Book Reviews

Rebecca Tolley. A Trauma-Informed Approach to Library Services. Chicago, IL: ALA Editions, 2020. 192p. Paperback, $59.00 (ISBN 978-0838919811).

As a deadly pandemic grips the world, this book couldn’t have come at a better time as we deal with a collective ongoing traumatic event. The trauma-informed approach (TIA) changes how we view ourselves, our organizations, and our patrons through centering empathy, compassion, and education about trauma along with its multitude of impacts on psychological, physical, and emotional well-being. TIA acknowledges that there are many contributing factors (known and unknown, micro to macro, historical to current, visible and invisible) that affect individuals, how they navigate and interact in the world, and how they engage in the services provided.

Written by Rebecca Tolley, A Trauma-Informed Approach to Library Services provides a rationale for adopting and implementing a trauma-informed framework in libraries that would “help us build empathy” for those we serve while “investing empathy in our operations and through our organizations.” This book aims to increase awareness of and advocate for an approach that aids the individual in a library organization. It focuses on employees as well as patrons. Anyone who reads this book can understand the importance of having a trauma-informed approach and treating people with empathy. It reframes the question, “What is wrong with them?” to “What happened to them?” Tolley ties in theories, evidence, medical and social work concepts into her analysis. With fewer than 200 pages, this book is packed with facts, strategies, and rationale for readers to digest. Tolley is a professor and librarian at East Tennessee State University and brings ample experience and expertise to this topic.

This book will be useful for novices as well as long-time library practitioners. The book is broken into three parts in addition to a preface, acknowledgment, table of contents, appendix, references, and index. Part I explains how physical trauma and adverse childhood experiences make trauma-informed approaches to library services necessary, and more. Part II addresses six key principles of trauma-informed care: safety; transparency and trustworthiness; peer support; collaboration and mutuality; empowerment, voice, and choice; and cultural, historical, and gender issues. Part III discusses assessing organizational readiness, the library as sanctuary, becoming a trauma-informed library workforce, planning for trauma-informed services. The book interweaves the importance of adopting cultural humility and unlearning myths, misinformation, and disinformation about underrepresented and oppressed groups. In librarianship, retraumatization can occur due to policies and procedures, in-person and online interactions, engaging with the library catalog subject headings, and more. The responsibility for knowing and rectifying this is necessary. To do so is to engage in continuing education and lifelong learning (core values in librarianship) while “paying attention to the underlying and systemic causes” of isms (racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, to name a few) and phobias (transphobia, Islamophobia, and others). TIA also means creating spaces for vital, unavoidable conversations (uncomfortable to painful) to occur regularly.

Though there are many concepts covered in the book, there are some gaps and areas that could be more deeply addressed. Whiteness, white supremacy, racial battle fatigue, tokenism, intersectionality, and vocational awe disproportionately impact BIPOC library workers and pose barriers to TIA. Even with these gaps, this is a book that everyone from current library workers to library school students will benefit from.

Libraries have done a lot of work in this area, but there is much more to learn and do. The onus is on us to know about our traumas, to understand the impacts of our trauma and that of our patrons, and how traumas affect how the work is done. This book serves as a primer for learning and implementing a TIA. Finally, this book can be returned to time and time again, to glean new ideas and deepen the reader’s knowledge base. This is the book if you want to continue to further inclusion, equity, cultural humility in librarianship and resist retraumatization, stigmatization, and othering.—Twanna Hodge, University of Florida Libraries