School Librarian & SIS Lecturer

Scot Smith (’98) has touched the lives of many middle school, high school, and graduate students over the past two decades as both a librarian and a teacher of librarians. He not only serves as a school librarian at Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but he’s also a long-time lecturer at the School of Information Sciences. He’s been at the middle school long enough that he’s starting to see the children of past students come through the doors of the library.

Becoming a School Librarian

While librarianship was on his radar early on, Smith took a detour before going to graduate school. He was teaching English and history at an alternative school in Kingsport, Tennessee, when he applied to the SIS master’s program in 1992. He was accepted, but decided to delay his schooling and instead joined another organization: the Peace Corps.

Smith spent three years in Ukraine, specifically Crimea at the time, teaching English as a foreign language. There, he married and had a child. He was only scheduled to be there for two years but he requested an extension to stay for a third.

Though Smith could have come back and kept teaching, librarianship tugged at him. For one thing, he wasn’t a big fan of grading papers, which is a significant part of teaching English.

“I just thought that, when I look at my skillset, I like to organize things, I like stories and schedules and making lists. Librarianship fit my personality a little bit better than being a classroom teacher, and it’s something I had always thought about,” he said.

When he came back to the United States, he decided to pick up right where he left off and enter the SIS master’s program. Only, a few things had changed since he left.

“I was in the Peace Corps from ‘93-‘96, and the internet had developed while I was gone. I came back to a whole new world and I was in shock,” he said. “I was the teacher assistant in the computer lab, and this was from the person who hadn’t seen a computer in three years, so I had a huge learning curve, not only as a student but as the assistant in the computer lab.”

But learn he did, to the point where he now embraces technology and is responsible for managing the Oak Ridge Schools and Robertsville Middle School websites. He had wonderful and patient instructors who not only helped him get up-to-speed with the internet and other technologies, but also made him confident to go into the field after graduating.

“SIS really prepared me professionally to step into a career as a librarian; there’s still a lot of on-the-job learning but I had the foundation and the basics to build upon,” he said.

Though Smith had envisioned himself in an academic or special library, there just happened to be a lot of opportunities for school librarians around the time he graduated. With a teaching certificate already in hand, it wasn’t difficult for him to acquire a position as librarian for Loudon High School before he even finished the program.

From there, he went to Central High School in Knoxville, which was a position he really enjoyed. But when a spot opened up at Robertsville Middle School, he just knew he should go for it.

Librarian, Lecturer, Volunteer

Robertsville is a unique middle school in that it serves students in fifth through eighth grades, which presents a wider range of interests, reading levels, and programming, Smith said. He’s learned to really enjoy it because the kids often read more than high school students do and the broad range of ages provides a lot of opportunities for imaginative programming.

As many school media specialists and librarians do, Smith has other responsibilities at the school besides the library. One of them has become particularly fun over the years, and that’s the live-streamed morning announcements he does with the assistance of his “internationally renowned” dog puppet named Fluffy. He said he just picked Fluffy up one day to assist with the announcements, and from there, the hand-puppet became a fixture in the library and a sort-of alter ego.

“My teachers tell me that Fluffy is me without my filter, so he can say things that I can’t say,” Smith said. “He’ll go to conferences with me like ALA and we’ll have pictures taken with authors, Mr. Smith and Fluffy.”

Though Smith did not expect to be a middle school librarian, he said it’s really worked out quite well. Which is something he has carried with him and relays to the SIS students he teaches.

“I found a niche I didn’t know I quite had. I talk to my students about that all the time, my UT students. They’ll, say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ and I always tell them, you’ll never know what door will open, just be prepared, because with a library degree there are so many options that you have,” he said.

Smith’s foray into lecturing started early on in his library career in 1999 when he was asked to teach an undergraduate children’s literature class that is no longer in the catalog today. That led to teaching other classes, but around 2001, he started teaching a young adult literature class with two other instructors. He co-taught for years with former SIS faculty member Jinx Watson before taking it over on his own.

Starting in summer 2021, Smith began teaching a special topics course on graphic novels, which is one of his personal interests. Other programs were offering courses on the topic so he pitched it to SIS faculty, who approved, and once it was launched it was received with great enthusiasm by students.

Being in a graduate classroom helps him gain a perspective about his profession he wouldn’t otherwise have and allows him to think about practical and theoretical scenarios in different ways, Smith said. It’s really rounded out his career and been a boon to him professionally.

“One thing I always think about when people ask about why I lecture and work full-time, is that lecturing helps me become a better school librarian and being a school librarian makes me a better lecturer. It gives me time to think critically about the important issues and concepts in my profession,” he said.

Being at UT also taught Smith the importance of networking through volunteering. He served as the webmaster for the Tennessee Association of School Librarians in the 2000s and read for the Young Adult/middle school committees of the Volunteer State Book Award (VSBA) for more than 20 years. He was the co-chair of the VSBA for 14 years. Currently, he is active in the American Library Association as he is serving on the jury for the Schneider Family Book Award and doing committee work for Young Adult Library Services Association and the Accessibility Assembly. In 2017, he was on YALSA’s Michael L. Printz Award committee, one of the highlights of his career.

“By nature, I am a homebody. If given the choice, I would stay at home and read and walk in the woods. It sounds cliché, but UT taught me the importance of being a volunteer,” he said.•