’s many reasons why I’m moving into social work but ,it just became a big focus of mine throughout my career because it opened my eyes to the systemic injustices that are sort of baked into the work we do as librarians and the legacy systems that we inherited as catalogers.
Elizabeth Nelson: So my interest in this developed a lot later than Rebecca and Billey. Around the time of the pandemic, I was seeing some just really cool presentations that people were doing. I am at obviously a community college. It’s a smaller library. We don’t have the resources to do a lot of these bigger projects and we don’t participate in like those national sorts of efforts, so seeing some of the things that people were doing and just trying to learn more about how people are doing things in smaller ways. Like, what are ways that individuals can make some changes in their own libraries and look at some of these things.
So we started looking at the way we describe collections and how they might impact different parts of our community. We have an adult ed program where there’s people from all over the world who have come here and are learning English or doing their high school equivalency and now we’re also a Hispanic serving institution. So thinking about the ways that even we label things and digging more into the individual books and how they’re organized.
But really, like I said, much later. But I think there’s so many cool things that people have been doing and are doing now and are now like getting more attention that it’s becoming something that more people are aware of.
Steve Thomas: It’s great. And then before we get too much more into the book, how did the three of you come together to edit this collection?
Rebecca Uhl: Well originally it was a suggestion in a Core committee that both Elizabeth and I were on, and we both kind of volunteered to edit the book, and we brought in Billey as a third editor because we needed to get some additional viewpoints, and it just kind of grew from there. It was a good choice because we all have different strengths and those complemented each other. It really worked out well for us, but it was very serendipitous in many ways.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I love that those conversations within Core or any other ALA division or something sometimes turn into a great project like this. If you’re identifying things that are needed and they’re not there yet, thankfully there are people like you guys that will volunteer to jump in there and hopefully you volunteered and weren’t volun-told to do that.
Elizabeth Nelson: No, we definitely volunteered. And I think what was kind of amazing is that, you know, this is just a conversation at a committee meeting, and Rebecca and I were like, “Yeah, we’ll take the lead on that. We’ll look into it and see what will happen.” And we started working on the proposal for the book, and we had no idea, like, what it was going to be. And we’re like, “I hope some people submit chapters. I hope there’s some interest in this.” And we got just such an incredible response from people, and it was a really great experience.
Billey Albina: Yeah, and this was a book that I wanted to make happen for quite a while. And it was something that there was no way I could have done this on my own. I didn’t really think it was something that would happen until I heard from Rebecca and Elizabeth and I was just so happy and excited that they were organizing this and that it was something that I could help with, and we worked together so well. Like Rebecca said, we each had our different strengths. Rebecca is, like, editor extraordinaire. Elizabeth was, like, administrator, and I had the connections and the background. And we all worked together to bring this into fruition. It was really wonderful teamwork. We were very diligent of meeting our deadlines and meeting regularly and sticking to our goals, and it really came together. I’m quite proud of it and I think we’re all quite proud of it.
Steve Thomas: You do cover all types of libraries: public libraries, academic libraries, school libraries, they all have their own individual ways of needing cataloging. I did want to ask, you mentioned the thing about “illegal aliens” and the LC catalog, how can libraries, because a lot of libraries maybe have a big cataloging department, there’s like tons of people there, and some of it’s like, it’s one person that’s part time. How can they balance using those subject headings and developing more localized inclusive practices? That seems like that would be a hard thing to do for somebody with a smaller department to be able to put a lot of time and energy into the inclusivity angle of it. Like, even if you want to, how do you make the time for that?
Billey Albina: I mean, I think it’s a matter of identifying priorities. I worked at a small college library. I was the only original cataloger with one copy cataloger. And so, if it’s a priority for you to have inclusive practices with your cataloging and make sure that you use subject headings that aren’t going to be offensive to your user population, then you need to make the time to dedicate to do that. And thankfully, in our chapter, we have a lot of resources for how a library could do this at scale using global change rules or if you have the opportunity to work with vendors. I’ve only worked at one library that used vendors. That was a wonderful experience, but at my previous place of employment, we did not have authorities vendors. So everything was done in-house. So you just have to make the time because it’s important. If it’s important to you, then it’s important to do.
Elizabeth Nelson: I would also add that when we started out, we purposely wanted to reach out to those different types of libraries to see the kind of work that was being done, because we assumed that it would be different, right? But for the most part, when you look at those case studies, a lot of the things that libraries are doing are essentially small projects, or projects that can be done as time allows.
