Welcome to the Disorientation Guide to Librarianship!

Disorientation Guide to Librarianship is a compilation zine created by 23 contributors and published in October 2021. The zine is designed to be an accessible resource for people who are unfamiliar with structural oppression and injustice in librarianship. It is intended to be a critique of library values and a guide for people fighting injustice in librarianship. The target audience is LIS students and those new to librarianship, with or without degrees, but all are welcome to the conversation.

When I put out the call for proposals for this zine, a librarian commented: “Not sure I would want to start a new career with a guide to what is terrible. Everything has a less than sunny side, but because we love something, we can endure the not so great parts. Focus on what is great, especially starting out. That is the way to success. Chase the light in things, not the dark.” Comments like that are precisely why I wanted to create this resource. Newer folks will have many people in their orbit who are not willing to discuss the less-than-pleasant side of librarianship. The Disorientation Guide to Librarianship isn’t negative for the sake of being negative—as individuals and as a profession, we need to understand the problems in the structures we live within to make substantive change. This zine was inspired by the LIS Microaggressions project, Fobazi Ettarh’s article “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves“, and the many disorientation guides created by higher education students around the world.

The zine is available for free for download in both printable and online versions:

Thank you to the contributors for making this possible!

—Violet