My ideas hardly ever come out clearly defined. Usually, they tend to be a scattered, amorphous glob of thoughts, like noodles dropped on the floor. And it’s not unusual for my ideas to come from unlikely circumstances or, what I think are, completely mundane moments. Sometimes it takes days, weeks, months, or years for an idea or a thing to be… a something.
The Library Cat is one of those somethings. It took nearly eight years for it to get where it is today. Originally, it began as a conversation in a classroom before turning into a website on public libraries, library literacy, information accessibility, and educational resources. Almost a decade went by before it became “a something.”
So when, where, how, and why did it start?
Locke and Key
[Scene: My second year at Florida State University as an Ethnomusicology doctoral student, sitting in Dr. Denise Von Glahn’s graduate seminar on Historical Musicology. Action.]
I sat at a conference table with a handful of other grad students. We talked and readied ourselves for the lecture as Dr. Von Glahn situated herself at the head of the table.
“Good morning, everyone. Today, we’re going to talk about Public Musicology.”
“What’s that?”
Public musicology, or public (insert academic field), is when members of higher ed or an educational institute engage with the public and share research or intellectually stimulating material with them.
My eyes bugged out of my head. Really?! I was going to love this lecture!
I grew up in a small, low income community and often worked with people who never went to college or had limited access to higher education. But despite our educational differences and the different paths we had taken, we always bonded over music. It connected us and exposed our shared interests and experiences.
I knew my friends and coworkers back home in Ohio would love our seminars, and this, public musicology, was the connection! Here was the opportunity to bring us and the public together and share our interests and research with so many people beyond the walls of our seminar room.
But my excitement faded, something didn’t feel right. Here we were, sitting behind a locked door, away from the public, talking about how we were going to engage with it. And on top of that, the room was in FSU’s College of Music library, which was locked electronically and required an ID to access it. Lock upon lock upon lock.
Were we locking ourselves in or were we locking the public out?
Publish or Perish
Our conversation made me think about where and how we were expected to share our research. To be recognized in a research-based community, you need to publish your work in academic, peer-reviewed journals for other academics to read. Academic exponential analysis.
And you need to publish a lot…or else. It’s affectionately referred to as “publish or perish.”
But we rarely talked about publishing in non-academic resources, which is why I was so excited now. The focus was always on academics talking to other academics (I’m not trying to excoriate the system that exists in these higher institutions, these were just my experiences with it).
But the public could read our work in these journals and academic sources if they wanted to, right?
Well, it depends on the publisher’s restrictions to the content. Is it freely available to the public? Are public readers willing to pay for a subscription/membership so that they can access and read the information if it’s not free?
Ironically, even university students run into these issues. More than once, I couldn’t access articles because my school didn’t subscribe to the journals I needed. Or, I hit the “Moving Wall,” which is when publishers don’t share current issues of their journal online, “encouraging” readers to “reference” the physical journal instead.
So, why were we talking about public engagement when we were locked away in a room and library that wasn’t exactly easy for the public to access? Did we need to publish in an academic journal to be recognized for our work? What if our interviewees and those sharing their knowledge with us couldn’t access what we wrote about them? Were there other options that we weren’t talking about?
What were they?
Finding Different Paths
Dr. Von Glahn loved creative solutions. I always admired that about her. What would she say if I brought this up?
Could I take another route?
Silence. Darkness devoured the room. Torches were lit. The Tritone Tribunal was summoned.
It was a lot less dramatic and fiery, actually (cool image though). A few days later, she passed me in the hall and said, “Pete, I’ve been thinking about what you said in class. You’ve got a point. Does it have to be that way?”
How could we champion ourselves as educators if our work was largely inaccessible to so many people? If we were advocating public musicology, or any kind of academic engagement with the public, how would that be achieved? What did it look like?
Did people outside colleges and universities know about our conversations? Did anyone else know how much knowledge was available to them or had they tuned out because they believed it was beyond their reach? Were there resources already available to the public that they didn’t know about? What were they? How could they find them? How could I find them?
Why did I have such a strong reaction to this? Why was I deviating from the traditional path so many others followed?
Thoughts of my home town and coworkers certainly played a role in this… as did the music I listened to and studied.
My research was…different. I studied Heavy Metal and the communities that birthed and sustained it. DIY, deviance, carnival, and subversion, baby. While some of my classmates talked to other scholars or composers for their research, I was on different trajectory.
The Gwar-B-Q
In 2015, I went to the Gwar-B-Q in Richmond, Virginia for my dissertation. I was studying Gwar and had gotten a press pass to photograph performances and interview members of the band. After walking around Hadad’s Lake and watching some of the other acts, I found myself talking to Maryann, a music journalist, and her photographer, Cricket. Maryann was a roadie, researcher, writer, and metalhead – I became green with envy (and Gwar spew) the more we talked and hung out.
