Library and Information Science Commons^™

The Creature Questions Its Reflection: Lyrical Feminist Explorations Of Reference Desk Interactions, Alexandrina Hanam, Corinne Gilroy

FIMS Publications

The lyric scholarship of Canadian poet-scholars such as Jan Zwicky, Anne Carson, and Kathleen McConnell provides space for literary, analytic, and artistic critique of library reference practice and interactions. Lyric scholarship is a poetic and methodological tool that is used here to interrogate the dependence-driven customer service model embedded in women-dominated service professions, while gesturing toward alternatives that cultivate inter-dependence, independence, and equity. Significant portions of this piece are structured to evoke Zwicky’s Wisdom & Metaphor, in which the author’s own verses live on the left, mirroring and responding to quotes from other writers and thinkers on the right. The …