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Last week I began my journey as a graduate student.  Three long years have passed since I graduated with my BA, and while I was proud of myself for putting in all the time and effort to get through the whole application process, I was also a little apprehensive.

After all, everything was new and different. I had just moved to Illinois from Iowa and didn’t know where anything was. I’d been out of school for a while – did I really remember how this school stuff worked? Also, grad students are formidable people, since they must have both intellect and drive to get accepted into selective programs. What would graduate school really be like with all those competitive, intelligent people together in such a small space?

However, my introduction into the world of graduate school has been without tragedy. So far I’ve figured out the bus routes, found all of my classrooms, and kept my head above water. I got to know my new coworkers within the Community Informatics Initiative, as well as some of the Fellows and Ph.D. students involved with CI. The Community Informatics Club also had its first activity of the year on Friday night — a big potluck party at Sharon Irish’s house with an opportunity to meet lots of others interested in CI — although in a more relaxed, friendly atmosphere. I had a great time, and most of the food was even vegetarian-friendly!

So, like a steam locomotive slowly gaining power and speed, grad school is starting to roll along for me. However, there is one thing that gives me pause: my classmates’ fear of asking questions. A coworker pointed out to me that in one of our classes only one student dared to speak up and ask for clarification on an assignment, although everyone was confused, which they admitted later. Why would something like this happen in a room full of intelligent, driven people who want to learn with an intelligent, helpful professor at the helm? I believe the answer is two-fold: 1) No one wants to look stupid, and 2) Perhaps incoming LIS grad students think that they should be able to figure out everything on their own, and it’s a sign of weakness to need help retrieving and/or interpreting information.

Yes, this is a long blog post…but it’s important.

Many of us dread looking stupid. The fact that we’re here shows that we prize education and count it as one of the most important things in our lives – otherwise we would not be incurring great debt, losing sleep, and eating 100 Pop-Tarts a month for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in order to cope with the demands of graduate school.

However, no question is stupid — questions help us learn. They help us grasp what we already understand and ascertain what we still need to figure out. If we do not ask, we can hope to find the answer later, but at what cost to our academic success and peace of mind? I hope that this is only a symptom of first-week jitters and that soon eager minds will inquire about any and all topics of interest in all of my classes. However, I am glad that I am reflecting on this now, at the beginning of the term, when I can review my purpose for being here and resolve to ask as many questions as I need to in order to get what I want out of my education and my time at U of I.

My paper with this title was accepted by the Midwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association for their annual meeting in Columbus, OH on October 4, 2009 (wish me luck with a 20-minute summary of the work. This will be a good test of what I learned in LIS 458 Instruction Design). This paper summarizes my findings from a research paper I developed for LIS 530BLE Health Science Information Services and Resources. My objectives were to identify information literacy skills in public health and librarian competency sets and to demonstrate that information literacy skills are being developed in the public health workforce through library-sponsored trainings.

I conducted a literature review which identified information literacy development trainings for state or local public health workers. Three trainings which improved either public health core or bioterrorism competencies were selected. Two tables were created for each training: one illustrates the relationship between training objectives and information literacy skills and the second table identifies the information literacy skills embedded in public health competencies.

My conclusion is that information-related trainings could be much more effective if librarians were involved in planning them. I found that librarians, public health workers and leaders in a minority community identified health issues and created information literacy skills trainings. In another training, the state library and health department used assessment data to teach workers how to use an online bibliographic database. Although librarians were not involved in another state health department training, the event improved information literacy skills. And the really interesting thing is that none of the trainings identified themselves as information literacy trainings although each training met the ALA information literacy criteria: find, retrieve, analyze and use [information].

