7 Comments
Jan 15Liked by jane c. hu

The job interview to become a public defender in Minnesota requires you to explain your personal philosophy on all of these exact issues in detail. Loved hearing yours, not enough people talk about this stuff publicly.

Expand full comment

I just wanted to let you know I had several interesting conversations with people this week because of your newsletter

Expand full comment
author

thank you elinor -- that means so much to me! 🧡 (p.s. please give fen a pat from me)

Expand full comment

omg you know about Fen! I will, he appreciates all his fans : )

Expand full comment

I am in awe of how serendipitous this issue is - I just signed up last week to start volunteering again with a similar organization in Chicago. In many ways, I think organizations like this (and my money and/or time) contributes more to the ideological sharing of information more than any of the professional librarian work I've done, and since that's why I got into the field in the first place I keep donating. Thank you for sharing, and adding nuance to incredibly complicated ethical issues.

Expand full comment
author

oh hey that's awesome! it's so hard to measure impact — i am positive your professional work has had impacts you'll never hear about! — but i feel like this volunteering is certainly reaching a different population, and one that might not otherwise have much access to info. in any case i imagine the org you're volunteering with is happy to have your time and your expertise! (i sometimes wonder if i'd be more helpful if i knew anything about the library sciences...)

Expand full comment

I don't know - I have a whole book somewhere inside of me about impact and the types of libraries I've worked at (never public, which I think would be a different story), but that being said I think I can almost guarantee that academic study in the library sciences wouldn't add very much on top of the expertise you already have as an academic and a reader, ha. If anything, I'd recommend a continuing education class in readers' advisory - U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Library Juice Academy both have great (and somewhat reasonably priced) classes, and I would bet a lot of money UW does too if you ever wanted to explore that side of things?

Expand full comment