Joanna Nemeth Interview

What is your position here? 

I work as a Digital Literacy Librarian. It is a lot of instruction: Making videos tutorials, teaching live webinars, and other projects which focus on building up students' research skills! My position is really critical because often times, a student's success in their course depends on the effectiveness and clarity of my instructional content. 

Any advice for people wanting to go into your line of work?

Firstly, they're going to need a Master’s in Library and Information Studies (MLIS). They should get as much experience during school as possible, work at different types of libraries, and also try to pick a focus early on. I knew one librarian who went in planning to be a map librarian and did all his projects on mapping, which is a really cool way to approach it, because that way you can do a tonne of research on your area of interest. 

What is the most interesting project you have worked on?

I think the webinars have been fun to develop. This summer we hosted our first workshop which was really exciting because it is a lot more active learning, I'm actually presenting on it in a panel discussion at the Workshop for Instruction in Library Use (WILU) this May! I also worked with the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) to get all the library teaching tools that pertain to their courses and students into a digital repository so it’s easily accessible to their learning designers to embed in their courses.

What's the best book you have read lately?

I just finished reading Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, it’s a really empowering book about female sexuality. I also just listened to Stephen Fry's reading of the complete Sherlock Holmes series and I feel like it has just changed my whole way of thinking. 

What are some things people may not know about you?

Last summer I was living in a hamlet 15 km away from Athabasca University and I would commute by bicycle on a back dirt road to work. It only took me an hour and there was a farm of Highland cows I would always pass, they're really agile and often the babies would have escaped the fencing and we would almost run headlong into one other. There's a lot of mule deer in the area so I saw them every day, but other wildlife I came across included: a moose running through a field a canola, a fox (on several occasions), and a black bear!