Reflections on One Year of Map Librarianship
By Maggie Tarmey
It’s been one year since I began my first academic librarian job at UCLA as a Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian, Liaison to Geography, Maps, and Economics. That title is a mouthful! In practice and based on the work that I do, I consider myself a map librarian who wears lots of additional hats. It’s been a year of learning and of many surprises. My office flooded at one point, but I also co-organized an event that reached students on multiple continents. I got my first outright paper rejection from a journal, but I also supervised six incredible student workers across two different roles. I’ve learned so much, and have pulled out four key things that I wish I knew when I started.
Lessons learned
Time moves differently
One of the most unexpected challenges has been the move from thinking about projects and research in discrete, ten-week academic quarters to thinking about projects on years-long timelines. In the fall of 2023 I designed and began an inventory of one portion (approximately 100,000 individual sheets) of the UCLA map collection, which will likely run well into 2025. Until now, I’ve never had the possibility of working on projects of this scale. Having years to work on certain projects is without a doubt daunting, but I’ve worked on reframing my thoughts and am letting it excite me rather than intimidate me.
Say yes
Say yes to opportunities that arise, both big and small. Only a few months into this job, I volunteered myself to work with a cross-University of California team of maps and geospatial folks on a grant application (which has since been awarded!) to write a survey and conduct a series of focus groups with geospatial stakeholders on our campuses in order to design a collaborative, cross-University of California resource guide for GIS resources. While I was initially nervous that I wouldn’t have much to contribute as such a new librarian with no formal geospatial or geography education, it has been a true pleasure to work with this team every week. We are all learning with and from each other. Not only am I building my skill set, but I’m also growing my network of connections across the state of California. Only you know your own capacity, but saying yes can open doors and create opportunities in unexpected ways.
Bureaucracy
It took me 38 emails and a half dozen phone calls to buy six pizzas for an event I hosted. I thought I had a relative understanding of the levels of bureaucracy within such a large institution, but I had no idea that it could sometimes be this convoluted for something seemingly so small. Be ready to adapt the best you can with bureaucratic hoops that pop up out of nowhere.
You shouldn’t know everything
It is incredibly intimidating to leap head-first into a workplace and profession with colleagues who have decades of experience. This is another reframing situation. I often find myself sitting in meetings thinking that everyone in the room seems to know what’s going on except for me. Your teammates are not expecting you to know everything, but they also don’t know what you don’t know. You have to make sure that you ask those questions, or else you’ll be perpetually lost. While you may be out of school, every day is a school day and we’re all learning new things, regardless of how much experience we have. You will never know everything, and your colleagues are more than willing to answer your questions as long as you are willing to ask them.
Violence
I can’t write this piece without discussing the horrific police brutality that was inflicted on my UCLA campus community multiple times this spring. My students and colleagues were attacked by a violent mob on the night of April 30th, and I bore witness the night of May 1st into the morning of May 2nd to the violent beatings and arrests of nearly 300 students, faculty, and staff. Later on May 2nd, I spent hours sitting outside of a jail providing support via food, medical care, legal services, and rides home with a group of fellow supporters. The blood stained clothes and open wounds visible on such young people as they trickled out of jail one by one over the course of hours are images that I will never forget. My campus was then militarized and occupied by multiple armed security teams and police forces, where arrests and violence continued over many weeks. We must not forget that this was done due to a nonviolent protest calling for university divestment in arms manufacturing that directly contributes to the genocide of the Palestinian people. As a map librarian, I’m always talking about the power of maps and how they are not neutral carriers of information. There are few stronger cases that show the power of maps to cause harm than in the case of Palestine. I recommend exploring the interactive mapping project by Visualizing Palestine (a group which also maintains the Palestine Open Maps project), called Palestine, Today (https://today.visualizingpalestine.org/) to learn more.
Looking ahead
I am genuinely thrilled to see where I can take my work in the future. My confidence is growing by the day, and I feel like I’m finding my rhythm. This fall I’ll attend my first WAML conference, and it’s exciting to have the opportunity to fully immerse myself in nothing but map librarianship with others who do similar work. It can be a little lonely some days being the singular maps person on-site at UCLA, and I’m excited for the opportunity to pick people’s brains and come home with new ideas and approaches for this work. The UCLA map collection is slowly getting more accessible and is generating more interest each day. Some days are overwhelming because of the sheer scale of the collection, but it’s slowly becoming more manageable. Seeing students confident and empowered to use library resources after our collaborations makes it all worth it. I can’t wait to see what lies ahead on my map librarianship journey.
Author
Maggie Tarmey (he/they), UCLA Library, mtarmey@library.ucla.edu