About 25 of us gathered on a fairly warm and humid August evening to enjoy The Big Neighborhood Supper. Artist and GSLIS grad student Maggie Taylor worked hard all summer to collaboratively organize workshops, conceptualize a group gathering around local food and drink, and produce a meal in a lovely setting. She pulled it off, and then some! Another GSLIS grad student, Susan Rodgers, led one of the workshops with Tom Abrams, about community gardens and foraging. At that event, I learned about purslane and the nutritional benefits of cattails. Other GSLIS grad students brought their produce to share for the meal last night. In Maggie’s back yard, we sat around home-made tables from discarded lumber found in an alley; set with 60-year-old china, vases of flowers from Rachel’s garden; placemats made from photos of local fruits, vegetables, and chickens; decorated with fabric and candles hanging in trees; and sprigs of herbs on each place setting. We all pitched in to prepare the food, and what food! Pesto and bread (thanks, Pekara!), chilled cucumber soup, salad greens with sweetpea currant tomatoes, grilled veggies, vegetable frittata, and half cantalopes filled with mint ice cream and warm plums. WOW. Almost everything was local, grown by the people who came to the meal. The four children, three dogs, and many adults were quite content when I left at 9:30 pm. We shared memories of food production and I met many new people, or got better acquainted with people who have been around as long as I have, but I haven’t talked to much. (Three of us were 56!) Thanks SO much, Maggie and all BNS participants!

I just got in from THATCamp Austin 2009, a program organized in conjunction with the 2009 Society of American Archivists meeting at the University of Texas. I helped lead a really great discussion on digital humanities, digital inequalities and community archives. One discussion I thought was particularly interesting was one about control in a digital age. The point was made that in a post-object digital world community control changes because things can be re-mixed quite easily once it’s out on the open-web. However, I pointed out that copyright is still an obstacle. Who controls copyright is who controls content and this control remains by and large in the hands of large, alien corporations. And the problem is fairly wide-spread. How much community control can truly be exerted in a clearly corporate program such as Flickr? In what cases would this matter for a community archives?

We also discussed digital humanities and digital inequalities. This is something that bothers me. I’m not a big fan of the term “digital humanities.” Why not something like digital humanity? Is there a reason we need this terminology except to mark this new field as clearly tied to the academy? On that note, I must say I am somewhat ambivalent about the fairly stark divide within LIS (at least here at UIUC) between people who look at questions of scholarly community and scholarly issues and those who look at community informatics. On the one hand I fear this divide in research and teaching perpetuates a university-public divide that I am uncomfortable with. On the other hand I recognize that we need some way to reasonably organize ourselves into communities of interest. Much of my thinking these days comes back to interdisciplinarity and collaboration. If anyone knows of any great works on this subject, especially in relation to community informatics, I would love to know of these works.

Finally, we discussed collaborative digitization in an international context. I brought up the fact that there are vendors such as Aluka (now part of JSTOR) and Alexander Street Press that are going around the so-called Global South (i.e. Mozambique, Brazil, various parts of the Caribbean, Timbuktu), digitizing what could be called community archives of these places and then charging research libraries around the world for access to these materials. In other words this digital content is NOT available to all – it is only available to those who can pay for it. One could argue (as the vendors do) that they make almost no money off of this – it is simply the only way they can afford to provide this service. But who is being served? I would argue it is not the communities from which this content comes; rather it is American and European researchers interested in advancing American and European scholarship on the Global South. I have some serious concerns with this model. One of the participants at THATCamp called it library imperialism – I wouldn’t go that far, but it does raise some serious issues about capitalism, libraries. international issues and information policy. I would argue that community informatics should take a stand on issues such as these as they are, in my opinion, symptomatic of the abuses that occur when an increasingly digital “Global North” begins taking what it needs/wants from communities in a “Global South” that lack the digital infrastructure to support these programs on their own. There is certainly a place for discussions of digital inequalities and community informatics around this topic.

