Elaina Granse
Elaina Granse
The United States used to be first in world literacy, today we are 31st according to the World Population Review, in our day and age, information is an incredibly important and valuable item, and disinformation is a very powerful and dangerous weapon. There is a growing issue of banning books to control what people can learn and dropping literacy rates. The rising social pressures of book bans take on a violent tinge as librarians are threatened with physical violence.
In some places libraries have become shelters, in others they have drawn danger.
My professional philosophy in essence is to help those that I can. I am a librarian, and so whoever comes through my doors, I carry a duty of care for. To help them learn, grow, and discover, to find that even when the world seems a terrible, cruel, and ugly place, there is and will always be a haven for those in need, to safeguard the knowledge and information of the past for those that might find value in it one day, just as I do now.
My professional goals are to work with a textile collection, teaching others about this topic that I love, so that others might also find joy in it. A great deal of history is tied to textiles, from the plant or animal that made the fiber, to the people who spun it on cold winter nights while passing on their stories, to the weavers who wove it into carpets or tapestries or cloth, to the people who wore the cloth until it was rags, used the carpets on their floors, and hung tapestries to keep out the draft and to tell their stories. This is the field of research and preservation that marks the unique existence of humanity, from any and every culture, from every point in time. The Society of American Archivists states two of their core competencies “Identifying and preserving essential records that document the cultural heritage of society, and serving a broad range of people who seek to locate and use the information found in evidentiary records.” Which, thanks to my studies at St. Catherine’s, I feel prepared to take on and apply (SLO 1). I want to know and understand everything on this topic so that I can share it with others.