Creating Community, Online and Off: 12 Questions with Lisa Bunker, MA in Library Science '01

Social Media Librarian (Retired), Pima County Public Library

I developed a strong conviction that libraries needed to figure out how to be relevant and create community in the newly forming online spaces. Not that our traditional focus on printed books was obsolete, but that we needed to figure out how to be just as relevant online. I carried this big picture goal throughout my career.

 
Lisa Bunker, who graduated from the University of Arizona Master of Arts in Library Science (now Master of Arts in Library and Information Science) in 2001, is a Tucson native who lived in many places before returning to work and study in Tucson. In this profile, she shares her fascinating experiences as a library science student, librarian at Pima County Public Library and, on her own time, "librarian in service to Harry Potter fandom."

What brought you to the University of Arizona to study library science?

My time working at the El Paso Public Library, from 1987 to 1992, convinced me that my career was in libraries, but we didn’t live in a place where a university offered a library sciences degree until we moved home to Tucson in 1999. All the same, I was apprehensive about starting another master’s degree since I had been forced to abandon an earlier art history degree due to extreme writer’s block. Seventeen years later I still feared that I couldn’t write well at an academic level or turn my papers in on time. I applied to the University of Arizona provisionally and didn’t formally apply until after I had turned my first paper in. On time. I decided that the degree was going to be my 40th birthday present to myself.

What was your focus area in the program?

By the time I applied in 1999, I had been working in library children’s services for 12 years. I loved this work; however, I decided to focus instead on archives or special collections work and finally put my art history undergraduate studies back into play.
 

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What did you most enjoy about the Master's in Library Science program?

The MA in Library Science reawakened my love of archives and history and helped me see the mission of libraries in a broader historical and social context. It also helped me rebuild my confidence in myself and my ability to write well.

What did you most enjoy about your time at U of A?

Graduate school was a time of huge growth for me, especially for my writing and communications skills. In 1999 the World Wide Web was still a little wild and wooly, and I talked my way into a job at the University of Arizona Library’s IT department because they would teach me to hand-code HTML. Website design and architecture were so powerful and magical to me that I started submitting my papers as webpages in addition to Word documents as assigned, just for practice.

Tell us about your library science final project.

As much as I loved the mission of public libraries, when I began my master’s degree I was determined to return to art libraries, archives or other museum libraries, so I made those needs the focus of my classes. In 2001 (my last year in the program), I was incredibly lucky to be chosen for an internship with the University of Arizona Libraries Special Collections, where I worked under Curator Bonnie Travers. She asked me to create an exhibit for the third-floor display area on the books the Nazis burned that were in the university’s collection.

I spent the semester horrified and appalled as I translated the original records online from the National Archives and books published in Germany. I located several of the existing “blacklists” and built the exhibit around the books, selecting books from our collection that were published before 1939. I wanted to show how similar in language and tone the Nazi documents were to the screeds of book banners today, so I asked Dr. Richter from the German Department to translate the accusations into English, and I included a display of the most frequently challenged books of 2001, including the language that was used to attack them.

Librarian Louise Greenfield helped me get in touch with Kurt Klein who, as a child, had witnessed the 1933 book burning in Heidelberg, and we were honored that he spoke at the opening. I also created a companion When Books Burn website, which, though is terribly dated design-wise, is still online.
 

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Walk us through your career path.

I’m retired now, but my last job was social media librarian for the Pima County Public Library.

The short version of my career path is that it took some strange twists and turns, all of which helped me to learn the skills I needed to become one of the first social media librarians in the country.

It’s funny: all of my job experience during my undergraduate years was in libraries, but I didn’t think of it as a career. Instead, my career goal was to work at a museum that had a collection focused on 19th-century art and the history of photography.

The reality was that my husband and I moved eight times in the first 12 years of our marriage, and I discovered that the library skills I had developed as a student worker were more useful than my degree in art history and museum studies. No matter where we lived I could find work I loved doing at public libraries and bookstores. From 1988 to 1999, I worked at well-funded libraries where I learned what could be done when a library isn’t constantly in survival mode, and I worked at poorly-funded libraries that were rich in compassion and connections to the neighborhoods they served.

In 1997, we moved home to Tucson and I ended up working at Sunrise Drive Elementary School’s library as the library assistant in charge of acquisitions and cataloging. I loved the job but was frustrated that I was still doing librarian-level work for $7.50 an hour. That’s when I decided to finally get my “library” degree at U of A, beginning in 1999.

Unfortunately, I graduated during a deep economic recession, and all of the local libraries—public, private and academic—had been forced to freeze their hiring. For the next three years, I worked as a temporary librarian for the University of Arizona Library’s Social Sciences Team, where I designed and wrote online tutorials for a series of grant-funded projects. This was fascinating work, but I was relieved when the Tucson-Pima Public Library (now the Pima County Public Library) offered me permanent full-time work in 2004 as the children’s services librarian at the Eckstrom-Columbus Branch Library. In 2007, I moved to the Pima County Public Library’s Outreach Department, where I coordinated systemwide programs like the “First Card” campaign and co-taught literacy skills to women incarcerated at the Pima County Jail.

