overview

• Dr. Vanessa Irvin is an associate professor and program director of the Master of Library Science Program in the College of Education at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. She brings decades of professional experience across academic, archival, public, and school library settings into her teaching in reference and information services, youth services, and public librarianship. Her scholarship also examines how emerging technologies are shaping the evolution of reference and information services in library settings.
  Dr. Irvin's research centers on librarian professional development, approached through a cultural heritage informatics framework. She studies how heritage-based knowledge systems shape librarians' information-seeking behaviors and literacy practices in both professional and everyday contexts, and she has led several grant-funded projects in this area. She also examines the social informatics of informal learning within public librarian communities of practice.
  Dr. Irvin's work contributes to critical librarianship by investigating public libraries as sites that cultivate heritage-based collaborative communities of literacy practice and serve as platforms for literacy justice for diverse local and Indigenous communities.