Core President's Program: Dear Librarians, No more trauma, no more pain: Reclaiming Our Value and Choosing To Win featuring Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty

The President's Program featuring Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty will be held on Saturday, June 24 from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm.

Core thanks OCLC for sponsoring the President's Program.

Narratives of trauma and marginalization surround us in libraries. In fact, they are embedded in our professional collective memory and the very existence of librarianship. Libraries are often undervalued. Our work as librarians is often invisible and conceptualizing workplace abuse and mistreatment in libraries is at long last realizing its "#MeToo" moment. Librarians are also experiencing the impacts of the global pandemic within larger contexts of organizational toxicity and collective disenchantment of the LIS profession.

Speaking personal truths and professional observations from 20+ years in library, archives, and special collections work, Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, Director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, challenges attendees to recenter our emotional investment in the hierarchical conflicts among ourselves and honestly engage with the realities of contemporary library work and how our work as librarians is viewed by society at large. In an era of unprecedented turnover, global health crisis, and crushing student debt, it is not a surprise that the Great Resignation is hitting libraries hard. Cynicism continues to take root more than solidarity and solution focused outcomes. The punishing consequences to library workers are dangerous and systemic. This professional climate in LIS not only demands new library leadership competencies, behaviors, and ideologies but also requires librarians to courageously implement radical accountability to develop frameworks for understanding how to deescalate traumatic work experiences in libraries to prioritize elevating experiences of fairness and respect.

Additionally, as a new wave of increasingly diverse library leaders arrives to address the longstanding issues in and of library work, we must holistically confront how we become a profession that doesn’t need to defend its value because we know our value. A profession that cultivates work environments for our librarians that promote empowerment, compassion, healing, and belongingness. A profession that commits to normalizing promotion of our gifts and expertise without jeopardizing our self-respect and agency. Without self-awareness and restorative strategies to address trauma-narrative finger pointing and deeply entrenched distrust of “leadership,” we erect the glass cliffs to which we send new leaders. We seek “Black unicorns” and instruments of change but fail to support, respect, empower, or simply listen to Black women in leadership roles.
The act of reclaiming is one of empowerment and reconciliation which cannot come without painful and necessary reckoning with the combined and connected forces of whiteness, distrust, passivity, and inertia. This legacy toxicity in libraries is present in most American libraries—be they public, school, or academic. It is a professional albatross that we must counteract through collaborative alliances and trauma-informed leadership models if the profession is to experience post traumatic growth through our will to survive and thrive.

Evangelestia-Dougherty’s address calls on the profession to stop the endless cycle of self-sabotage that is jeopardizing our future and professional capital. If libraries carried the nation and the world through a global crisis (we did), then we are strong enough to reclaim our value.

Please join Core for this timely and imperative talk during the 2022 President’s Program presented by Core President Lindsay Cronk. The Core President’s Program Committee is comprised of Berika Williams, Matthew Noe, Andrew Pace, Marcy Simon, and Katherine Leigh.

Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty is the Director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. The recently integrated Smithsonian Libraries and Archives contains nearly 3 million library volumes and over 44,000 cubic feet of archival materials chronicling the history of the Smithsonian. Evangelestia-Dougherty oversees 137 employees, a national advisory board of 18 members, an annual budget of over $16 million, and 22 library branches and reading rooms located in Washington, D.C., New York City, Maryland, Virginia, and the Republic of Panama.

Previously, Evangelestia-Dougherty was an associate university librarian at Cornell University where she initiated Cornell RAD, a new research hub for rare and distinctive collections. She is also a faculty member of the UCLA California Rare Book School. As director of collections and services at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture from 2013 to 2014, Evangelestia-Dougherty led collection and programmatic development of five curatorial divisions. At the University of Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium, she served as executive director from 2011 to 2013 and as consulting archivist from 2007 to 2011. There, she successfully led initiatives to discover and make accessible archives related to the African American diaspora.

In addition to her extensive work with rare and distinctive collections, Evangelestia-Dougherty is a published author and public speaker who has presented nationally on topics of inclusivity and equity in bibliography, administration, and primary-source literacy. She currently serves on the boards of Digital Scriptorium and the American Printing History Association. Evangelestia-Dougherty holds a Master of Science in information science from Simmons University’s School of Library and Information Science in Boston and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Houston.

“Evangelistia-Dougherty will share insights and perspectives as a strategic leader in GLAMs [galleries, libraries, archives and museums] and crucial voice on topics of inclusivity and equity in bibliography, administration and primary-source literacy,” says Lindsay Cronk, Assistant Dean, Scholarly Resources and Curation at River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester and current Core President. “Speaking from decades of experience in public and academic libraries, archives and administration, Evangelista-Dougherty’s address to Core members promises to be as thoughtful and visionary as the speaker herself.”