Copley Library 2023-2024 Annual Report

“Librarians are information professionals. With enough preparation, we can teach any kind of information literacy.” | Amy Pham

Amy Pham A s the Senior Electronic and Open Content Librarian at Copley Library, I acquire and manage the library’s databases, print and ejournals, ebook packages, and open access publishing agreements. I’ve worked in the library field for over 10 years and received my MSc in Information & Library Studies in Glasgow, Scotland. I’m a librarian’s librarian. My area of expertise is library acquisitions, which many people don’t realize is a major business industry. My position requires me to learn, at a high level, the resources required for each librarians’ subject areas. I research information such as product assessment, usage metrics, accessibility, industry pricing models and product adoption, as well as best practices for licensing negotiations. My current research study focuses on this area of my work: negotiation dynamics in library acquisitions. There is a ton of research about negotiations in adjacent fields, but research in this area of librarianship is often focused on pragmatic advice: “How do librarians become better negotiators?” Negotiating isn’t just about being a good or bad negotiator. Even with experience and concrete data in your favor, a negotiation can be influenced by abstract factors like external biases and interpersonal dynamics. What I’ve been finding in the course of my research is, despite what you might expect, librarians are not bad negotiators. Librarians are communicative, data-driven, and success-driven in negotiations. Librarians are information professionals. With enough preparation, we can teach any kind of information literacy. I’m the liaison to Women’s and Gender Studies and the Gender Identity Resources Center, and recently, we had a lot of fun together learning how to verify political information on social media. I called the workshop, “Should I Google That?” The students recommended TikToks to me ahead of time to incorporate, and we used a checklist to search for key information and verify the authenticity of each example. Fun fact: If I were not a librarian, I would be a specialty grocer – I’m obsessed with produce. I grew up with a backyard, pictured here, full of unconventional fruits like sugar cane and persimmons. In the featured picture, I’m standing next to my mother’s banana tree. My family immigrated from Vietnam, and in our family, food meant connection– to our history, to our heritage, and to our identity.

14 | HELEN K. AND JAMES S. COPLEY LIBRARY