Emily Drabinski

Emily Drabinski (born June 16, 1975) is an academic librarian, author, and teacher, serving as president of the American Library Association since 2023.

Early life and education
Drabinski was born in June 1975 in Boise, Idaho, with an identical twin sister, Kate Drabinski. Emily attended Madison Elementary School, North Junior High School and Boise High School while living in Idaho. She left Boise at age 18 in hopes of becoming a writer after attending Columbia University. Emily Drabinski earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1997 from Columbia University.

In 2001, she enrolled in Syracuse University's Master of Library and Information Science program. Drabinski believed she would work as a librarian who helped people "find books." At the time, she lived in New York City, took her classes online, and worked full time at the New York Public Library. She received her MLIS degree in 2003 from Syracuse. She earned a degree in rhetoric and composition in 2011 from Long Island University to become an academic librarian.

Career
Drabinkski's first professional librarian job was as an academic reference librarian from 2004 to 2008 at Sarah Lawrence College. Drabinski was an early member of Radical Reference, where she protested the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City and taught fact-checking workshops for independent journalists. She remained a member and participated in events between 2007 and 2010.

From 2008 to 2012, Drabinski served as an electronic resources and instruction librarian at Long Island University, Brooklyn. She also served there from 2012 to 2019 as a coordinator of library instruction. As a faculty librarian at LIU Brooklyn, Drabinski went on strike in 2011 with fellow union members.

In 2016, Drabinski co-chaired a colloquium on gender and sexuality in information studies with Baharak Yousefi and Tara Robertson. Drabinski edited a Library Juice Press series on gender and sexuality in information studies. She also co-edited Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods with Maria T. Accardi and Alana Kumbier.

In September 2016, Drabinski was secretary of LIU's faculty federation and joined the faculty and students' protest at Long Island University - Brooklyn over a lockout associated with faculty contract negotiations. In an interview with Jacobin magazine at the time, Drabinski described the union as "fairly militant" in seeking a "fair contract," as well as the desire for the university to move "towards meaningful shared governance." In April 2022, she stated the lockout informed her about "forming collective power" among workers. From 2017 to 2020, Drabinski taught classes at Syracuse University in its iSchool’s MSLIS program.

Drabinski joined the faculty in 2019 at the Graduate Center, CUNY, as a critical pedagogy librarian. In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 lockdown began in New York City, Drabinski assumed the role of interim chief at the Graduate City library when the previous chief, Polly Thistlethwaite, became interim university dean for library services at CUNY. Drabinski also held a workshop in March 2019 at the Open Educational Resources bootcamp of CUNY. In July 2022, she ended her role as interim chief librarian, but continued to work at CUNY's Mina Rees Library.

In fall, 2023 she was appointed Associate Professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.  

In October 2021, the American Library Association announced Drabinski's candidacy for the office of president for the 2023-24 term. She had served as an American Library Association councilor-at-large (2017-2020), a chair of the International Relations Committee, and as both an American Library Association Association of College and Research Libraries chair and information literacy frameworks and standards committee member. As president of the ALA, Drabinski pledged to build solidarity to "champion a treasured social institution" in librarianship, create "stronger connections between...our communities and the communities we serve," and aid everyone in society struggling from "maldistribution of wealth." She also argued that the ALA needed a president who publicly sided with labor and educated people about union organizing.

On April 13, 2022, the ALA announced Drabinski won the election as president, receiving 5,410 votes versus 4,622 votes for Kelvin Watson, the executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District. Drabinski began her tenure as president in July 2023. In November 2022, she was interviewed by Brooke Gladstone for On the Media about how libraries under attack need to change the narrative.

ALA Presidency
In her first editorial for American Libraries after becoming president, Drabinski stated, "These coming months will ask even more of us as we organize and mobilize together on behalf of our libraries, our patrons, our communities, and, importantly, ourselves." She asserted that the ALA needs to make "good trouble, the kind of trouble that matters" and added, in her view, that the ALA must "build the collective power necessary to preserve and expand the public good," and committed herself to working with everyone. 

In her first interview as President on August 7, Drabinski said she plans to tackle "pressing issues" facing librarians, including preparing libraries for climate change consequences, ensuring collections are diverse, hiring lawyers for libraries, encouraging people who support intellectual freedom to run for library and school boards, and hosting an intellectual freedom summit in Washington, D.C. in January 2024.

