Fobazi Ettarh

Fobazi Ettarh is a former academic librarian of Rutgers University and a PhD student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who is best known for her coinage of the term "vocational awe". See page 5 of this faculty publication.
==Early life and education==
Ettarh was born in New Jersey, as the child of a pastor. She attended University of Delaware for undergraduate studies. She later earned a MLS from Rutgers in 2014 while on the school library media track. She also received a certification to be a school librarian in New Jersey.
==Career==
From August 2015 to May 2017, she worked as Resident Librarian at the Temple University Libraries. She would be a mentee of Temple University librarian Latanya Jenkins, who died of breast cancer in August 2021, with Ettarh later blaming the university for running Jenkins "into the ground" as a result of existing work requirements.
In 2016, Ettarh created Killing Me Softly: A Game About Microaggressions, an open-access video game. which allows plays to navigate through the life of a character who experiences microaggression.
In May 2017, during a panel presentation held at the University of Southern California, Ettarh first used, and coined, the term "vocational awe". She later defined the term, in a January 2018 article within In The Library With The Lead Pipe, as "the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique." The term was embraced by fellow librarians such as Meredith Farkas, who argued that vocational awe was "common in the helping professions" like librarianship and R. David Lankes of Publishers Weekly as putting the "grand mission" of librarians before the well-being of the workforce.
In 2018, she gave a presentation at the American Library Association Annual Conference & Exhibits. By June 2018, she was Student Success Librarian at California State University, Dominguez Hills. In September 2018, Ettarh wrote the foreward to the Library Juice Press book Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS.
Fobazi began working as an academic librarian at Rutgers University sometime before March 2019. By March 2021, she was still working at Rutgers as a Special Projects Librarian. She later began studying for her PhD at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
In January 2019, as part of a American Libraries piece interviewing "front-line librarians", she argued that "mission creep" was a major problem within librarianship, citing the use of Narcan as an example, and saying that librarians should remain specialists in information, not be "stretched thin" in job responsibilities. She also presented at two conferences in 2019 on the topic of vocational awe, first at the Association of College and Research Libraries Conference in April and at the Library Journal Directors' Summit n November 2019. She also gave the keynote speech at the Minnesota Library Association's Academic and Research Libraries Division (ARLD) Day in 2020 and a presentation at the Academic Library Association of Ohio the following year.
In March 2020, she told Teen Vogue that she disagreed with colleges sending students home in response to coronavirus spread, and said that it shows library works that their "health and well-being" does not have the same level of importance as academic success of students. In April 2021, she told Chronkite News that there needed to be long-term solutions to restoring in-person library services. In March 2022, Ettarh told Library Journal that the pandemic had "brought home the idea that work can’t love you back".
Ettarh presented the keynote speech at the Connecticut Information Literacy Conference in 2022 and a keynote presentation at the Lake Superior Libraries Symposium the same year. She also presented on the topic of vocational awe at the Politics of Libraries Conference in March 2022 Video notes date in March 2022. and on the same topic at the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion symposium hosted by the SJSU School of Information. She also was a presenter at the Social Emotional Librarianship conference, co-hosted by Library Journal and School Library Journal in October 2022, on the topic of advocating for yourself and your staff.
===Research, librarianship, and influence===
Ettarh's research focuses on gap between values of librarianship and the realities for "marginalized librarians and users". She also focuses on inclusion, equity, and diversity in libraries, including social and organizational privilege, and the notion of vocational awe as related to librarians. She is also involved with the We Here community and talks about "creating communities of color" within libraries which support one other. In 2017, she was selected as a ALA Emerging Leader. 
Ettarh's article January 2018 In the Library with the Lead Pipe article received an honorable mention in the 2018 |Library Juice Paper Contest and appeared on library science course syllabi. Her article was praised for allowing librarians to talk about the profession with "more honesty". Abby Hargreaves of Book Riot argued that there is "staunch reality" in examining the ALA "Library Bill of Rights", saying it deserves a "sense of awe". She also said that vocational awe should be deconstructed and eliminated "in ourselves and in our customers". 
The term "vocational awe" has been used by scholars in articles about music librarianship, theological librarianship, early career librarians, preservation,, academic librarians, stress and burnout of library workers, higher education, and other topics. The term has also been used by non-librarians. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel described Dykes to Watch Out For protagonist Mo Testa as falling into "the pitfall of vocational awe, believing that her public library job is a religious calling". Writer John Warner proposed a similar term, institutional awe, derived from vocational awe, referring to when no individual sacrifice is "too great in order to preserve the status quo functioning of the institution."
In May 2020, Ettarh was named as a "mover & shaker" by Library Journal. In March 2021, scholar Zahra Osman said that Ettarh, apart from her scholarly work, often spends time giving interviews with MLIS students covering her perspectives on library leadership.
==Personal life==
In March 2020, Ettarh described herself as "severely immunocompromised" and vulnerable to COVID-19. Ettarh also identified as first-generation American, queer, and disabled women of color in a Library Journal profile. She also took on the moniker of "radical librarian" for herself, and was living in Newark, New Jersey as of April 2021.
== Selected publications ==
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Category:American people
Category:People from New Jersey