833 Library Tautology: A Reenactment of the One- Shot Nora Almeida* I have the hammer, I will smash anybody who threatens, however remotely, the company way of life.1 If there’s one thing you learn today, let it be this: keywords. Not specific keywords but the idea of them. If you whisper the correct keywords into the algorithm, you will achieve relevance. If you don’t achieve relevance on the first try (which is super common), imagine you’re an academic with a specialization in a super-niche disciplinary area who wrote a research article. Then imagine keywords you (they) would use and try those.2 I used to start with “write down every word you can think of related to your research topic” but no one understood why we wouldn’t just google. Why do you think you’re here? I say now at the beginning, why even use the library? One student says “the library is more reliable.” But they don’t say what it’s more reliable than. I try it a different way: what kinds of sources might you find at the library that you can’t find on the internet? “Books,” someone says. And they’re right but it’s not the answer I was hoping for. If there’s one thing you learn today, let it be this: a cursory understanding of knowledge production and dissemination processes, which is why we need to log in from off campus.3 Show of hands…has anyone ever encountered a paywall in the wild? A short economics lesson: Academics create intellectual products that are trapped in these databases. The labor of intellectual production is unwaged and subsequently monetized by companies who sell it back to universities. So these products are attached to capitalist value but indirectly. Like I’m standing in front of you getting paid for this. And you’re paying to be here but you’re not paying me.4 Not just anyone can read this stuff…is what I’m saying. Without the login. Questions? I’m sorry but I don’t know your username or password. After our library session you can visit the understaffed help desk downstairs. Transition: I’ve internalized a concept and I’d like to transmit it to you but I also want you to engage in constructing it. * Nora Almeida is an Associate Professor in the Library Department at New York City College of Technology (CUNY); email: nalmeida@citytech.cuny.edu. ©2022 Nora Almeida, Attribution-NonCommercial (https://cre- ativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) CC BY-NC. mailto:nalmeida@citytech.cuny.edu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 834 College & Research Libraries September 2022 Can you guess what it is? Good guess but a university can’t be the author because a place doesn’t have the capac- ity to write. A hint: some of the people who write academic articles are in this room. “Students?” someone offers, hesitantly. Sometimes, I say, but usually professors. We all look at their professor who seems startled and is probably an adjunct who juggles so many contingent jobs that they don’t have time to write.5 And, I say, lowering my voice a little as though to let them in on a secret…when I’m not teaching students how to do research, I write academic articles about teaching students how to do research.6 This does not accurately describe my scholarly output. The students look skeptical, like they can’t think of a single human being who would want to read an article like that. And I empathize. Confession: I thrive in an atmosphere that combines boredom with urgency. I rely on meta-analysis as a pedagogical crutch. Reminder: your own experiences are examples of primary sources if you write them down. We are all knowledge producers here. Watching you try to use the interface makes me an empirical researcher. Now, I will conduct labor on behalf of a non-intuitive platform.7 “EBSCO abhors a prepo- sition,” is a joke I like that no student has ever understood.8 See how you can slide the date filter until you are confined within a specific timeframe— like recursive intervals of 50 minutes. Or you can use these radio buttons like you’re shopping online, an experience you’ve likely had before.9 Later we can unpack the “find it” button because I like unearthing broken links behind the discovery layer in front of a live audience. Is anyone feeling confused? This interaction doesn’t have a lot of context so that’s totally normal.10 Transition: I’m going to roam around while you engage in active learning or experiential learning or learning by discovery. I’m just a facilitator, I say, winking at the professor who is grading papers and doesn’t notice me.11 Is everyone finding stuff? Advice: if you’re not getting what you need, try a different operator. Reminder: the database is not predictive but responds to certain directives. For example, univers* = universal = university.12 Let’s evaluate some sources. How about this article about public sector austerity? Let’s take a look before the vendor cuts off access because we’re behind on payments.13 Is this a reliable source? That’s true. Reliability is subjective….and contextual but let’s gauge how this critical framing is landing with your professor.14 They’re not into it. Let’s talk more about the indica- tors of reality. I’m sorry, I mean: