Profile – Caroline Ashcraft – INFO 200

Required Information

Professional Information

Employer Name	N/A
Job Title	N/A
Job Description	My last job was in operations management for a luxury hospitality company, which I left in order to focus on my MLIS and a career switch into school librarianship. Improving literacy, fact checking, and community awareness are all critically important, now more than ever, and I also just love sharing a good book with a kid and seeing them get hooked on reading for life.
Scholarly and Professional Interests	{School Librarian}, {Youth Librarianship}

Social Information

Favorites

Favorite Activities	Reading, Word games, Cooking, Volunteering, Traveling, Graphic Design, Trying new restaurants, Attending games/shows/pop ups, Sleeping or otherwise laying down
Favorite TV Shows	I have recently really been enjoying foreign language shows, but not the high-brow art film kind, more k-drama rom-coms, funny Spanish shows, French crime/mystery shows, German historical fiction, etc. I do love shows like Parks and Rec and The Good Place, historical dramas like Reign or The Great, the first seasons of Westworld and True Detective, and a few others I’m forgetting. I prefer TV shows to movies, as you tend to get more story.
Favorite Movies	I love a good Matthew McConaughey movie – Sahara, Interstellar, Gold Rush, etc. and a good Amanda Bynes movie – She’s The Man, Sydney White and the Seven Dorks, Easy A, etc. I could watch the Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones movies an infinite number of times. I mostly watch movies when I want to unplug my brain, so I watch a lot of rom-coms and classic Golden Age of Hollywood films. I never ever watch scary movies, and although I am not opposed to a superhero movie, I never find myself picking them for myself.
Favorite Music	I listen to everything! I often (unpopularly) put my entire music library on shuffle and listen to whatever comes across in whatever order it shows up – from classical to EDM to jazz to pop to Latin to R&B and so on. I do have playlists if I am looking to listen to something specific, but I usually do a big shuffle. If anything, I avoid super twangy country music more than anything else, but I still enjoy some country.
Favorite Quotes	Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.” – William Martin “I long to have pretty lingeries, dozens of little dresses, books – and roses, roses, roses.” – Anais Nin “Her heart was made of liquid sunsets.” – Virginia Woolf
Favorite Books	Far, far too many to list, but here are just a few… The Alienist – Caleb Carr The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards The Percy Jackson series’ – Rick Riordan Throne of Glass series – Sarah Maas (Fun fact: I actually read the original back when it was posted on FictionPress in the early aughts under Queen of Glass, and it has been fun to see how it changed as it was published, and then absolutely wild to see how Maas caught on as an author during the pandemic! I know ACOTAR is the popular series with Booktok, but I believe TOG is the better series.) I love reading books about books, libraries, librarians, book sellers, etc. I love reading about mythologies – not just Greek – and tend to drift toward more feminist or alternative retellings and interpretations, as I find them more compelling. I love fiction – fantasy, romance, mystery, and historical fiction are my most read genres. I absolutely love a physical book, but appreciate the convenience of an e-book, and have been known to enjoy an audio book and graphic novel, manga, comic, etc. in my time. Some of my favorite writing over the years has actually been published on websites like FictionPress, FanFiction, A03 etc. There are both novel-length original and fan fiction stories that have stuck with me for years.
Favorite Websites	For cooking, I’ve been following Half-Baked Harvest since she started in 2012, and I stand by all of her recipes. She has never led me astray! I also spend an inordinate amount of time looking at art, quotes, recipes, and fashion on Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Learning Experiences and Goals

Most Memorable Learning Experience

– My freshman year of undergrad I took Intro to Microeconomics. It was the first time I ever struggled with learning information of any kind. It felt like no matter what I did, I could not understand the content of the class. It forced me to think about how I learn and process things, and how to rearrange information to best allow me to do so. It taught me how to be comfortable with not understanding something, asking for help, and sometimes failing. It forced me to re-evaluate how much of my self worth I had put into achievement, and how to find pride in the process of learning and not just the end result. I ended up learning more about myself and my brain and my relationship to academics in this class than I did microeconomics, but it was all valuable.

– My senior year of undergrad I was the manager of a PR student group led by the head of our department that would run media centers at different events (NASCAR, PGA Golf Tour, Miami Open, different galas, etc.). When I showed up to the media center at the Miami Open, my professor told me I would be in charge of the entire center – including the media personnel, students, and other volunteers – and then she left. I did not think I was prepared to take on that level of responsibility at a massive event as a college student, but as I moved through the day keeping everyone on task and addressing issues as they came up, I realized that I had learned all the skills and experiences I needed to do it by myself. My professor’s unwavering faith, followed by my success, gave me an incredible amount of confidence that I now lean back on in any situation where I feel overwhelmed or out of my depth.

Online Learning

Flexibility! Life is busy and there is always something unforeseen coming up, so the ability to do my learning at the most convenient time and place for me is unbeatable. I do miss connecting in-person with people.

Learning Goals

There are so many overlapping and interwoven information communities here in NYC. I am looking forward to learning how to identify and define individual groups, and learn how to best address their needs in way that is efficient for the whole, while still effective for the smaller group and individual.

Caroline Ashcraft

@carolineashcraft