Maryann mentioned she was working on an article about the band Corrosion of Conformity and was at the Gwar-B-Q doing fieldwork, just like me. Her latest interviewee? The mother of one of the guys in the band.
“Yeah, she invited me over to her house and we hung out on her front porch drinking Mountain Dew and just talked… she even showed me some of the band’s original gear from when they were starting out. I got some really cool shots of the original mic stand.”
Now, here I was, a doctoral student, working on my own research to contribute to academia. But Maryann was doing exactly what I wanted to do – interviewing musicians, talking to their mothers, going to festivals, and writing about it. But, she wasn’t worried about social theory and she wasn’t submitting her article to a peer-reviewed journal. It was going to be accessible and digestible for the public, in print and online, along with Cricket’s photos.
That’s public accessibility. That’s what I wanted.
Germination
So, can someone who isn’t a member of a higher ed community access the information that’s produced there? Can the public even access these spaces? How can someone who can’t afford college gain access to it? Is it available to someone who’s exploring a new career path? How can someone, who’s curious just for the sake of being curious, access this material to feed their interests and keep their mind sharp and in shape?
It’s benevolent and naive to think that articles, books, and resources are all freely available to anyone who’s curious and hungry to learn. I’d love to believe that anyone can access anything and engage with a topic that fascinates them. But barriers and obstacles exist.
I know this because I’ve experienced them.
What if these obstacles discourage someone’s academic success and crushes their growth? Is there a way to connect people, public and academic, with the resources they need?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
In 2017, I finished my doctoral coursework and moved back home to Ohio, where I worked at a perennial nursery. It was an industry that was about as far away as I could get from a college campus and the burn out I had gone through there.
Now, I was surrounded by friends and coworkers, the same people with whom I had been told I should engage and share my research. And as always, we were surrounded by our music.
What about my dissertation and my degree? It remained on my mind for months but, in the end, I never returned to it. And probably never will. And I’m ok with that.
But even so, something still stirred in me. The seeds that were sown behind those locked doors were germinating. A “something” was ready to break the surface.
Skeleton Key
And here we are. Those experiences fueled the Library Cat – a site committed to information accessibility, public libraries, library literacy, and connecting you with resources and tools to support your continued education and success.
It’s no secret that college education grows increasingly more expensive each year, leaving good, curious, bright people to find ways to fund their education or leaving them behind altogether. Should you go into debt for a college degree? Do you need a degree to follow your path? Are there alternatives? What are they?
This site is designed in response to these obstacles and concerns. I’ve run into some of these problems myself while friends, family, and coworkers have told me about others.
- I can’t afford college right now but I want to keep learning. I don’t know what to do. How can I continue my education? What resources or programs are out there?
- I’m working on a project and my research keeps hitting roadblocks. How can I overcome them to get the information I need?
- I’m a teacher and am having trouble finding resources for my students. Where can I go for help? How can I foster their passion for learning?
- What public spaces are available to me where I can get together with people in my community and learn a new skill or share my experiences?
- Who still uses libraries? The world is so digital now, everything I want is online. What does my library have to offer? Why should I use it? What role does my library play in my community? Or my life?
No matter what brought you here, we’re going answer questions like these and so much more. It might be at your library or it might be somewhere you’d never thought to look. But we’ll find out, nonetheless.
Why?
Mission
Why am I doing this? I’m not a trained librarian. I never even enrolled in an MLIS. I’d like to clear about that. I’m definitely not trying to be deceptive about my credentials or experiences.
But I am an educator. And I am one of millions who have benefited from libraries and the resources they offered to me as a child, student, teacher, researcher, and life-long learner. I’ve lived, learned, and experienced the possibilities that exist there.
I’m a product of libraries. I want to share that with you and I want you to experience them as I have.
I want you to learn. No matter who you are or where life has taken you, I want you to be excited about learning and growing. Be curious and find the answers. I want you to succeed.
You shouldn’t be left out of an intellectual community if you’re driven by your curiosity, creativity, imagination, and desire for learning. Don’t be discouraged because you can’t “afford to learn” or because you don’t know where to go when you’re curious.
We’re here to find a way to make it happen.
Get inspired. Be driven. You’re going to succeed. Follow the path to your destination. You have every right to follow it – to learn and grow. We’re going to get you where you’re going.
We’re going to make it happen.
Here. Now. Today. Ready?
Like what you read? If you’d like to see more posts like this on other topics, please consider donating to the Library Cat and supporting the site and my work. Thanks for reading!