So everyone was kind of working around that, even some of those larger institutions. They aren’t necessarily getting all of this stuff prioritized. There’s lots of competing things happening, so a lot of the things in there are things that one person could work on and could start to incorporate and as you add new materials, you look at the things that you’re adding, make those changes. So I thought that was really, really fascinating. I assumed that we would have some like really elaborate examples that people were doing. And really, for the most part, it was like, here’s how you do this. You do this one thing, and then you do this other thing. And slowly, those things together start to add up and now you’re doing big things. But it’s really like starting with that first small thing.
Rebecca Uhl: Yes, and I would definitely agree. We had a couple of very small libraries, one person libraries, and they detailed how they had to do it, which was basically one of them was doing it based on circulation. They made changes as they checked books in or out. They didn’t attempt to do anything throughout the catalog. They did what they could with what they had.
And even the large libraries and the large consortia were doing very much the same. They did what they could with what they had, and they tried to automate to the extent they could which is impossible for a lot of libraries. I understand that. We can’t really do a whole lot of automation for us, even though we have a very large system that does a lot of automation, but I think we did an excellent job of getting a bunch of different perspectives. And that’s thanks to all of those who were willing to write the chapters for us and share what they were doing.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And books like yours is one way that you can help do that. Cause you can see, “Oh, I’m a one person library. I don’t know how to do this. Oh, look, this person did it. I can follow what they did!” And being a member of things like Core where you can talk to people. I mean, that’s a common thing, no matter where you are as a solo librarian in various roles, whether it’s cataloger or anywhere else. When you’re the only person doing the job, you’ve got to find a way to make your own network, basically, and learn these best practices.
You have case studies and those are all really helpful but at the beginning you talk about more theoretical parts of this. Can you talk about some of the theoretical underpinnings for reparative cataloging efforts?
Billey Albina: Yeah. I’ll take this. The theory and history section was a little bit more, I guess I was the point person for that, and it starts probably from the most foundational theory and moves into the historical. The opening chapter with Belantara and Drabinski is the most theoretical. And it really outlines how people come into the world with their own perspective and how everyone experiences their world from a lens, so looking at the worlds and the words that we create and the words that we use within those worlds, how everyone can approach things differently. From that broad understanding, we can have an idea of inclusivity, and then we move into some of the more historical accounts where we go into the Fox and Gross chapter that goes into the short history of inclusive cataloging, like how we’ve been doing this and pushing against these standards throughout the entire profession.
Then we just wanted to document what happened throughout the 20th century into the 21st century, and so each chapter sort of builds on and outlines the history of what was done and what was the current environment starting in the early 21st century and what’s happening now.
Rebecca Uhl: I think a lot of it was driven by what we were sent, the abstracts that our authors sent, and what we had was the theoretical, and then we had the histories, of course, and then some large scale projects that were not within a library or a consortium, but were addressing the issue. I mean, there was a chapter on the comics, which led to changes within LCSH and LCGFT, the genre form.
There was the Trans and Queer Metadata Collectives and, I mean, it just seemed to really fall together based on what we received from our contributing authors. I was just struck each time I read through the book how much the case studies fed back into the initial chapters and how the initial chapters set up the case studies, because I could see echoes of both as I read through everything, and I’m really proud of what we came out with and I think it will be very useful to a lot of people, giving background and theory as well as how those backgrounds, histories, theories are dealt with in real life, quote unquote real life.
Billey Albina: Yeah, the first section, I really feel like it lays out the theory, the foundational theory, and then the histories, and then the impact on the profession, how it manifests within the profession, like the professional organizations, and what changes were made based on the efforts of librarians over the last especially, like, 20 years.
Elizabeth Nelson: Yeah, and I think the authors in that section did just such a great job of really laying everything out. Like, this work has been done for 100 years, so it’s not this moment in time. Those case studies are great. Like, “Oh, hey, I can go do this thing now!” But to really see where we’ve come from and where we’ve ended up right now, already a lot of progress has been made, right? There’s still so much to do, but like this isn’t insurmountable. These little efforts do add up. These little conversations you have that lead to this change or a group of people meeting together saying like, “Hey, we need to do something about this.” Those changes make big change. And I think the way they wrote about it, you can tell how passionate everyone is about this topic and the work that they’re doing, and I just think that’s so cool.
And then, I think it’s also really great that we have this moment in time. Like, right now, today, this is where we are, these are the things we’re thinking about, and ten years from now, I’m excited to see where we’re gonna end up.
