Look Who's New!
By C. Boyce
Hi everyone! I’m the new Instruction & Technology Librarian at the Annandale campus and this is where I tell you all my quirks and secrets (insert villain laugh that sounds oddly like Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove). My pronouns are she/her/hers, I’m queer, my politics are leftist to liberal depending on the topic, I’m coming to NOVA from Hawai’i/Illinois/Leesburg (it’s complicated), and I get to go home to my kiddo and dog at the end of the day. Kiddo (she/they) is 12 and the pup is a 4 ½ year old super mutt who wants nothing to do with anything under 75°.
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I’ve been working in libraries since I was 16 but didn’t figure out I wanted to be a librarian until kiddo was born. I did my coursework 100% online with a new baby (you can become addicted to stress; did you know that?). My program ended with a study abroad course in London and a cross country move to Illinois. I was working on a PhD while we lived in Hawai’i, but COVID-related circumstances, an impending loss of in-state tuition benefits, and other big life transitions meant I left the program ABD.
I’ve only ever worked in 4-year academic libraries with local administration and leadership, and I’m slowly building an understanding of multi-campus partnerships, distributed workflows, and the unique needs of community college students and their faculty.
That’s a very small, not-at-all random sample of me, so let’s jump to the awkward question phase.
What’s a movie or show you will watch over and over and it never get old?
Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (not The Hobbit even though the cast is great), and The Fifth Element are a few of the movies that I will absolutely never get tired of. If they were on VHS, I’d have burned through several copies of each by now, like I did with The Adventures of Milo and Otis when I was a kid. I’ve watched the entirety of Firefly, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Supernatural multiple times each. I’d rewatch all the new Doctor Who and Sherlock if they were on any of my streaming services. If you haven’t watched Steven Universe, you should. That show is amazing.
What are your top one or two unexpected skills?
I have a general belief that I can do just about anything creative, which means I have a whole slew of hobbies that I rotate through. I tend to binge on one for a few months before it gets set aside for a while, years possibly. I recently got back into sewing, which means I finished a quilt I started in 2016 and taught myself how to make my own clothes. So far, I’ve made a bunch of shirts and three pairs of pants. I may or may not be a fabric goblin, so any excuse to buy pretty fabric will get my adrenaline pumping and force my grown-up, budget-conscious brain to go into overdrive.
If you could do anything during a typical evening, what would you be doing?
I’d love to have a regular group of friends able to get together for snacks, drinks, and board games. I’ve got so many games that are great for groups, and I have a love of organizing (yes, an actual love of organizing ALL THE THINGS) and baking. I’ve been known to make upwards of 15 different types of cookies for the holidays in addition to pies, cakes, and other confections. I prefer playing board games like Pandemic, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Catan, and other games that vary in set up and difficulty and have immensely different game play each go round. I recently got a copy of Radical Queer Witches which is Cards Against Humanity without the bigotry and hate.
What’s something you think your co-workers ought to know about your work style?
I am an external processor which means I’m frequently hanging lists and pictures or talking something out (yeah…sometimes with myself). I’m neurodivergent and have learned a lot of ways to work with my brain over the years, and sometimes that looks like a bunch of post-it notes all over my desk. If it’s in a drawer, there’s got to be a big reason for me to remember it, otherwise it’s just something that got printed and then forgotten about. I’m also a systems thinker, which means I tend to look for the relationships between things to understand them. Everything and everyone is connected, even nebulously, and those connections have just as many surprising impacts as they do obvious ones.
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