Dr. Shannon Jones, director of libraries and professor at the Medical University of South Carolina–Charleston, was named a 2021 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her significant commitment to mentoring other library workers in medical and academic librarianship, as well as creating a Medical Library Association (MLA) book club focused on books discussing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). LJ recently talked with her to learn what she’s been doing since then.

LJ: Are you still involved in mentoring and the MLA book club?

Shannon Jones: Yes, I’m still a mentor and still involved with the MLA program. We just wrapped up the discussion of our fifth book, What the Eyes Don’t See. We had 150 librarians across the country discussing that book, and we’re gearing up for our sixth discussion. We’ve done an evaluation of the program to see how participation in it impacted the participants in terms of how it pushes them to act. Because reading is one thing, but actually learning the concept and moving on it is another. We found that people feel more comfortable being able to engage in conversations about DEI topics because of the different books we’ve read.

Have you taken on any new initiatives since 2021?

One thing I’m doing that I’m really excited about is part of my MLA presidency, a program called Be Well MLA. It’s focused on wellness and well-being for members. We started a webinar series in September 2022. Our whole goal was to invite MLA members and friends of members to talk to us about how they enact wellness in their lives. We’ve covered a variety of topics. We started out with a program, which was probably my favorite, called “I Wet My Plants” because we have a lot of members who use plants and gardening for self-care. We’ve had people talk to us who are into volunteering, and we talked about how they enable action in their community. We’ve done two book discussions as part of that on a book called Laziness Does Not Exist and one on Radical Empathy. We’ve done healthy eating, we had a session in February that was more about how you enable radical self-love and your life. Coming out of the pandemic, and knowing how our members and librarians in general have weathered the pandemic—being caregivers at home, still having to show up at work and serve our respective populations. We’re always thinking about, “How do we do this for our patrons? Is it going to be good for our patrons?” A lot of times we don’t focus on us.

Speaking of the pandemic, how did that affect medical libraries?

Because we’re in the healthcare environment, many health science library workers never stopped going to work and never stopped serving. Some of my colleagues are hospital librarians who worked in healthcare or hospitals. Some of them were called upon to support the pandemic in different ways where they were taking temperatures and maybe sitting at an entryway to make sure people coming in were doing things the right way. I think we’re still figuring out how it impacted us, but I know that some of us were well-suited to the situation. In my case, my library no longer maintains a physical collection. I have colleagues who used 3-D printers to make personal protective equipment when there were shortages.

Probably the biggest thing most people are grappling with now is that we had two-and-a-half years of remote work and we’re trying to figure out, what does work look like? In a post-COVID world, what does hybrid mean when you have an on-campus, in-person clientele? We’re trying to figure out how to be flexible and still meet those needs.

What happens to the former library space that held print materials?

The space becomes something different. Once you take the books out, one of the things you learn really quickly is that books buffer a lot of noise in a big, wide-open space. But now it’s much more of an education and innovation center. We have classrooms and computer labs for standardized testing, we have 3-D printing, we have collaboration spaces.

Libraries going completely digital have been making the news recently as controversies. How does that work in the medical library field?

There are two different camps. There are some who have these big legacy collections. Then you have colleagues or people who establish a new medical school, and if they’ve never had a medical library before, that library is born digital. It’s not likely they’re going to buy any print resources. My library has legacy collections, and because space is such an issue on campus, and also because of the ways research is conducted in health sciences, it makes sense to go digital. The researchers aren’t doing research out of physical books, they want literature that’s the latest and greatest. Our provost gave us money to buy everything that we had in print electronically. Now I think our collection is much more robust, and much more diverse.

Our campus loves it. Their schedules may have them at a patient’s bedside, so they want to access things in the clinical environment at the patient’s bedside. They can access our stuff wherever they are. They don’t want to come to the physical library to get things.

You also pursued more education.

I finished my doctorate in educational leadership, so I’m now Dr. Shannon Jones. I did my research on the lived experiences of Black library directors who lead AAHSL [Academic Association of Health Sciences Libraries].

What’s next for you?

I’m pivoting now in terms of things I want to work on. When I was doing my dissertation, one of the things that I found was that there was a lack of narratives about Black library leaders, contemporary leaders that are leading right now. It took me on a journey to find out their leadership experiences. I’m now working with my colleagues and the African American Medical Librarians Alliance. Our history isn’t documented in health sciences. We’re embarking on that journey of writing our history, so that 20 years from now, there will be librarians coming in behind us, and they’ll know that Shannon was the second Black president of the MLA, but there was a whole generation of other Black librarians that were making really amazing contributions and doing work. It’s just never been captured. Our goal is to capture that and leave a legacy for the librarians coming from behind us.