In the Library with the Lead Pipe – Page 9 – An open access, peer reviewed journal

In Brief Information literacy is an essential life skill, and learning information literacy starts when students begin their schooling in the K-12 years. However, a disturbing trend has arisen: the lack of school libraries, and librarians, in schools across the country. Without a school librarian, students are not learning the foundations they need to become...

Your editors at Lead Pipe wanted to share some of the things we’ve been working on and thinking about, Lead Pipe aside. Enjoy! Amy One of the projects I work on at my library is the Civic Lab, a pop-up participatory program initiative centered around facilitating deeper exploration of how our government works, social...

In Brief: Access and preservation of online government data and information has been a long-standing and complex issue for librarians in government information librarianship, but it has recently started to receive attention on a larger level from the media, public, and libraries in general. The most recent initiative to archive digital government data was the...

In Brief Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary....

In Brief The undergraduate student experience has long been poorly and selectively captured by university archives. Though student narratives have always been essential for creating a complete history of the university, current nationwide student protests have made these voices all the more important to capture. As students engage in activism, regarding issues relevant to student...

Something is rotten in the state of online scholarship. We here at Lead Pipe have noticed a significant uptick in commenting and other behaviors across multiple social platforms that constitute harassment—comments, subtweets, and actions meant to intimidate, cause anxiety in, personally discredit, and silence scholars who share their research and arguments through publication and in...

In Brief Recent critiques of diversity in higher education and librarianship by Stewart (2017), Hudson (2017), and Hathcock (2015) have encouraged a critical shift away from diversity talk and initiatives, towards attention to equity, anti-racism, and whiteness. They point out that diversity initiatives often fail to address deeper power imbalances, and they offer new language...

In Brief Information organization and access is one of the core goals of librarianship. However, as librarians, we have the power to control what language patrons must use when searching for items. This power often manifests itself by limiting access to materials by and/or about oppressed or otherwise marginalized groups, due to how we label...

In Brief Socratic questioning, the act of asking questions in order to prompt critical thinking and reflection, expands the boundaries of librarianship by borrowing from the fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology. When employed during the research consultation, Socratic questioning establishes a cooperative relationship between librarian and student that empowers the student to take agency...

In Brief This essay reflects on the effects of capitalism and corporatization on the work habits of librarians, and critiques the profession’s emphasis on innovation for its own sake. First, the essay compares Juicero Inc., a Silicon Valley startup that faced criticism for producing an expensive machine that squeezed premade packets of juice, to projects...

Without Foundations, We Can’t Build: Information Literacy and the Need for Strong School Library Programs

Editorial: What we’ve been up to

Spotlight on Digital Government Information Preservation: Examining the Context, Outcomes, Limitations, and Successes of the DataRefuge Movement

Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Bringing Student Voices into the University Archives:  A Student Organization Documentation Initiative Case Study

Editorial: Harassment in Scholarship is Unacceptable–and Requires Action

Accessibility for Justice: Accessibility as a Tool for Promoting Justice in Librarianship

Patron-Driven Subject Access: How Librarians Can Mitigate That “Power to Name”

Socratic Questioning: A Teaching Philosophy for the Student Research Consultation

The Innovation Fetish and Slow Librarianship: What Librarians Can Learn From the Juicero