The academic literature of librarianship is a bit narrow sometimes. Most journals expect conformity to an article structure taken directly from the social sciences. In my experience, this can chafe at a librarian’s creativity: we sometimes need to go to tremendous efforts to find ways to shoehorn our ideas into that social science article structure, just to make our work publishable in a peer reviewed library journal.

This is not ideal.

I hope to have more news to share about this topic soon. But in the meantime, I’d just like to point out one effective strategy for a librarian who is despairing at their limited stylistic choices: the case study. Library journals sometimes have a peer reviewed section devoted to case studies, and while it might be called something else, these sections are often much more flexible than they may initially appear. The useful thing about this format is that once you have spent a few paragraphs dispatching your “case”, the rest of the study is often wide open to you. You are then at liberty to take the document where you please, and make the points you want to make. Of course you still have win over the editors and the peer reviewers, but I have faith in you! So it is definitely worth considering whether your project would make an effective academic case study.

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