University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

In this day and age of specialization, when academic scholars are casting themselves into ever-narrower silos that do not communicate with each other, it was refreshing to read Mills' Sociological Imagination that suggests virtue in looking across the silos. In Mills' words, imagination is the perspective to shift from one perspective to another and the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformation to the most intimate features of human self--and to see the relations between the two (p. 7). When such a perspective is taken towards the research that one pursues the vistas that one could never imagine to have existed seem obvious and fruitful. It is with such a perspective that I approached my research that in most instances crossed silos and disciplines. Instead of seeing myself in "no man's land," I saw this research as having multiple homes.