Steve Thomas: With the “illegal alien” conversation we had earlier, obviously there’s a problematic element of the main source of subject headings basically having a veto from the government. So are there other networks of finding subject headings? This is me just not being a cataloger so not knowing. Are there other ways of getting like alternate subject headings? Is there another shared catalog of subject headings?
Rebecca Uhl: There are a lot of different subject classification schemes. LCSH is, of course, predominant here in North America and the English speaking world, perhaps, but I know that there are different thesauri addressing different topics, and the Spanish speaking countries have their own subjects, the same with the Germanic languages. I do know Australia has been doing a lot of work to redress the native Aboriginal, similar to what we are doing within their thesauri, so I do think it’s happening all over the world, and there’s a lot of them appearing in our records now as well: there’s one, ERIC, for education, NASA. There’s a lot of different thesauri out there that people, librarians, catalogers, can add to their records to address some of those topics that are not dealt with properly by LCSH.
Steve Thomas: What are some other common challenges that people face when trying to make these changes? What makes it difficult in the work, even if it’s worth doing?
Elizabeth Nelson: One challenge, and it is addressed by at least a couple of the case studies, I think, is that you can recognize the problem and say, “this isn’t a term that we want to use in our library,” but determining what the appropriate term actually is, that can be really difficult. So some people have invested a lot of time in saying, “Okay, let’s reach out to these groups of people. Let’s get that consensus.” But sometimes there’s not a good consensus and some of it can be very local. Like our students, this is the term that they use or they identify best with, and sometimes, it’s hard to pin down what that is.
Also if you’re doing that work on your own, then the maintenance is also on your own. So as terminology changes, you have to make sure that you stay on top of it. This is really a commitment to continuing to do this work and really making sure that it stays up to date. I know those are the some of the things that I hear about most when you’re doing some of these things, because you don’t want to make things worse by making a change that you hope is for the best.
Billey Albina: And, you know, of course, we live in a very divided society right now where diversity, equity, and inclusion work is being challenged and depending on perhaps where you live in the country or where you’re working in the country, you might come against challenges in trying to create more inclusive cataloging practices or create more space for social justice within your catalog. You might experience resistance from your library boards, from community members, from your administrations for trying to create you know, a “woke” catalog or something like that.
And, you know, that’s just the reality of where we’re in with libraries being challenged so much within this divided society that we have right now. It does make libraries more vulnerable perhaps to do this work, but I would argue that this work is worth it and important to do. And we have to fight against these injustices and create more inclusive spaces.
Steve Thomas: Well, and it’s not like it’s one big project and then, ” We’re done, yay, it’s all inclusive now forever!” It’s an ongoing process. Can y’all talk about some of the things that you have to do to ensure that you have an ongoing process of continual reflection and change?
Rebecca Uhl: For me, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot because in my role I’ve been making a lot of the decisions of which headings to address, and I’m coming up on retirement. So it needs to be documented. It’s well and good to address things in the now, but terminology changes and after I’m gone, some of the headings that are good for now, that I have changed locally, are going to change again. People 5, 10 years from now are going to have to know what I changed in order to make adjustments as time goes on, so it seems from my perspective, trying to document what has been done that is not strictly by LCSH, what changes that I have done, how to undo them, to redo them, or whatever, I think is very important. You have to document what has been done for those who come after, so that they can make their own changes as needed.
Elizabeth Nelson: Our catalogs are always in flux, but I think it’s really important that when you’re starting a project, and not just for this, I mean all projects that we work at, really, as part of that process from the beginning to include what that looks like. Who is responsible for this? Is it a single person? Is it a position? What is the plan? I think it’s really important to have that plan from the beginning before you start making those changes because local changes are hard. Once you’ve made those, you’ve disconnected it from updates and all of that. So you want to make sure that it’s something you do actually have the bandwidth to maintain and to keep going and I think at this point, a lot of people are still doing their pilot project or their test case, right? So the things we’re doing now, if you’re starting a small project, it might be that, “okay, we’re going to test this and see how it goes and if everything goes well, we’ll start building on it.”
So like, as soon as that’s something that you’re committed to then you need to have that plan for how you’re going to keep this up to date.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I wonder, is this something of a positive use case of AI, that they can do like low level stuff that it could do for you? I mean, not even necessarily AI, but just automation.
