By Jenna Josserand
For Adrienne Nguyen ‘13 (B.A.s, history and anthropology), ensuring that peer-reviewed scholarship is accessible is how she fights back against the modern scourge of disinformation, artificial intelligence and censorship.
In high school, Nguyen found herself drawn to history classes not just for the curriculum, but for what lay beyond it. “I was fascinated by the concept that there are so many more things to learn about in history than what is taught in a textbook,” she explains. History is often remembered through rose-colored glasses so thick that the lenses become practically purple, oversimplifying the past to an unrecognizable extent.
To Nguyen, removing those rose-colored glasses – and ensuring that the scholarly mission of the university is something that many can access – remain her driving purpose. Now a Scholarly Resources and Metadata Law Librarian at the UCI Law Library, she channels her passion for uncovering historical truth into her current role as a “steward of information,” championing accessibility in an age of increasing barriers to knowledge.
What are you going to do with that?
When Nguyen began her undergraduate journey at UC Irvine, she remembers being fascinated with anything and everything. This boundless curiosity led her to major in history, where she met some of her closest friends and mentors in the Humanities Honors Program. Reflecting on the experience, she notes that “They pushed me to think more deeply about the world and the creative ways one can make an impact.” She became involved in the UTeach program, where her mentors instilled in her a confidence that encouraged her to recognize the impact that one person can have on the world. Through an independent study with UTeach, Nguyen worked with mentors who showed her “the soul of the humanities.” It was inspiring and formative for her future career trajectory.
But as she progressed through her undergraduate studies, Nguyen found herself struggling with how to answer the question “What are you going to do with that history degree?” She told herself it was a natural byproduct of being a humanities student. But the question still remained. While she knew that there were many ways to make an impact, she wasn’t sure which career path was right for her.
An illuminating experience
Upon graduating in 2013, and determined to discover her path, Nguyen took up part-time jobs in various fields as a way to try out future careers.
Thinking she wanted to be a lawyer, Nguyen secured an internship at the public defender’s office. The reality of the office was not how she had pictured it, however. To Nguyen, the justice system seemed stripped down, with attorneys unable to devote the proper amount of time to each case and overwhelmed by the nature of the high stakes work and constant stress.
Nguyen next worked as a tour guide at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. The Nixon Library was an illuminating experience for Nguyen, as the museum’s portrayal of Nixon’s administration starkly contrasted the reality she had learned of his time in office. Nguyen recalls, “The Richard Nixon Presidential Library is where I became interested in public history and how we could teach history better, both in museums and in schools.”
These realizations led her to pursue a Ph.D. in education and learning, with a focus in public history. And so she moved from her hometown in Irvine to New York City to pursue graduate work at New York University.
At NYU, Nguyen focused on an open-ended question: “How do we actually shape the way that history is taught in schools and beyond?” She addressed this question by returning to her experience at presidential libraries, conducting fieldwork and archival work at the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nixon libraries, in order to learn about the libraries as sites, and models, of how historical knowledge is produced and taught.
It was 2020, and only a few months into her research a deadly virus emerged overseas. As the spread of COVID-19 escalated, Nguyen found herself stuck in California for the foreseeable future. Reflecting upon why she decided to pause her Ph.D. program, Nguyen reflects “It was an interesting wrench in the very straightforward path that I'd laid out for myself.”
Steward of information
While researching at the Nixon Library, Nguyen had also been working part-time at the UCI Law Library to support herself during her doctoral studies. As the pandemic progressed, she immersed herself more deeply in the library work and discovered that the more time she spent there, the more she fell in love with her position.
Now a fulltime Scholarly Resources and Metadata Law Librarian, Nguyen spends her days ensuring that faculty research is findable, accessible and supported. She devotes the majority of her time to the metadata of faculty research, adding keywords and phrases to ensure that papers are discoverable on well-known sites like Google Scholar as well as on UC Irvine’s institutional repository. She supplements these efforts through collection development, selecting books and collaborating with colleagues to purchase electronic resources that support faculty scholarship.
While working part-time at the UCI Law Library, “I realized that I care a lot more about making sure information and knowledge is actually accessible to people,” she shares. “While it is very important to think about how the material that’s in a textbook is shared, I mostly want to be a part of a movement that ensures that information is actually findable to people. I want to do my part to shape access to knowledge as well as think about how knowledge is produced.”
She finds the exclusionary nature of academic research deeply troubling. Nguyen explains, “The work that academics do is really important and should be something that people can actually read. If all of that is locked behind paywalls, there is an immovable barrier for people to access peer reviewed research.” A significant problem emerges when this inaccessibility is coupled with an emerging landscape of easily accessible misinformation and disinformation.
Nguyen does miss interacting with a wider community in her position, however, and would consider transitioning into a more public-facing role at some point in her professional future. She jokes, “Maybe I’ll even sign up to be a tour guide at the Nixon Library again!” But for now, the rose-colored glasses have come off as she works to ensure that quality faculty research is accessible to the public – all while navigating the rapid changes brought by artificial intelligence to library sciences.
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