Skip to main content

Rafia Mirza

SMU, Library, Librarian

Followers

29

Following

21

Public Views

Rafia Mirza is currently the Humanities Research Librarian and liaison to the History, World Languages and Literatures, Religious Studies and Philosophy Departments, and the Classics and Honors Programs at SMU.She did graduate coursework in American studies at the University of Minnesota and received her MSI from the University of Michigan in 2008. Her research interests include digital humanities, digital project planning, digital pedagogy and popular culture.

less

University of California, Santa Barbara

Grisell Rodriguez

University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez

Kishor Chandra Satpathy

Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta

Anna Maria Tammaro

University of Parma

Visvesvaraya Technological University

Shenandoah University

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Kansas State University

Justinus Andjarwirawan

Petra Christian University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

InterestsView All (24)

Uploads

Papers by Rafia Mirza

They think all of this is new: Leveraging librarians᾿ project management skills for the digital humanities

The Digital Humanities, 2020

Memorandum of Understanding Workbook, Version 1.0

They think all of this is new: Leveraging librarians' project management skills for the digital humanities

College & Undergraduate Libraries, 2017

ABSTRACT This article will explore how to develop the holistic project management planning (PMP) ... more ABSTRACT This article will explore how to develop the holistic project management planning (PMP) mindset in different parts of the library when undertaking digital humanities (DH) projects. PMP skills do exist within libraries and librarians, but organizational alignment typically does not allow for the most effective applications of librarians' PMP skills to DH projects. This article will explore how the skills of public services librarians, technical services librarians and administrative librarians align with the PMP phases and the challenges that each kind of librarian has to overcome in completing successful DH projects.

Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom

In 1977, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) produced a... more In 1977, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) produced a film entitled The Speaker which depicts a high school that invites a professor to speak on the inferiority of African Americans. A throughline connects The Speaker in its 1977 incarnation to OIF’s 2018 actions and discourse around its 2018 revision of the “Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights” to specifically include hate groups. It is not coincidental that the construction of the library as a marketplace of ideas takes place through debates around the fundamental humanity of Black people in the United States; this throughline is embedded in racial capitalism. In this essay, we argue that debates around intellectual freedom within librarianship, with their reliance on the metaphor of the library as a “marketplace of ideas,” must be understood through the broad lens of racial capitalism. More specifically, we use Jodi Melamed’s typology of liberal antiracisms in...

Modifying a Project Memorandum of Understanding for Reuse

Poster presented at the 6th annual Digital Frontiers Conference | Exploring the Edges, Pushing th... more

Encouraging Digital Scholarship in Graduate Education

Panel presentation for the 2015 Cross Timbers Library Collaborative (CTLC) Annual Conference. Thi... more

Does Google Scholar help or hurt institutional repositories

Librarians often act as though Google Scholar is our new frenemy; however, the reality is somewha... more Librarians often act as though Google Scholar is our new frenemy; however, the reality is somewhat more complicated. While it is true that Google Scholar’s requirements are not always transparent to us (us being libraries, archives, institutional repositories), enough research has been conducted that we can now make an educated guess as to how to organize the content in institutional repositories (IRs) and archives in ways that Google Scholar can index more effectively. Google Scholar offers many options for libraries to make their IR collections discoverable. It is true that there has been a history of Google Scholar lacking in transparency and structure; what’s more, Google Scholar citations profiles are largely accomplishing the same objectives as IRs. This chapter looks at the effect these Google programs have on IRs and how libraries can respond. Google Scholar has gained its powerful position because libraries have yet to create an effective means of searching across IRs. The ...

Memorandum of Understanding Training

LibGuides, Videos, and Screencasting: Technologies to Enhance and Promote Digital Wisdom in Information Literacy Instruction

The information revolution, as its name implies, has created a major upheaval in the ways that ac... more The information revolution, as its name implies, has created a major upheaval in the ways that academicians produce and disseminate scholarship. For those involved in teaching today’s students how to join the scholarly community, the role of the librarian in developing digital wisdom (Prensky, 2009) is often glossed over. Before we discuss digital wisdom, however, it is helpful to remember the precursor to this term: “digital natives.” In 2001, Marc Prensky coined this term to describe the generation of people who were born after the digital revolution and spent their childhood surrounded by electronic paraphernalia. Prensky (2001) also made a distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants, the latter being those older generations who did not grow up with ubiquitous digital devices. Although many assume that digital natives are experts in manipulating digital tools, Prensky (2009) argues that many, if not most, have very little digital wisdom.