After two years in Outreach, I was surprised and delighted when Deputy Director Karyn Prechtel offered me a temporary, part-time position at the Tucson Museum of Art’s Library in 2009. Pima County Public Library’s Outreach Department was beginning to be reorganized and the Museum of Art needed a librarian to remain open and help retain their museum accreditation. The museum’s library, which is open to the public, had recently finished adding their incredible collection of books on art, art technique and art history to PCPL’s catalog, and our library leadership had an interest in helping the museum keep the doors open. Karyn knew of my art history training and research skills and had suggested me for the part-time job. Of course, I said yes. I would never have guessed that I would be working at an art museum library as an employee of a public library system, but that is what happened. I worked the other half of my hours on the Main Library’s reference team.
  

There’s another weird twist to my career, but we need to back up a little bit. Basically, all this time, I had a second career at home as a librarian in service to Harry Potter fandom. I had always loved the books, but in 2004 I discovered the forums and websites that were the beginning of online Harry Potter fandom: especially Mugglenet, The Harry Potter Lexicon, The Leaky Cauldron, and HPANA fan forums. It was a wonderfully geeky mess of fanfics, costumes, crafts and theorizing. As a librarian, it was the theorizing that fascinated me.

Anyone who had read up to the third book in the series (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) or seen its 2004 movie, realized how author J.K. Rowling had been hiding clues to what would happen to Harry and the Wizarding World from the very beginning of the series. Forums like HPANA were full of young fans who were dissecting everything they could think of to see if they could predict what might happen as soon as every new book was published. Name derivations, etymology, rune and alchemical lore, symbolism, Latin translations, color and numerological symbolism… all this geekery made my frustrated art history librarian heart so happy.

Even more exciting, I recognized that Potter fandom was an opportunity to study how book-centric communities formed online with an eye to what libraries could learn for our own websites and social networking. What else could I do? I joined the fan forums and helped the much-younger fans figure out how and where to find authoritative sources for their theories. By 2006, my research materials for the fan forums had become full-fledged websites, and I ended up co-founding Accio Quote, an index to all of J.K. Rowling’s interviews. I also was a senior editor for The Harry Potter Lexicon, in charge of maintaining all of the site’s character pages.
 

In 2010, Jen Maney, the librarian in charge of Pima County Public Library’s website and digital materials, asked me use what I was learning from fandom and to take over the library system’s social media presence. We had just closed down our MySpace account and Jen wanted to see what I could do with the library’s Facebook pages and Twitter account.

It was a heady time. I was one of the first social media librarians in the country and amazingly was able to create policy and training materials from scratch, something very unusual in libraryland, where tradition and legacy policies are so strong. Most library social media was managed in a centralized way by a library’s marketing department. However, based on what I had learned from the Potterverse, Jen and I decided to find ways to capture the real-time energy of our front desks, and prioritize that over official marketing messaging. We developed a system where I would write for the primary library accounts, and then train frontline staff at branches for branch-level accounts. If a branch manager wanted to have a page on Facebook or a Twitter account, I trained the staff they assigned. Along with the dos and don’ts I asked them to write with the same informal helpfulness as they did at the desks, and to tell all the great stories that never made it into official press-releases. This trust was rarely broken, and over the years we have been able to tell a deeper story of what our libraries contribute to the communities of Pima County.

At the time, Pima County Public Library encouraged staff to go to conferences, and because social media was a huge part of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, I attended the technology, music and pop culture conference, beginning in 2011. It was mind-blowing—primarily because I was fascinated by how powerful it was to have developers, entrepreneurs and nonprofits in the same room discussing solutions. When I returned I asked other Tucsonans who had gone to SXSW to do a “report back” about what they learned.

The SXSW “report” was successful, and gave me a programming idea that I eventually called Catalyst Café. I envisioned a series of informal discussions on tech and entrepreneurship topics that would be marketed to both businesses and nonprofits. Basically, I would call up local folks working on cutting-edge projects in the Tucson area and ask them to speak about what they were working on. Over the years we covered Kickstarter, the foodtruck biz, principles of lean startup, ways to gamify decision-making, online selling via Etsy, the legalities of social entrepreneurship and more.
 

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My continuing participation at SXSW put me in touch with other librarians who were also focused on ways libraries could be experimental and innovative, especially staffers at the American Library Association. These connections meant I was invited to speak at national conferences about social media, the Catalyst Café and ways to plan for library innovation. I was also asked to contribute to Using Social Media to Build Library Communities: A LITA Guide.

COVID was an unexpected high-stakes test of the following we built on social media. With buildings shut down, staff on leave and no book circulation, our website activity plummeted. Our two best ways to maintain relationships and communicate service updates were either the email messages created by Holly Shaffer, or our social media pages

When I retired in 2021, almost every Pima County Public Library branch had an active Facebook page, and special services teams like Nuestras Raices and LGBTQ+ had either Facebook or Instagram accounts. On the whole, I believe that our de-centralized model for social media community building and communications has proven to be a strong one.