The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Author: Kayo Denda

  • AADC Reunion Visit to Douglass Library

    Two people sit at a table, smiling and holding an open yearbook.
    Barbara Gray Nicholson, a 1950 graduate of the New Jersey College for Women, with Kayo Denda at Douglass Library.

    On June 6, during the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College reunion, multiple alumnae visited Douglass Library. As an indication of the meaning Douglass Library holds for Douglass alumnae, the library is consistently an option on the reunion’s list of activities.  

    The highlight of this year’s visit was Barbara Gray Nicholson, a 1950 graduate of the New Jersey College for Women (NJC), which later became Douglass College. While at NJC, she met her husband, a Rutgers College of Agriculture student, also from the class of 1950. They married after graduation, settling in North Carolina, where she lived from 1956 to 2019, studied library science, and worked in a small public library. For the last five years, she has lived in Nebraska, close to her son.

    Nicholson talked about visiting the library, then located in the basement of Recitation Hall (now Ruth Adams Hall, having been renamed in honor of a former Douglass College dean), and about the professors she admired. They include renowned English constitutional law historian Margaret Judson and seeds specialist Jessie Gladys Fiske, who later became chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. She had fond memories of the dances on campus, through which she met her husband, and the old Packing Box gym next to Voorhees Chapel with an open floor furnace. The students in the mandatory modern dance class had to dance gingerly, navigating around the metal fence surrounding the opening, to avoid getting burns. 

  • Transforming Health Professional Education and Service Delivery for A Gender Non-Conforming Community

    Transgender patients experience discrimination in health care and encounter difficulty in finding compassionate health care professionals. In order to transform health professional education and service delivery for a diverse gender non-conforming community, Dr. Jeremy Sinkin, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, RWJMS created the video Masculinizing gender-affirming chest contouring surgery to address this issue. The video is now hosted in SOAR: Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers and can be shared broadly, increasing its reach. Other co-investigators of this project are Dr. Gloria Bachmann, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, RWJMS, Dr. Ian Marshall Associate Professor of Pediatrics, RWJMS, Kayo Denda, Head, Margery Somers Foster Center & Librarian for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, New Brunswick Libraries, and Mark Schuster, Dean of Graduate Student Life. The project was supported by the Rutgers – RBHS – IDEA Innovation Grant (2020-2021).   

    Dr. Sinkin and his colleagues are planning to create other videos on the topics of Gender Affirming Surgery (top and bottom), Hormonal Affirmation Therapy, Preferred Pronouns, Psychological and Social Well-being, Inclusivity, Sexual Transmitted diseases, and Addiction. The videos will be shared with the RBHS community educating health care providers.  The project partners are the PROUD (Promoting Respect, Outreach, Understand and Dignity) Center of NJ, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the Rutgers University Libraries, and the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.  

    The interdisciplinary group working on this video project collaborates in other projects, including the monthly Babs Siperstein Humanities & Medicine Seminars – Focus on Transgender and also hosted the colloquium  “Affirming Medical and Mental Health Care for LGBTQAL+ Communities” (February 25-26, 2021).  

  • On the Impact of a Casual Conversation

    Kayo and student
    Noah Mac and I during New Student Orientation at Carr Library.

    One never thinks that a casual conversation with a librarian at Rutgers Day might impact a student’s decision to come to Rutgers University, but this is one such example.

    Noah Mac, RU ’21 and I met for the first time during the cool morning of 2017 Rutgers Day. Noah and his father were among the many visitors to the Rutgers University Libraries table in front of the Art Library. I engaged in a conversation with them and learned that they were visiting from Michigan. The visit was important for Noah, a high school senior, as he was in the process of selecting the college where he was to spend the next four years. After a friendly conversation that included information on the 250-year history of Rutgers and library services available for undergraduate students, I often wondered which college Noah ended up attending, especially because Michigan has so many options of state universities with great academic standings.