What follows are some often rambly reflections on a number of CI-related topics:

On Saturday, July 18th, a handful of GSLIS students from the Society of American Archivists, UIUC student chapter, and the Community Informatics Club, and a few interested non-students from the Champaign-Urbana area traveled to nearby Mahomet to check out the Doris Hoskins Archives on Cultural Diversity, housed at the Early American Museum after the passing of Ms. Hoskins a few years ago. This archives represents a form of a community archives. As defined by Commanet (Community Archives Network), a community archives is defined by the following points:

• the community creates its own archive
• the community has editorial control over its archive
• the community owns the copyright in its archive

This description partially fits the Doris Hoskins’ collection. Although the collection emerged in a somewhat collective manner, it was first largely directed, collected, organized and controlled by a single woman, Doris Hoskins. The collection was acquired by Ms. Hoskins throughout her life, but was especially supported by a partnership with the Early American Museum that began in the early 1990s. The “community” in question is the African-American community of north Champaign, which supported Ms. Hoskins with staff, support for the production of a newsletter and in the creation of exhibits from her collection. People from the community gave Ms. Hoskins their material because they saw here as collecting and preserving, in the words of one  community member, “our stories.” However, now that Ms. Hoskins has passed on the collection has traveled to the Early American Museum, which struggles to keep her legacy alive in the community and to continue to build upon the collection in a respectful and useful manner.

At our first meeting with Cheryl Kennedy, Early American Museum director, we learned about the history of the collection, how it was acquired, the issues faced (including copyright and community control) and brainstormed about how GSLIS students could help further the mission of this archives. Furthermore, how can we make this collection more “collective?”

We will be returning to the Early American Museum on Saturday, September 12th in the afternoon. All are welcome to participate. Our current plans on that day are to on that day begin developing electronic inventories of the collection that can be placed on the Early American Museum’s website, identify preservation needs and identify portions of the collection that can be digitized without worrying about copyright or personal privacy violations. The goal of digitization will be to enable people at, especially, the Douglas Branch library in Champaign access, add to, comment upon and use the archives in a creative way. Possible software for these purposes include Omeka, http://omeka.org/, and Commanet, http://www.commanet.org/slideShow.aspx. Other ideas are greatly appreciated.

In terms of community informatics, a secondary question is how can we collectivize the archives through the use of digital technology. In the United Kingdom, where the community archives movement originated, much of the recent activity in community archives has heavily relied on the use of new technologies to enable community control and direction in a way that the analog world makes more difficult to achieve. For examples of this phenomenon, see the National Archives, UK’s report Community Access to Archives -
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/partnerprojects/caap/,
the blog of the grant-funded project out of University College London led by Andrew Flinn, Community Archives and Identities -
http://archivesandidentities.com/,
the national directory of community archives – http://www.communityarchives.org.uk/,
the Commanet site – http://www.commanet.org/English/Tutorials/WhatIsComma.htm.

Community archives have existed in the U.K., as well as in South Africa and Canada and probably elsewhere, for many years, yet there is a palpable sense that their numbers are mushrooming as digital technology and a somewhat sympathic archival community support their development, funding and resource sharing. Community archives have to a great degree changed the notion of what archives should be and what they should do. In South Africa, a special issue of S.A. Archives journal in 1998 (available through EBSCO) explored how community archives have reoriented the archival profession there. More recently, in the U.K. Victor Gray, president of the British Society of Archivists in his presidential address in 2007 explored how community archives have thoroughly re-orienated the archival profession in the U.K. (found in “‘Who’s that Knocking on Our Door?’:
Archives, Outreach and Community”, Journal of the Society of Archivsts, 29, 1, April 2008).

A new book to be released in August seeks to investigate some of these issues in the American context: Community Archives – The Shaping of Memory. http://www.studia.no/node/5124266. The book is co-edited by Jeanette Bastian who has explored community archives related issues in her story of the U.S. Virgin Islanders’ loss of control over their archival heritage, Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History.

