This I Believe

I arrived in the United States as a preschooler with my Anglo-Indian, Cold War bride mother, trailing my Italian-American father out of a plane full of military personnel onto the freezing tarmac of Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts. Since that moment, I have been a half-American, half-English, immigrant, third-culture, multi-ethnic girl and then woman, belonging in two countries and cultures but never fully at home in either, embracing my South Asian heritage even as many in my family refused to fully do so, and most importantly welcoming every educational and professional opportunity available to me in the United States and beyond.

All the facets of my intersectionality, which grew over time to include being the child of a low-income, single, immigrant mother in a rural state where we were othered; my own neurodiversity in the form of ADHD and Autism; and being the parent of a child with a disability, have shown me the incredible beauty in diversity and the importance and value of not only treating others with empathy and respect, but also showing them that I see them even when others do not. Crucially, my deeply personal understanding of every person’s distinct and important individuality helps me respect their need to be seen in their full intersectionality at a level that is comfortable to them.

This respect and understanding of individual intersectionality and ability powerfully aligns with the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) (2021) Professional Ethics statement #9, which drives me to strive for cultural humility in my own practice with a clear understanding that, when I am working with any patron, I am not the most important person in the interaction and that I have much to learn from the individual in front of me even as I use my professional expertise to guide them to information that is theirs by right of being a library patron. The ALA’s Professional Ethics statements #1 and #2 (2021) and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL’s) Standards for Libraries in Higher Education, specifically Professional Values, Educational Role, Discovery, and Collections (2017) state that every person has the right to freely access information in the library and that equally, this right does not allow them to curtail others’ access to information. Furthermore, while both the ALA and the ACRL allow individuals to decide what information they will access, these guidelines mandate that librarians working within those principles must ensure the information accessed is reliable, thorough, and offers a range of views so that anyone in the library can make an informed decision about what information they need and use (ALA, 2021; ACRL 2017).

It is not up to me to judge individuals or the information they need, in accordance with the ALA’s ethics statement #7 (2021). It is, however, up to me to see every patron as a unique individual who is different to any other patron, to place their information needs at the highest level of importance, and to provide them with diverse and reputable information regardless of any pressure applied to me, to them, or to libraries as a whole. This, I believe.

References

Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). (2017). Standards for libraries in higher education. https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries

American Library Association (ALA). (2021). Professional ethics. https://www.ala.org/tools/ethics