MLIS Candidate, San José State University (Expected 2027)

I am a first-time ALA Annual Conference attendee. I’m finishing my MLIS here at SJSU while I work in a public academic law library. I came to Chicago with a strategically mapped out schedule of the talks I wanted to hear and the people I wanted to say hello to; it was important to me to utilize my time efficiently to honor the financial support I received from the iSchool. For the most part, I stuck to the plan. What I hadn’t accounted for was everything a spreadsheet can’t schedule, like the informal chats that ran just a bit longer. For example, I couldn’t make it to Lois Lowry’s talk, the 89-year-old two-time Newbery Medalist calling her appearance a kind of homecoming, just about a floor away from wherever my itinerary had me at the time.  

What I love about ALA as an organization, and about the conference itself, is that it is genuinely a “big tent.” Everyone is encouraged to participate and share their scholarship. An MLIS student, or a library assistant, can present solo in a conference hall next to an Assistant Dean from a law school, on equal footing, with equal claim to the floor. There is something quietly radical about that. It tells you what kind of profession librarianship can be: one where standing is earned by showing up and contributing.

That ethos showed up in practical ways too. Staff from WebJunction, for example, presented on a new set of foundational skills courses built for library staff who don’t hold an MLIS degree. These are the people who keep circulation desks, tech help, and daily operations running. Having once trained student workers myself, I recognize what a resource this is: ready-to-go, accessible training that treats frontline staff as worth investing in. I found their catalog quite substantive; it is worth a look. 

The tone shifted a bit the next day at the President’s Program on invisible labor. The panel, which was part of the Learning Round Table’s slate, took on something every library worker recognizes and almost no one measures: the emotional support, crisis intervention, relationship building, and improvised tech help that make up so much of a shift, and that vanish the moment you try to write them into an annual report. The panelists named the work, but also pushed further, asking what happens once you make the work visible. That labor is relational, not transactional, which is why it resists counting. So how do you build it into strategic planning? How do you write it into a job description, let alone a performance evaluation, when its value is in the moment? I recognized this from my own desk shifts, where a five-minute question could turn into an hour of supportive listening about a custody hearing.

From the invisible work of staff, the conference moved to a session about spaces that try to work without any staff in the room at all, Architecting Access: Designing New and Existing Facilities for Unstaffed Self-Service. Architect Kate Michaud of MSR Design walked through the questions she hears most often from libraries designing for nontraditional hours, alongside Kelly Duran of Jefferson County Public Library, who manages the first fully unstaffed library branch in the U.S. and talked through how she got buy-in from administrators, boards, and staff. The room was packed, and full of pointed questions about whether extended, unstaffed hours quietly signal that staff aren’t needed at all.

I’m currently taking Advanced Information Architecture with Professor Virginia Tucker, and the overlap was hard to miss: good IA starts with user personas, mapping how different people actually move through a system and where they get stuck. Michaud and Duran were doing the physical space version of exactly that; thinking through who’s walking in at 5 a.m., what they need to feel oriented and safe without anyone at the desk, and how signage, layout, and registration flow have to do the work a staff member usually would. Patron orientation, security considerations, the architecture of access itself all take deliberate planning; none of it happens by accident. 

Architecture protects patrons, but who protects staff? A session on library safety reframed workplace risk as something staff already sense long before it’s written into a policy. Incident reports, Liliana Acevedo argued, flatten what actually happened into language too neutral to convey reality. Acevedo grounded the talk in a reminder that the gap between what staff experience and what gets acted on isn’t abstract. Her point was that risk assessment should listen to the people who are on the ground every day and already know. If staff safety is an issue of interest to you, the presenter’s slides are available here. 

Zooming out from staff risks, a session led by SJSU’s iSchool faculty and students presented on community book ecosystems, a model for closing “book deserts.”  As someone who grew up in Bulgaria in the late 1990s, on the receiving end of donated books and the kind of library programs the panel described, I know firsthand what this labor is actually for. Someone, somewhere, decided that access mattered enough to build, and someone else showed up to staff it, protect it, and keep it running.

The iSchool reception on Sunday closed out that third and final day for me. As a special session student, I find it means the world to make connections in person. The gathering was an opportunity to meet our dean and incoming director, catch up with professors between conversations, and talk with fellow students and alumni that I’d otherwise see only over Zoom. These are the relationships that make the program feel like a community. The posters were a highlight too, and I only wish I had time to see them all, the amazing work that my fellow colleagues are engaged in.  (And yes, obviously, great food. Thank you, iSchool; the cake was delicious.)

If you’ve read this far, I would like to leave you with something that you can put into practice as you journey through the MLIS degree and the current job market. The Library Support Staff Round Table at ALA advocates for staff still working on their MLIS degrees.  As an MLIS student and a library assistant, I appreciated being called a professional. Not paraprofessional, not allied professional, not adjunct. In a presentation on professional growth, Shaunterria Owens, LSSRT’s current chair, offered a winning recommendation for grant writing: I will learn skill A to launch service B that benefits community C. It’s a formula worth keeping in your back pocket for any funding application, or elevator pitch. It’s also a fitting note to end on since it is the same logic that the whole conference ran on: name the skill, name who it serves, and go build it (and keep the data to prove your worth).