The question we as students interested in community informatics should be asking is how much are we changing and challenging the professional orientation of our respective information fields. Community informatics is a separate field from librarianship science, archival science, etc., which has benefits in terms of disciplinary independence. Yet it has drawbacks in that it doesn’t challenge directly the professions of librarianship or archival science. A more controversial term, such as community archives, has the potential to offer a full-frontal attack on previously unspoken professional biases in the definition of what an “archives” is or could be. Community informatics is often spoken about as a research area, yet how can we also interpret is a professional field. Does community informatics train people to be community informaticians? Community informatics has staked a place for itself within the academy – has it also staked a place for itself within the professional communities? These are some questions that interest me…

For example, in 2006 the Centre for Community Networking Research in Prato hosted a conference with the theme Constructing and sharing memory : community informatics, identity and empowerment (proceedings available for purchase or through Interlibrary Loan) that featured a number of papers related to community archives – including one by our very own Kate Williams!  – http://www.ccnr.net/node/71. This was an extremely important conference, yet I would doubt that it has had much impact on the archival community. How do we both support the development of community informatics as a separate field and nurture its integration into well-established fields of practice?

I just met Mary L. Gray and heard her talk about her new book, Out in the Country (NYU Press, 2009). She spent about three years living in smallish towns in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, as a participant observer of LGBTQ youth. The subtitle of her book is “Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.” She told a story of young people driving for over an hour to meet at a regional Wal-Mart, one of the few places open 24 hours, to dress in drag in the store, show off their outfits, photograph each other and then upload the photos, with the final upload culminating the event. The photography and the posting of the photos to the web was key to the ways in which they created space for themselves. While she talked about the negative images of “rural” that folks in less populous places have to work against–from the bumpkin-ness of “The Beverly Hillbillies” to the violence and hatefulness of “Deliverance” to the bleakness of “Brokeback Mountain”–she suggested that for most rural youth the Internet was less of an escape than a place of connection. Further, that the connections on- and off-line had a continuity that helps support a young person’s identity explorations, since there are so few models of “how to be trans” or “what gayness in a small town looks like.” Mary gave me a whole new understanding of the 1972 film by John Boorman, “Deliverance”–a movie I watched once and never cared to think about much after that–and also of Ang Lee’s 2005 movie, “Brokeback Mountain.” Apparently gay youth in small town USA did not find the homophobic violence believable, nor did they accept the opinion of the Heath Ledger character in “Brokeback Mountain” that two men living together just would not work in their towns. She stressed that living in rural America is in marked contrast to that in big cities, but small towns discriminate differently, not necessarily more. Definitely a book to buy and read. Thanks, Mary!

Sharon Irish, CII Project Coordinator, and UI history professor Leslie Reagan are co-teaching a course for first-year students in the Fall of 2009 called “Art Creativity Diversity.” We’ll have about 18 students just starting at the University of Illinois and together we will explore a wide variety of cultural events in Champaign-Urbana. The funding comes from the Mellon Foundation for a three-year pilot curriculum-based arts initiative through the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.  This is the second year of the grant.

Here’s the amazing thing: the funding pays for attendance at concerts, plays, operas, and dance performances at Krannert Center. Free, for the whole semester! We will meet twice a week, but one of those meetings will be an art event of some sort. We’ll do walking tours of campus and community art, museum visits, potluck discussions with working artists, in addition to the Krannert Center trove of offerings. The class will focus on the important issues and values associated with diversity and the creative process in the context of our lives and experiences. Leslie and Sharon hope to invite class members to create some art of their own, so stay tuned!

This past April, Melissa Martinez participated on the Sustaining the Cyberlife of Chicago’s Ethnic Communities Panel for eChicago 2009 Cybernavigating our Cultures at Dominican University. She presented on the archival project that is underway between the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. The goal of this project is to digitally archive materials from the Puerto Rican Cultural Center that have been generated and published by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and its institutions. The materials selected to be part of this project were transferred to the Special Collections Department at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the early winter months of 2009.

One thousand images will be digitized and made available online to the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, the Paseo Boricua community, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researchers and others during this project. Ms. Martinez discussed how the project gave Chicago’s Paseo Boricua community control in creating this digital archival collections and the role this project has in the cyber sustainability of the community during her presentation.