reliability.15 Where on this virtual artifact would you look for those? If there’s one thing you learn today, let it be this: always be skeptical but also always defer to the assignment guidelines that your professor never shared with me.16 I’m assuming there is an assignment and will reference it often to lend our interaction gravitas. Library Tautology 835 Confession: I believe the capacity to spontaneously construct a high-energy performance is an asset as a critical pedagogue. However, I have questions about the conflation of efficacy and eye contact.17 Which rubric would you use if you were me?18 Sadly, we’re almost out of time but here’s the button to email yourself the articles you found. Here’s, for some reason, a paper worksheet with URLs on it. Here’s where you can chat with a librarian (not a robot) the night before your assignment is due. Oh, and we didn’t get into citations but you can just push this button and poof! Imagine how much you can impress all of your friends with perfect MLA citations if you can ever find this button again. One sec… before you leave, I need you to manually type this faded bit-link that my col- league wrote on the whiteboard last year into your browser. It’s a two-minute assessment that will help us improve these sessions for future students. I think about the strangeness of the phrase “future students” and wait two long minutes and remember the time a professor directed her students to applaud at the end of a one-shot. It made me feel embarrassed and grateful. I’ve never otherwise been emphatically congratu- lated for something I do so routinely. Don’t be a stranger, I say, while the students leave. I turn off the projector. It is warm and humming. The room is empty. I feel alive beneath oppressive fluorescent lights, buoyed by the fric- tion of an exchange that I’m also relieved is over. Notes 1. Donald Barthelme, “Our Work and Why We Do It,” in Sixty Stories (New York, NY: Penguin, 1981), 317. 2. Hope A. Olson, “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs,” Signs 26, no. 3 (2001): 639–68. 3. Barbara Fister, “The Illogical Complexity of the Walled-Garden Library,” Library Babel Fish (blog, September 19, 2013), https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/illogical-complexity-walled-garden-library; Char Booth, On Information Privilege, Info-mational (blog, December 2, 2014), https://infomational.com/2014/12/01/ on-information-privilege/; Dave Ellenwood, “‘Information Has Value’: The Political Economy of Information Capitalism,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe (2020), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/information- has-value-the-political-economy-of-information-capitalism/. 4. Armin Beverungen, Steffen Böhm, and Christopher Land, “The Poverty of Journal Publishing,” Organiza- tion 19, no. 6 (2012): 929–38. 5. Rosalind Gill, “Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 1 (2014): 12–30; Nora Almeida, “Librarian as Outsider,” Hybrid Pedagogy (2015), https://hybridpedagogy.org/ librarian-as-outsider/. 6. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1959); Elena S. Aza- dbakht, “The Many Faces of Instruction: An Exploration of Academic Librarians’ Teaching Personas,” Commu- nications in Information Literacy 15, no. 1 (2021): 57–74. 7. Patti Ryan and Lisa Sloniowski, “The Public Academic Library: Friction in the Teflon Funnel,” in Infor- mation Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis, eds. Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2013), 275–96; Lauren Wallis, “Smashing the Gates of Academic Discourse Part 1,” Do-It-Yourself Library Instruction (blog, March 23, 2015), https://laurenwallis.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/smashing-the-gates-of- academic-discourse-part-1/. 8. Barbara MacAdam, “Humor in the Classroom: Implications for the Bibliographic Instruction Librarian,” College & Research Libraries 46, no. 4 (1985): 327–33. 9. Romel Espinel et al., “From Value to Values: Information Literacy, Capitalism, and Resistance,” ACRL Conference Proceedings (2019), https://eamontewell.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/from-value-to-values-acrl-2019.pdf [accessed December 14, 2021]; Joshua F. Beatty, “Locating Information Literacy within Institutional Oppression,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe (2013), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/locating-information- https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/illogical-complexity-walled-garden-library https://infomational.com/2014/12/01/on-information-privilege/ https://infomational.com/2014/12/01/on-information-privilege/ https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/information-has-value-the-political-economy-of-information-capitalism/ https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/information-has-value-the-political-economy-of-information-capitalism/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/librarian-as-outsider/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/librarian-as-outsider/ https://laurenwallis.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/smashing-the-gates-of-academic-discourse-part-1/ https://laurenwallis.