Volume 23 Issue 1 Introduction

I feel honored and fortunate to have been asked to introduce this issue of the OLA Quarterly, and, having lived in Oregon for less than two years, not a little daunted in light of my relative newness to the state. Neither a longtime Oregonian nor even yet a fully credentialed librarian, I am hardly the fittest person imaginable to introduce a journal issue focused on Oregon librarians’ response to broad and dramatic changes. And yet, in the same way that one can benefit greatly from the distanced perspective of a different set of eyes looking over a draft of writing in which one has become deeply immersed, perhaps my outsider’s view can offer useful observations even at its degree of remove. This issue’s contributors and topics span academic and public institutions, rural and metropolitan libraries, political activism and personal narrative, and programming as well as abstraction. I undertook the task of introducing it with humility, but also with genuine hope that my experiences living in some of the most conservative and some of the most liberal parts of the United States, working in academic and public libraries, and teaching classes founded in feminism and critical race theory would enable me to offer something productive to this conversation, as I have learned abundantly from its constituents