The project can be viewed at the following link:
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_uic_prcc.php?CISOROOT=/uic_

The fifth annual Community as Intellectual Space symposium was held June 12-14, 2009, on Division Street in Chicago’s Paseo Boricua neighborhood. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Critical Pedagogy and Community Building.” Co-organized by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) and the Community Informatics Initiative (CII) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the symposium also had significant support from DePaul University, Universidad del Turabo, Northern Illinois University, Pedro Albizu Campos High School, Indiana University, and several other UIUC units. Critical pedagogy is an approach that challenges dominant mainstream practices and beliefs while encouraging students traditionally disenfranchised in the educational system to become critically conscious of their own cultures and histories. The three-day symposium explored how different organizations can come together in solidarity to transform communities through dialogue. This year’s symposium was packed with panels and workshops highlighting the importance and the role of critical pedagogy in the Chicago neighborhood around Paseo Boricua.

Antonia Darder, UIUC professor in the Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a Studies Departments, was the keynote speaker. Darder is a leading scholar in the field of critical pedagogy. Her written works include Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy Of Love and The Critical Pedagogy Reader: Second Edition (co-edited with Marta P. Baltodano and Rodolfo Torres.)  Dr. Darder delivered a thoughtful and emotional speech on the importance of critical pedagogy within educational structures.

Saturday morning highlighted the usage of critical pedagogy at the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School (PACHS) in Chicago. Both students and teachers from PACHS, along with Ida Roldán of the Institute for Clinical Social Work, Troy Harden, faculty member at Chicago State University, John Fritsche, chair of the Department of Education at Illinois College, and Michelle Torrise, a recent graduate of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, presented thoughts on the empowerment of critical consciousness and education.

The afternoon session began with two workshops on “Engaging the Community as a Locus of Knowledge.” These workshops highlighted several ongoing projects between the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and the CII at the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science, including efforts to catalog the center’s library using LibraryThing. Afterwards, Laura Ruth Johnson and several of her students from Northern Illinois University presented on community-based research practices and experiences on Paseo Boricua. Graduate students in Dr. Johnson’s course worked at a local café and learned about traditional Puerto Rican music, for example. The students on the panel shared what they had learned and how community engagement had transformed their research experience.

Ann Bishop, director of CII, led a panel on community inquiry and informatics with Victor Benitez and Licia Knight. The panelists discussed their experiences working in and with the Paseo Boricua. A Café Teatro Batey Urbano performance entitled “Crime Against Humanity” followed, rounding out Saturday’s events. “Crime Against Humanity” is a play depicting the struggles and joys of several Puerto Rican political prisoners’ lives behind bars. The play is based on interviews with released prisoners.

Artist Pablo Marcano, who was visiting from Gurabo, Puerto Rico, opened Sunday’s events with a video of a recent art project of his in which the homes in a hillside village in Puerto Rico were repainted with Caribbean colors to reflect the town’s heritage. Earlier in the conference, on Friday, Mr. Marcano opened an exhibit of his bold, bright paintings at the Institute of Puerto Rican Art and Culture in Humboldt Park. Mr. Marcano traveled to Urbana-Champaign following the conclusion of the symposium to examine a site where (later this year) he will begin installing a mural.

Sunday’s events also included several panels on critical inquiry and community health; critical engagement; critical literacy; and asset-based community service learning. Howard Rosing, Executive Director of the Community-Based Service Learning Program at DePaul University, and Marisol Morales, Associate Director of the Community-Based Service Learning Program, highlighted how an asset-based community service learning model can produce more collaborative and long-lasting relationships among students, faculty, universities, and communities.

The panels were followed by a short documentary, produced by graduate student Alexandra Cavallaro and Ph.D. student Patrick W. Berry from UIUC. The documentary showed how students from Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago used creativity and life experience to learn in an urban environment.

The symposium came to a conclusion mid-Sunday afternoon following a short reflection in which symposium goers were able to share their thoughts and feelings about what they learned and saw over the course of the three days. The symposium brought together about 100 people. While feedback was generally positive, one suggestion for future conferences was representative: set aside time for an “unconference, where the agenda is set by the participants.”

We are in the process of compiling a multimedia archive of the conference, so stay tuned!