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/smashing-the-gates-of-academic-discourse-part-1/ https://eamontewell.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/from-value-to-values-acrl-2019.pdf https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/locating-information-literacy-within-institutional-oppression/ 836 College & Research Libraries September 2022 literacy-within-institutional-oppression/. 10. Karen P. Nicholson, “‘Taking Back’ Information Literacy: Time and the One-Shot in the Neoliberal Uni- versity,” in Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook (vol. 1), eds. Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy (Chicago, IL: ACRL, 2016), 25—39; Nicole Pagowsky, “The Contested One-Shot: Deconstructing Power Structures to Imagine New Futures,” College & Research Libraries 82, no. 3 (2021): 300. 11. Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe (2018), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/; Kelly McElroy et al., “‘I Love Being a Librarian, but…’ Reconciling Vocational Awe, Emotional Labor, and Social Change” (Zine, 2017), https:// ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/articles/3n2041243; Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study,” Journal of Library Administration 57, no. 8 (2017): 846–78. 12. David James Hudson, “The Whiteness of Practicality,” in Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Studies, ed. Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2017), 203–34; Joe Henao, “Linguistic Hegemony in Academia and the Devaluation of Minority Identity in Higher Education,” Inquiries Journal 9, no. 1 (2017); Sara Ahmed, “Common Sense,” Feminist Killjoys (Blog), https://www. saranahmed.com/commonsense [accessed 17 December 2021]; James Elmborg, “Critical information literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, no. 2 (2006): 192–99. 13. Nora Almeida, “The Labour of Austerity: Absurdity, Performative Resistance, and Cultural Transforma- tion,” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 6 (2020): 1–25. 14. Association of College & Research Libraries, Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Educa- tion (2015), www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework1.pdf. 15. Katelyn Angell and Eamon Tewell, “Teaching and Un-teaching Source Evaluation: Questioning Authority in Information Literacy Instruction,” Communications in Information Literacy 11, no. 1 (2017): 95–121; Ilan Gur- Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 463–86; Emily Drabinski, “A Kairos of the Critical: Teaching Critically in a Time of Compliance,” Communications in Information Literacy 11, no. 1 (2017): 76–94. 16. Maura Seale, “The Neoliberal Library,” in Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2013), 39–61; Yvonne Nalani Meulemans and Allison Carr, “Not at Your Service: Building Genuine Faculty-librarian Partnerships,” Reference Services Review 41, no. 1 (February 15, 2013): 80–90; V. Arellano Douglas, J. Gadsby, and S. Evans, “Peers, Guest Lecturers, or Babysitters: Constructions of Power in the Library Classroom” (proceedings, Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium, University of Arizona, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/10150/631576 [accessed 14 December 2021]; Celia Emmelhainz, Erin Pappas, and Maura Seale, “Behavioral Expectations for the Mommy Librarian: The Successful Reference Transaction as Emotional Labor,” in The Feminist Reference Desk: Concepts, Critiques, and Conversations, ed. Maria T. Accardi (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2017), 27–45. 17. Julia Furay, “Stages of Instruction: Theatre, Pedagogy and Information Literacy,” Reference Services Review 42, no. 2 (2014): 209–28; Sarah Polkinghorne, “Unpacking and Overcoming ‘Edutainment’ in Library Instruction,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe (2015), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/edutainment/. 18. Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith, “The Library as ‘Stuck Place’: Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University,” in Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, eds. Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria Accardi (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2010), 305–18; Marilyn Strathern, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy (London, UK: Routledge, 2003); Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” in Audit Cultures, ed. Marilyn Strath- ern (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), 69–101. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/locating-information-literacy-within-institutional-oppression/ https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/articles/3n2041243 https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/articles/3n2041243 https://www.saranahmed.com/commonsense https://www.saranahmed.com/commonsense http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework1.pdf http://hdl.handle.net/10150/631576 https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/edutainment/