After her election as ALA president in June 2022, Drabinski described herself in a later deleted tweet as a "Marxist lesbian" who believes in "collective power" with a mom who was proud of her. Following the tweet, Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the conservative nonprofit, Moms for Liberty, criticized outside interference in libraries, asking "what’s in the libraries?" and promoting books written by partners of her organization. Drabinski stated she wants to promote, and build, enthusiasm for "amazing work" by librarians across the United States. She also stated that she is still a professional, regardless of her political views. 

In July 2023 the Montana State Library Commission voted 5-1-1 to withdraw from the ALA because of Drabinski's political beliefs. The ALA later stated that the organization would continue to provide "essential support, resources, and opportunities for every library and library worker" in all states and territories despite the decision. Prior to the decision, Darrell Ehrlick of The Daily Montanan criticized the Montana Commission for legitimizing stereotypes about lesbians and Marxists, and the commission "look[s] rather uniformed." The executive board of the Montana Library Association, a different organization than the Commission, said they "deeply regretted" the Commission's decision, sating it runs counter to the mission of the Commission, and "undermines the shared goals of Montana libraries." Branko Marcetic later argued in Jacobin that such votes, and pushes from nine Republican Freedom Caucuses across the U.S. to also withdraw from the ALA, were red-baiting and homophobic attacks against Drabinski.

In an August 2023 interview, Drabinski argued that her tweet was an excited expression to celebrate "two aspects" of her identity which are "really important" to her and are often scrutinized. She stated that she didn't anticipate what she described as "targeted attacks being used as a bludgeon against library workers," calling them "regrettable" and wishing they weren't happening. She added that critiques of her beliefs are "organized pro-censorship efforts" by those who want to weaken support for "public institutions that enable access to information for everyone" and said that her personal views are being targeted, but that her "personal agenda doesn’t drive the association" and instead the agenda of everyone working together is the ALA's driving force.

Research, teaching, and librarianship
Drabinski's research focuses on queer theory, library instruction and cataloging practice. She has also conducted research about reference services for incarcerated prisoners with scholar Deborah Rabina. Drabinski has served as chair of the ALA's international relations committee  of the American Library Association. In addition, she is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Philippine Librarianship & Information Studies, which is published by the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. Drabinski has presented papers at international conferences in Zadar, Croatia; London, England; Quezon City, Manila; and at several conferences in Canada, including Ottawa, Windsor, Edmonton and Vancouver. Drabinski says that current library classification has "no language" for queer people because "queer identity terms change so quickly." Those classifications require "fixed language...[and] there’s no way to change it quickly."

Drabinski is currently on the editorial board of Radical Teacher. She works as an adjunct professor at both UCLA, and Rutgers. She was formerly a part-time faculty member at the Pratt School of Information, where she taught a reference librarianship course.

Personal life
In June 2020, during the COVID-19 quarantine, Drabinski and her partner, Karen Miller, a history professor at LaGuardia Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center, launched Homeschool Co-op 2020. That effort invited people to teach classes over Zoom for children and adults. Drabinski led a morning session, Cat Chat, at 8 a.m. Eastern Time every day.

Drabinski and her partner currently live in Brooklyn with their teenage son and their three cats.

Honors and awards

Drabinski was a 2014 Library Journal Mover & Shaker Advocate, and winner of the Ilene F. Rockman Instruction Publication of the Year in 2015 for her article "Towards a Kairos of Library Instruction." She was honored with the Beta Phi Mu Harold Lancour Scholarship for Foreign Study in 2018.

Selected publications 

Drabinski, Emily. (2020) “Professionalism reconsidered.” Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice. 15, No. 20, 191-195.

Drabinski, Emily and Debbie Rabina. (2016) "Reference Services to Incarcerated People, Part II: Sources and Learning Outcomes."  Reference & User Services Quarterly,  55, No. (3), pp. 123–131.
Drabinski, Emily and Debbie Rabina. (2016)"Reference Services to Incarcerated People, Part I: Themes Emerging from Answering Reference Questions from Prisons and Jails."  Reference & User Services Quarterly,  55, No.(1), pp. 42–48.

References

External links
 Personal website
 Interview of Emily Drabinski by Graduate Center, CUNY in March 2022

American librarians
American LGBT writers
American lesbian writers
American Marxists
American women librarians
Academic librarians
Queer theorists
Long Island University faculty
Living people
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Syracuse University alumni
Long Island University alumni
CUNY Graduate Center faculty
Presidents of the American Library Association
Lesbian academics
Lesbian trade unionists
Women Marxists
American Library Association people
1975 births
Queens College, City University of New York faculty