The Joy of Doing Things Badly by Veronica Chambers

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author of Marisol and Magdalena...

Favcrite quote from this book is from the chapter "A word or two or three about rejection:"

"On the first day, I could cry as much as I wanted. On the second day, I could cry, but I had to get out of the house. On the third day, I could cry, but I had to do something to get back on the horse..."

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So ALA sent out their email to invite members to come to ALA Annual in Chicago this year, and they selected five sessions to highlight. Ours is one of them!   As the US struggles with an onslaught of book banning like we have not seen in my lifetime, our project, the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians , aims to get ahead of what we expect to come next: local battles over the existence of public and community college libraries. In fact, this battle has already begun, with some community college libraries in my state losing up to 2/3rds of their former staffing levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. We are right on time. This concern about defending libraries launched my research on understanding data storytelling in librarianship, with a pilot project in 2019 funded by the Center for Social & Behavioral Science at the University of Illinois--an article on obstacles to library data storytelling is in press with Public Library Quarterly, likely to be published in summer 2023. ...
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