In the Middle of Difficulty Lies Opportunity: Hope Floats


LITA President’s Message 

In the Middle of Difficulty Lies Opportunity 
Hope Floats 
Evviva Weinraub Lajoie 

 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2020  
https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v39i3.12687 

 

Evviva Weinraub Lajoie (evviva@gmail.com) is Vice Provost for University Libraries and 
University Librarian, University at Buffalo, and the last LITA President. © 2020. 

If quarantine has illustrated anything to me, it’s that time is merely a construct. While my 
approximately 2-month term as President may be the shortest in LITA history, it has been filled 
with meetings, reports, protests, and preparations for our metamorphosis into Core. My thoughts 
have been consumed with the myriad of financial, health, and societal issues that have also filled 
my news feed. I spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about what their impact will be on our 
work and our institutions, how it impacts me and the people I work with personally, and what role 
Core may play for many of us in the future. 

I imagine all of us are thinking about health and safety. We are all balancing those parts of 
ourselves that want to aid, to help, to teach and guide with the parts of ourselves that are anxious 
and scared. Many of us have responsibilities where we need to protect our loved ones and 
ourselves. We are seeing the health and safety of our BIPOC colleagues disproportionately 
harmed. Balancing our crucial role within our communities is complicated and there are no right 
answers. 

I imagine many of us have been spending a lot of time thinking about money, whether it be 
personal concerns, institutional and organizational concerns, or their intersection point. We’re 
thinking a lot more about where our money comes from, how it is invested, how we pay for things, 
how we prioritize paying for things, who decides what gets purchased, and whose voice gets 
centered when we make that purchase. We’re thinking carefully about the institutions and 
infrastructures that have existed and how they will look different and should be different in a 
post-COVID landscape. 

I imagine most of us are thinking about societal connections. We are interacting with our 
professional colleagues differently, and many of us are, perhaps for the first time, perceiving the 
deep imbalances that permeate our personal, social, and professional lives. We are all trying to 
figure out how to do the work we need to do when we are uncomfortable and the world is 
uncertain and the demands for change are coming from all angles and in a variety of forms. 

LITA remained my professional home through the years because I found it to be a place where no 
matter who you were or where you worked, there was a place for you. That feeling of connection 
is so vital to all of us, pandemic and social unrest or not. Knowing there is a network I can depend 
on to be there when I’m working through the difficult and uncomfortable makes the work just a 
little bit easier and significantly more meaningful. Our professional organizations and affiliations 
have the ability to be an anchor in uncertain times - whether through a change in career, a 
financial crisis, an environmental catastrophe, or a global health emergency. 

On August 31, 2020, LITA officially dissolved and on September 1, our home became Core. At our 
last LITA Board meeting, Margaret Heller and Amanda L. Goodman presented a history of LITA. 

mailto:evviva@gmail.com
http://hdl.handle.net/11213/14823


INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES  SEPTEMBER 2020 

IN THE MIDDLE OF DIFFICULTY LIES OPPORTUNITY | WEINRAUB LAJOIE 2 

What became clear to me in the retelling is that this is not LITA’s first reorganization. Nor is it our 
second or our third. LLAMA, LITA, and ALCTS have always been dancing with each other. Our 
merger is an acknowledgement that we “...play a central role in every library, shaping the future of 
the profession by striking a balance between maintenance and innovation, process and progress, 
collaboration and leading.” 

Collectively, we have had a year that is beyond comprehension—it has been filled with loss, anger, 
frustration, grief, anxiety, depression, horror...we have all been weathering the same storm, but 
our ships are not all equally prepared for the task laid ahead of them. That has been, for so many 
of us, the hardest part of all of this. We may have always known that inequities existed, that the 
system was structured to make sure that some folks were never able to get access to the better 
goods and services, but for many, this pandemic is the first time we have had those systemic 
inequities held up to our noses and been asked, “what are you going to do to change this?” 
Balancing those priorities will require us to lean on our professional networks and organizations 
to be more and to do more. I believe that together, we can make Core stand up to that challenge. 

It has been an honor to serve as the last LITA President. For the brief time I have served, to have 
the chance to hold an office so many people I truly admire have held...it is a legacy I am proud to 
have had a moment to uphold. I am gratified to transition LITA into a partnership that will take all 
that we have loved about LITA and make something new, something Core. 

https://core.ala.org/our-mission-vision-and-values/
https://core.ala.org/our-mission-vision-and-values/
https://core.ala.org/our-mission-vision-and-values/