This is a tardy announcement that Emily Drabinski has taken on the position of Interim Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center. Her appointment began March 16, coincident with the upturn of the coronavirus outbreak in the most difficult possible historical moment to assume CUNY leadership. During her first week on the job, she navigated events and conditions that led to the closure of the Graduate Center Library. Since then, with all staff working from home, she has led the shift in the library’s focus to online teaching and research and tailored the library’s reference, instruction, and ebook discovery to re-situate library service to evolving faculty and student needs.

With Emily’s guidance, the Graduate Center Library’s online presence is robust and available 24/7. E-resources are discoverable in OneSearch, Interlibrary Loan continues to deliver electronic copies of book chapters and articles, and reference consultation and workshop instruction all happens online.

Emily Drabinski, photo by Alex Irklievski.

Emily joined the Graduate Center Library in March 2019 from Long Island University. Her first role at the Graduate Center was as Critical Pedagogy Librarian, supporting the School for Labor and Urban Studies.

Emily is a leading scholar of librarianship. Her 2014 “Toward a Kairos of Library Instruction” and her 2013 “Queering the Catalog” are canonical texts in the Library and Information Sciences curriculum. Drabinski co-edited the 2009 Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, and she edits the Library Juice Press Series on Gender and Sexuality in Library and Information Studies. Drabinski co-edited a 2019 Library Trends issue, “Labor in Academic Libraries.”

Follow Emily Drabinski on Twitter @edrabinski and find an interview with her in the GC’s 365 Newsletter, March 2019.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.