Like many academic librarians, I’m on the tenure track, and with that comes the opportunity and requirement for academic service. I genuinely enjoy most of my service work, which ranges from membership in our faculty governance body to work on committees dealing with academic technology and curriculum development, among others. Right now I’m in the midst of a five-year commitment on a large grant-funded pedagogical project at my college. My time is devoted either to the project or to my work in the library on different days of the week, with some exceptions. I joke about taking off one hat and putting on another from day to day or meeting to meeting.
My library days are structured along similar lines as they were before my involvement in the grant project. But on my grant days I often don’t feel like a librarian: no library instruction, no reference, no information literacy program planning, no library meetings — only work related to my other service obligations. On those days I sometimes wonder: what does it mean when I spend more time outside of the library than inside?
Despite occasionally feeling as if I’m being pulled in different directions depending on which hat I’m wearing, I’m certain that my service work augments my work in the library. College service makes me feel connected to the institution, and allows me to gain a more complete understanding of and contribute to the college’s mission, going beyond the work I do in the library. I also think that academic librarians taking on service commitments can bring more visibility to the library on campus, almost a stealth form of marketing. Faculty in other departments whom I’ve met on various committees will sometimes contact me to ask a question about the library, and I hope that makes them more likely to send their students to the library as well.
My academic service outside of the library also helps inform my work as an information literacy librarian. In my roles on college-wide projects I’ve become much more familiar with the programs and majors available for our students, which facilitates making connections across the curriculum and planning information literacy outreach. College service work increases the number of faculty from other departments whom I meet who can be potential collaborators, too. I’ve drawn on these colleagues when we’ve wanted to pilot different initiatives for library instruction, and have sometimes sought feedback from them on our programs and efforts.
I hope that being in this space at the intersection of multiple identities can help push me to think in new ways about the role of academic libraries and about myself as a librarian and an academic. But despite the benefits of college service work, the crowding of these multiple identities that I inhabit is not always entirely comfortable — sometimes I wish I had two heads for my two hats. If you’re a librarian involved in academic service, what strategies do you use to reconcile your two roles?
Balancing this life is difficult. The best strategy I have for balancing these worlds is to first of all make sure the service commitment ties back to the library’s role in researchers lives/work. Working outside of the library allows librarians to find/make connections that would have gone unnoticed otherwise. Secondly, I try to limit meeting time as much as possible. Committees love to schedule meetings which in my opinion are the biggest waste of a librarian’s (or anyone for that matter) time.