Elizabeth Nelson: Yeah, and I think technology definitely plays an important part. Like, you can quickly identify records that you need to work with or identify headings, but some of the authors did point out when they did that, they missed things. You might miss something with a subdivision or something that you need to do. So you have to be really careful to make sure that you’re not relying on technology to do the critical thinking pieces of it, just that, like mechanical stuff, right? Batch changes are great, but you need to actually identify those records. So I think even AI probably has a role where it could help identify potential issues that an actual human could then look at and kind of determine what’s best for that community.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Computers are good at searching through large data sets and finding things, but doesn’t necessarily know how to make the right decision once it gets to that thing, but yeah, doing that and then kicking it out to a human to say, “Oh, hey, look at this.”
If someone was just getting started doing this work, you mentioned in some of the chapters of what some of the resources and tools are, but are there some specific things that you would recommend that they start looking at first, like to how to get in the right mindset?
Billey Albina: Violet Fox’s Cataloging Lab is an excellent resource for getting familiar with this kind of work and the issues and resources. I also would recommend CORE, getting involved with the Metadata and Collections Section and the DEI Committee of CORE that has lots of resources for this kind of work as well. And the Program for Cooperative Cataloging also has a wonderful amount of resources for this kind of work.
Steve Thomas: I did want to ask one specific chapter. And I think it’s helps to set the tone that there’s a chapter about writing a harmful content statement. It’s almost like more of that documentation that Rebecca was talking about, that you have something there that says this is what we’re going to do, and it’s important, and it’s something organizationally that you can do that says this is important to the organization.
We don’t want to go through here and say, “Oh, well, if you’re a cataloger, you should sneak this stuff in and nobody will notice if you start doing this.” You want to, as an organization, make a statement.
Rebecca Uhl: I actually started one for our institution and had some verbal encouragement from various levels of administration, and then the administration changed, and it just kind of fell by the wayside. I’ve been trying to get it restarted again, but I was thinking more of the statement that I’m creating as, “this is what we are doing, and if you want to suggest or have issues with it, this is what you should do, and why.”
For public services staff, for the people who are looking at our policies from outside the library. I don’t know that I was thinking of it as something for the catalogers, but more to explain and tell people that this is something we care about because most people in my institution hear about what the public services people are doing. We have, in my opinion, one of the best Native American Departments, collections around for our area in the southwest and you hear a lot about what they’re doing. We have a I think it’s called the Black Collections in our archives, which is a community driven archives. And people hear about that because that’s what is out there front facing and nobody thinks about us.
So I started this statement as sort of, “Yeah, this is something that we’re thinking about too, and this is why,” so I think of it more as an explanation and putting us catalogers out there as being somebody who is interested as well.
Elizabeth Nelson: So I really love that chapter and we spend a lot of time talking about it because it was a little bit different than some of the other chapters that we had, but when you look at that chapter, it’s from a public library, they’re acknowledging that a lot of this work, academic libraries are kind of leading some of this work, but they want for their community to know that they know about this, they care about this, and they are making changes as they can, and I think that’s just a really powerful statement in some ways, as much as doing the work itself. You can do the work and maybe some people will notice and some people won’t, but to just put it out there right on their website. It was very prominent because we inquired about that. They did talk about the placement of it, and they placed it so that it was prominent. It’s not hidden on another page. It’s right up there with, like, their mission and vision and some other things. Like, here’s the statement because it’s that important to them. That’s just really amazing to be able to do that.
And I realized that because of things that are happening in different states, not everyone can do that, but that library is here in Illinois. So I know that we can do that here. But it’s really powerful in a different way, so to not just do the work, but to be very upfront of this is what we’re doing and these are our values and we want you to know about it and we want to answer your questions which is just great.
Steve Thomas: Well, I wanted to ask one question also. This one is more specifically for Billey, but if anybody else has anything they want to add, they can. But in the introduction you talked about Sanford Berman, Sandy, and I’m sure a lot of listeners know who Sandy is, but for those who don’t, can you just briefly say who he is and then how did his work inspire yours?
Billey Albina: Well, thank you for this question. I had the deep pleasure of meeting Sandy Berman a few years ago at a conference that I was invited to speak at, and it was really like a professional hero dream come true. So Sandy Berman, he’s still alive, he’s a librarian, a retired librarian in Minnesota who in the late 60s, early 70s, saw that the Library of Congress Subject Headings had inherent biases in them and started firing off letters with his typewriter to the Library of Congress petitioning to correct them, and he wrote a book called Antitheses and Prejudices that lit a fire about all of this. He also wrote another wonderful book called The Joy of Cataloging that outlines a lot of the letters that he wrote, and he was very interested in using the language of people as we use it, like common vernacular.
