Poet-Librarians in the Library of Babel: Innovative Meditations on Librarianship

Poet-Librarians in the Library of Babel is a compendium of experimental essays, creative meditations, non-fiction accounts, and lyrical explorations that challenge, redefine, and/or widen perspectives on subjects related to libraries and librarianship. These subjects encompass abstractions such as silence, knowledge, questioning, solitude, information, access, truth, organization, preservation, alphabetical order, digitization, and memory to such concretenesses as bookshelves, archives, mildew, the Patriot Act, scholars, pencils, catalogs, and the list goes on.

21st century librarianship employs a wide array of languages, from the language of scholarly communication to the vocabulary and syntax of computer science, from customer service at the circulation desk to the rhetoric one exercises when asking donors for funds, from the language of government in which state-funded institutions must participate to the very modern language of branding. Libraries are well known for providing services that blur and cut across social layers such as class, ethnicity, and religion. The ways in which libraries use, experiment, and translate the various languages of the profession support the aforementioned blurring and strengthen "core library values." This anthology adds another language to the mix-—a language of hybridity, exploration, creativity, and experimentation; a language that is missing from today’s critical librarianship landscape.

The audience for this book includes creative writers, librarians and other information professionals, artists who have chosen careers besides that of the traditional professor, and library scholars.

Sommer Browning is Head of Resource Management at Auraria Library in Denver, Colorado. Her most recent books include the poetry collection, Backup Singers (Birds, LLC; 2014), and The Circle Book (Cuneiform, 2015). She holds an MSLIS from Long Island University and an MFA from the University of Arizona.

Shannon Tharp is a Collection Development Librarian at the University of Wyoming Libraries. She is also the author of the poetry collections The Cost of Walking (Skysill Press, 2011) and Vertigo in Spring (The Cultural Society, 2013). She holds a MLIS and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.