    It was a great pleasure for me to meet Noah for the second time in August 2018, when he was attending the New Student Orientation at Carr Library. He mentioned that the Rutgers Day conversation in 2017 had made a very positive impact on his decision in coming to Rutgers. Unexpectedly, Noah and I met for the third time during the 2019 New Student Orientation at Carr Library. This time, Noah was an orientation leader with the New Student Orientation and Family Programs guiding the incoming student groups from one event to another. After talking about his successful first year at Rutgers, Noah mentioned to me that the story he tells his group of incoming students, My Rutgers Story, includes “a librarian whom he met on Rutgers Day” who made him feel “not just another number,” impacting his decision!

    Noah will be majoring in microbiology and in addition to his academic endeavors has other talents, including that of being a trumpet performer in the Rutgers Marching Band. He is certainly very talented, as he was one of the five trumpet performers (among 35 or so) to be selected to travel with the band to a football game in Ann Arbor, MI against University of Michigan in fall 2019. He is delighted to go back to his home state as a member of Rutgers Marching Band representing the university.

  • Notes on 2017 WLIC, 83rd IFLA General Conference and Assembly

    Notes on 2017 WLIC, 83rd IFLA General Conference and Assembly

    • Printing press gnome . Wroclaw is famous for its small bronze gnomes scattered around the city. Each has a theme and it started representing a protest movement in the 1980s. There are 400 or so of them in the city. Credit: Kayo Denda.

    The 2017 IFLA WLIC took place in Wroclaw, a lovely city in the southwestern region of Poland from 19 to 25 August, 2017. With the theme Libraries. Solidarity. Society, the congress brought together thousands of representatives of the library field. IFLA’S Global Vision brainstorming that started earlier this year in Athens, Greece continued in Wroclaw, and as Donna Scheeder, IFLA President expressed, the delegates got together “to explore how a connected library field can meet the challenges of the future. Hopefully the final report will be released soon. Library staff around the world will be encouraged to vote supporting (or not) the document when the final draft is released.

    One of the highlights of the congress for me was the Social Science Libraries one-day workshop titled Understanding Your Library from the Inside Out: A Workshop in Library Ethnography for User Assessment. Our workshop leader was Celia Emmelhainz, Anthropology and Qualitative Research Librarian from UC Berkeley and our keynote speaker was Lynn Silipigny Connaway, Senior Research Scientist and Director of User Research at OCLC. We were very fortunate to hold the workshop in a brand new library facility at Wroclaw University Library. The workshop, capped at thirty participants, attracted participants from twelve countries affiliated with eleven IFLA units, and eight librarians from the host institution also joined the workshop. Through hands on exercises, we learned the importance of qualitative assessment of library services in capturing the behaviors of elusive library users. These rich and nuanced data provides important information to support decisions about resources and services. Despite her busy schedule during the congress, Dee Magnoni was able to join us at the workshop. So did Kay Cassell, faculty emerita from SC&I, LIS.

    Qualitative assessment was mentioned a few times during the congress. Jim Neal, the ALA President, stressed the importance for the libraries to depart from simple statistics collection and focus on the context and relationships beyond the numbers. The ethnography in libraries was also mentioned in Dona Scheeder’s remarks during the congress opening. Clearly the library leaders recognize the need to go beyond the numbers to gain access to rich and meaningful information in order to shape future direction of libraries.

    Organizing this workshop in Wroclaw while in New Jersey was extremely challenging. I was fortunate to work with Grażyna Piotrowicz, Director of Wroclaw University Libraries, who shared her local knowledge and invaluable insights with me. I was also assisted by Rutgers University Libraries/Rutgers University colleagues who put me in touch with key individuals and provided significant administrative assistance. It really took a village to make the ethnographic workshop successful!

    Kayo Denda
    Head, Margery Somers Foster Center & Women’s Studies Librarian
    Former Chair of IFLA, Social Science Libraries Section