The Coin of Love and Virtue: Academic Libraries and Value in a Global Pandemic

In September 2010, the Association of College and Research Libraries released The Value of Academ... more In September 2010, the Association of College and Research Libraries released The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report. The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting global pandemic has raised questions about the concept of value in academic libraries. How is value attributed? How does value function? What does it mean to demonstrate or prove our value? We begin with an overview and analysis of ACRL’s Value of Academic Libraries Initiative. We then provide a description and timeline of the spread of COVID-19 and the reaction of both institutions of higher education, academic libraries, professional library organizations, and individual librarians. The pandemic has created a new category of workers - “essential workers” - who provide vital services, perform maintenance work, and labor to keep infrastructures intact. The role of carework and careworkers in the pandemic helps illuminate the situation of academic librarians within regimes of ne...

Empty Presence: Library Labor, Prestige, and the MLS

Library Trends

Empty Presence: Library Labor, Prestige, and the MLS

Library Trends

Abstract: Watchers Punks and Dashing Heroes Representations of Male Librarians in Generation X Mass Culture

The Generation X Librarian : Essays on Leadership, Technology, Pop Culture, Social Responsibility and Professional Identity., 2011

In American mass culture, academic librarians tend to be seen as part of academic life, but not a... more In American mass culture, academic librarians tend to be seen as part of academic life, but not as fully connected with their communities; their work is mysterious, and hidden from the public. Perhaps due to this, depictions of the profession and its practitioners have been the subject of numerous articles and books. While these analyses have investigated in detail how exactly libraries and librarians are depicted in films, television programs, novels and short stories, comic books, advertisements, websites, and material culture, few have explicitly examined the role of gender ideologies in these representations. Most merely observe that librarians tend to be portrayed as women, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the profession has been dominated by women since the early twentieth century, and note that depictions of male librarians in mass culture have historically been quite rare. This has changed, however, as the most prominent mass culture representations of academic librarians currently are male: Rupert Giles the Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Flynn Carsen in TNT's The Librarian series, and Henry DeTamble from both the novel and film versions of The Time Traveler's Wife. The emergence and popularity of these characters during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, which have been characterized by revolutionary changes in the information landscape, in the field of academic librarianship, and in dominant understandings of masculinity, is striking. In this paper, we argue that these texts and characters renegotiate power relations within the realms of gender and knowledge/information. Male academic librarians became possible in American mass culture as technology became to be seen as central to the profession in both mainstream discourse and within librarianship itself. Ultimately, these texts are reactionary, as they endorse the need for an authoritative, masculine figure to act as a gatekeeper to knowledge and information and to conquer irrationality. This vision is complicated by a modified sense of masculinity and by these characters' relationships with female characters, but it remains. These texts also simultaneously reveal a discomfort with this gatekeeping figure, as these male academic librarians are forced to confront the irrational as embodied in the paranormal elements of these texts; however, they are ultimately able to control the paranormal, even if only to a degree, and are portrayed as worthy of admiration. This paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of these representations and a discussion of how these images might be reshaped and reclaimed in order to better reflect the necessary interdependence of librarians and users in this information age.

They think all of this is new: Leveraging librarians᾿ project management skills for the digital humanities

The Digital Humanities, 2020

Memorandum of Understanding Workbook, Version 1.0

They think all of this is new: Leveraging librarians' project management skills for the digital humanities

College & Undergraduate Libraries, 2017

ABSTRACT This article will explore how to develop the holistic project management planning (PMP) ... more ABSTRACT This article will explore how to develop the holistic project management planning (PMP) mindset in different parts of the library when undertaking digital humanities (DH) projects. PMP skills do exist within libraries and librarians, but organizational alignment typically does not allow for the most effective applications of librarians' PMP skills to DH projects. This article will explore how the skills of public services librarians, technical services librarians and administrative librarians align with the PMP phases and the challenges that each kind of librarian has to overcome in completing successful DH projects.

Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom

In 1977, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) produced a... more In 1977, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) produced a film entitled The Speaker which depicts a high school that invites a professor to speak on the inferiority of African Americans. A throughline connects The Speaker in its 1977 incarnation to OIF’s 2018 actions and discourse around its 2018 revision of the “Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights” to specifically include hate groups. It is not coincidental that the construction of the library as a marketplace of ideas takes place through debates around the fundamental humanity of Black people in the United States; this throughline is embedded in racial capitalism. In this essay, we argue that debates around intellectual freedom within librarianship, with their reliance on the metaphor of the library as a “marketplace of ideas,” must be understood through the broad lens of racial capitalism. More specifically, we use Jodi Melamed’s typology of liberal antiracisms in...

