Joining Professional Cliques

Or Attempting to Gamify My Future

Our ALA Student Chapter held its final Zoom meeting of the year in mid-December. It was held on short notice, but the agenda was light—no guest speakers, no pressing issues. This was an informal gathering to reflect on the past semester and share our plans for the coming one.

As always, I defaulted to the chat. Unmuting my mic seemed too bold. Typing was more natural, probably because I’d spent so much time in Twitch chats. But this was unlike Twitch in so many ways. It was a relief to not see messages scroll up faster than I could read them, emote spams, chatters dropping hints about how much they’d love a communal horny session, constant diversions, or KEKW used as punctuation. (As much fun as chats can be, the energy can be… a bit much.)

The chapter officers spoke in their soft, measured cadences, responding to every message in the chat. We shared our struggles with rigidly unforgiving professors and mountains of coursework. Two members discovered they lived in the same town, and one casually shared their phone number in the chat, inviting the other to reach out about their local library’s archiving projects. When I mentioned my intention (hey, that rhymes) to take three courses in the spring, a few people claimed they felt panicked on my behalf. Before the meeting ended, we were all invited to join the Discord.

The atmosphere was trusting, open, sensible, and human. I did find myself debating on whether turn on my mic or camera. I knew no one would judge me for bad lighting or frizzy, freshly washed hair. For a brief moment, I even considered sharing my idea for a LIS-centered blog or asking if anyone else was on Bluesky.

It’s astonishing how effortless it feels to belong in a space where people want to do good work and see others as belonging. Interacting with my peers made me realize that instead of focusing so hard on studies, I should have been talking to them outside of classes, networking with professional librarians (and not just for class-based projects), and creating works for LIS professionals.

I also should have also taken my professors’ advice and joined the ALA sooner. But I finally did at the start of the year. While I’m getting far more emails than I’d like in a day, I’m also getting a deeper look into the library world, and it’s so far removed from the online one I decided to occupy. It’s a perfect balance for me right now.

That said, there’s very little from the library world I’ll probably be sharing on this blog. No offense, but how many readers would sit through posts about collection development, weeding, and determining the worthiness of new items with CRAPP? (No, I did not misspell that.)

Well, I guess can show you how two librarians at CMU Library used Animal Crossing: New Horizons to explain metadata. That much might be interesting.

Which is a perfect lead-in to show you how my two worlds might combine: The Games and Gaming Round Table.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s all the time I’ve been hanging out in RevScarecrow’s chat, maybe it’s watching a couple of my peers livestream—it could be a combination of all three. But when I learned GameRT existed, something clicked in my mind, and I knew I had to join.

Something like this probably won’t be the focus of my career, but it would give me ideas of how to help library spaces stay relevant. In this day of budget and staff cuts, I’m going to need all the ideas I can brainstorm, so it may as well be as fun as possible.