So he was at Minnesota, the Hennepin Public Library, and for a while, catalogers like, my mentors would talk about the Hennepin Public Library, cataloging subject headings, because they had their own authority records, and you could subscribe to them, and you could get them through the various technologies that were around in the late 70s and 80s and 90s. Like, they had their own very progressive subject headings. And so, instead of using “incandescent lights,” he used “light bulbs.” Instead of “commodes,” it was “toilets.” Like, the different stuff like that, of course, those are the two examples that I think of. But, like, he just really advocated for using vernacular language, sex positive language, gender equity. So, instead of, like, “Women as doctors,” just like “Doctors– Women.” It was like little things like that, that absolutely changed the way that people use the catalog.
I think mostly though he is, he’s still, you know, he’s still pounding off letters on his typewriter to the Library of Congress, and a librarian, Jenna Friedman will put them on her website and then it’ll get picked up on the Cataloging Lab and all those kinds of #critcat, if you follow #critcat, and there’s also the wonderful Facebook group Magical Metadata Fairies and Curmudgeonly Catalogers or something like that. I can’t remember now. So his work is still being effective and still inspiring librarians.
So when I read his biography in library school, I was just so excited that people were trying to make a difference and that actually succeeded. And it might’ve been incremental, but that’s the work, right? Like when I first proposed the change to RDA back in 2015, I think it was, it took eight years, eight years, eight of my 13 years as a librarian to make change. It just was persistence. So I didn’t have a typewriter. I had my voice, I had my computer. I had meetings to go to, but it was just through persistence and incremental progress that we can make change. And that’s what this book is trying to really document and encourage people to do. It’s just whatever change you can make, do, because those small changes, we know have ripple effects that will last a lifetime.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. He’s really a pioneer in so many different ways, and he’s sort of, I don’t know, the father of inclusive cataloging almost…?
Billey Albina: Yeah, absolutely. And we also documented some earlier pioneers in the book as well that came before him. We were excited to show that history as well, but he really is a pivot point in the career of those 70s radical librarians. That was also just in the zeitgeist within American, North American culture in the 70s.
Steve Thomas: So the last question is what I ask everybody who’s on the show. What is it that you’re reading right now, or if you’re not reading anything right now What was the last book that you liked?
Billey Albina: Well, I am reading like almost 400 pages a week in graduate school, and I am loving every minute of it but as far as just books, I finished reading Braiding Sweetgrass which is a fantastic collection of stories that bring together indigenous practices with botany. The author, whose name is escaping me right now is a botanist and also Indigenous woman, and she just, the book is incredible.
Elizabeth Nelson: So I always laugh when someone asks this question because my youngest two children are actually in preschool. So I was actually just like looked over and I have books from the Scholastic Book Order, so I can tell you what I will be reading, and that is A is for Axolotl which I’m very excited about, but I don’t have as much time for reading things that I would like, not that I don’t like that book, I’m sure it’s great but I do more reading to my kids at this point, so lots of picture books yeah, we try to get our hands on whatever new stuff is out there.
Rebecca Uhl: Well nothing so perhaps interesting, but I just found a new author that I’ve been enjoying. Okay, I have two dogs so I kind of like dog books that include dogs as a character. And I just found this series by Paula Munier. They’re mysteries and one of the main characters, or perhaps the main character, is a retired police woman who served two tours in Afghanistan and inherited her deceased fiancé’s bomb sniffing Malinois. They’ve moved back to Vermont and are solving mysteries with the help of a Vermont fish and wildlife person who has a Lab Newfie search and rescue dog. And I’m just really enjoying those.
Steve Thomas: Sometimes a cozy mystery hits the spot.
Thank you all so much for coming on the show. There’s obviously lots more to learn in the book. We couldn’t even cover hardly any of it, even skimming over it. I think we didn’t hit all the subjects, but I encourage people to check out the book, even if you’re not a cataloger, you know, I’m not a cataloger, but I learned a lot of stuff in there.
I always say my cataloging class was really important to me in library school because it does help me learn how to search for things, because I know how things are organized, even if I don’t want to do the work myself. But it is important to understand how all this stuff is done, and it’s obviously important work to be done, through that social justice lens as well. But thank the three of you for coming on the show to talk about it.
Rebecca Uhl: Thank you for having us.
Circulating Ideas 