Modifying a Project Memorandum of Understanding for Reuse

Poster presented at the 6th annual Digital Frontiers Conference | Exploring the Edges, Pushing th... more

Encouraging Digital Scholarship in Graduate Education

Panel presentation for the 2015 Cross Timbers Library Collaborative (CTLC) Annual Conference. Thi... more

Does Google Scholar help or hurt institutional repositories

Librarians often act as though Google Scholar is our new frenemy; however, the reality is somewha... more Librarians often act as though Google Scholar is our new frenemy; however, the reality is somewhat more complicated. While it is true that Google Scholar’s requirements are not always transparent to us (us being libraries, archives, institutional repositories), enough research has been conducted that we can now make an educated guess as to how to organize the content in institutional repositories (IRs) and archives in ways that Google Scholar can index more effectively. Google Scholar offers many options for libraries to make their IR collections discoverable. It is true that there has been a history of Google Scholar lacking in transparency and structure; what’s more, Google Scholar citations profiles are largely accomplishing the same objectives as IRs. This chapter looks at the effect these Google programs have on IRs and how libraries can respond. Google Scholar has gained its powerful position because libraries have yet to create an effective means of searching across IRs. The ...

Memorandum of Understanding Training

LibGuides, Videos, and Screencasting: Technologies to Enhance and Promote Digital Wisdom in Information Literacy Instruction

The information revolution, as its name implies, has created a major upheaval in the ways that ac... more The information revolution, as its name implies, has created a major upheaval in the ways that academicians produce and disseminate scholarship. For those involved in teaching today’s students how to join the scholarly community, the role of the librarian in developing digital wisdom (Prensky, 2009) is often glossed over. Before we discuss digital wisdom, however, it is helpful to remember the precursor to this term: “digital natives.” In 2001, Marc Prensky coined this term to describe the generation of people who were born after the digital revolution and spent their childhood surrounded by electronic paraphernalia. Prensky (2001) also made a distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants, the latter being those older generations who did not grow up with ubiquitous digital devices. Although many assume that digital natives are experts in manipulating digital tools, Prensky (2009) argues that many, if not most, have very little digital wisdom.

The Coin of Love and Virtue: Academic Libraries and Value in a Global Pandemic

In September 2010, the Association of College and Research Libraries released The Value of Academ... more In September 2010, the Association of College and Research Libraries released The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report. The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting global pandemic has raised questions about the concept of value in academic libraries. How is value attributed? How does value function? What does it mean to demonstrate or prove our value? We begin with an overview and analysis of ACRL’s Value of Academic Libraries Initiative. We then provide a description and timeline of the spread of COVID-19 and the reaction of both institutions of higher education, academic libraries, professional library organizations, and individual librarians. The pandemic has created a new category of workers - “essential workers” - who provide vital services, perform maintenance work, and labor to keep infrastructures intact. The role of carework and careworkers in the pandemic helps illuminate the situation of academic librarians within regimes of ne...

Empty Presence: Library Labor, Prestige, and the MLS

Library Trends

Empty Presence: Library Labor, Prestige, and the MLS

Library Trends

Abstract: Watchers Punks and Dashing Heroes Representations of Male Librarians in Generation X Mass Culture

The Generation X Librarian : Essays on Leadership, Technology, Pop Culture, Social Responsibility and Professional Identity., 2011

In American mass culture, academic librarians tend to be seen as part of academic life, but not a... more In American mass culture, academic librarians tend to be seen as part of academic life, but not as fully connected with their communities; their work is mysterious, and hidden from the public. Perhaps due to this, depictions of the profession and its practitioners have been the subject of numerous articles and books. While these analyses have investigated in detail how exactly libraries and librarians are depicted in films, television programs, novels and short stories, comic books, advertisements, websites, and material culture, few have explicitly examined the role of gender ideologies in these representations. Most merely observe that librarians tend to be portrayed as women, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the profession has been dominated by women since the early twentieth century, and note that depictions of male librarians in mass culture have historically been quite rare. This has changed, however, as the most prominent mass culture representations of academic librarians currently are male: Rupert Giles the Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Flynn Carsen in TNT's The Librarian series, and Henry DeTamble from both the novel and film versions of The Time Traveler's Wife. The emergence and popularity of these characters during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, which have been characterized by revolutionary changes in the information landscape, in the field of academic librarianship, and in dominant understandings of masculinity, is striking. In this paper, we argue that these texts and characters renegotiate power relations within the realms of gender and knowledge/information. Male academic librarians became possible in American mass culture as technology became to be seen as central to the profession in both mainstream discourse and within librarianship itself. Ultimately, these texts are reactionary, as they endorse the need for an authoritative, masculine figure to act as a gatekeeper to knowledge and information and to conquer irrationality. This vision is complicated by a modified sense of masculinity and by these characters' relationships with female characters, but it remains. These texts also simultaneously reveal a discomfort with this gatekeeping figure, as these male academic librarians are forced to confront the irrational as embodied in the paranormal elements of these texts; however, they are ultimately able to control the paranormal, even if only to a degree, and are portrayed as worthy of admiration. This paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of these representations and a discussion of how these images might be reshaped and reclaimed in order to better reflect the necessary interdependence of librarians and users in this information age.