Seeking 2023-24 First Year Academic Librarian Bloggers

As we enter a new academic year, we’re looking to bring on a few new bloggers here at ACRLog. We’d like to thank our 2022-2023 FYAL bloggers Rosemary Medrano and Emily Zerrenner for their terrific posts this past year in our First Year Academic Librarian Experience series. We’d also like to encourage new academic librarians — those who are just beginning in their first position at an academic library — to blog with us during their first year.

FYAL bloggers typically publish posts monthly during the academic year. If you’re interested in applying to be a FYAL blogger here at ACRLog, applications are due by Sunday, September 10, 2023. Please submit an application through this Google Form.

Proposals are evaluated by the ACRLog blog team. When selecting FYAL bloggers we consider:

Diversity of race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/ability
Voices from a range of academic institutions (for example, community colleges, research universities, etc.) and job responsibilities within academic libraries (for example, instruction, cataloging, scholarly communications, etc.)
Clear and compelling writing style
Connection between day-to-day work and bigger conversations around theory, practice, criticism, LIS education, and other issues

Please send any questions to ACRLog’s Technical Coordinator, Hailley Fargo at fargoh1@nku.edu. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Digging In: Reflecting on a Work Anniversary

This week, I celebrated my two year work anniversary. I feel like I say this a lot, but I both can’t believe I’ve been here two years and also feel like I just started. A lot has happened in a short amount of time! In addition to this anniversary, I’ve also spent most of July compiling my dossier for tenure consideration this fall. Naturally, I’m spending a lot of time taking stock of how I got here, what I’ve accomplished, and what’s next.

When I think about my two years at my current institution, I see a different focus each year. My first year was focused on getting to know my team, understanding the dynamics of the library, and figuring out the type of supervisor I wanted to be. I felt very internal, but knew I wanted to establish a strong foundation before trying to face more externally. My second year was focused on getting out of the library and building relationships with folks across campus. This external relationships piece is one of my favorite parts of the job. I like to represent the library, hear about challenges and successes across campus, and seek out intersections for collaboration. These days, I find that I’m more comfortable walking around campus, seeing people I know, and getting together to figure out what’s next. I can only hope that year three will be a nice mix of work happening inside the library and collaboration with folks across campus.

The thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is the “figuring out what’s next” piece. During my meetings this summer, I felt like I was working with folks and we were laying out ideas that spanned more than just this upcoming academic year. I found myself referencing AY 24-25 or even AY 25-26! As I left those meetings, I thought about the ways I am “digging in” to the work. I’m envisioning a future at this institution for many years. This isn’t something I’ve experienced before. I’m both a little scared of this feeling and also excited about what it means for me.

While I was at my former institution for five years, I can’t place a time where I felt this “digging in.” Sure, I thought about the future of my work, but I don’t think I saw it as clearly on the horizon as I do right now. I can’t quite parse if that’s because I’m in a department head role and I naturally think forward multiple years, or if there’s something different about this role and location where I feel comfortable thinking ahead like that. In some ways, I think it is a combo of being wearing that department head and the location where I’m living. I genuinely enjoy living in Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky and I have a community around me that feels permanent in a way that I didn’t always feel in other spots, where everyone around me felt transient.

Of course the other factor that could play into this “digging in” feeling is tenure. At my former institution, I left before I encountered my sixth year dossier. Now, it’s right there on the horizon. This summer, it was so satisfying to put all my work together and shape the narrative of my career trajectory. I found more parallels between my work as the Student Engagement Coordinator and as a department head. I could more clearly see the shifts in my thinking and my scholarship. I see my growth and I hope I’ve articulated that in a way that everyone can see. For me, achieving tenure doesn’t feel like stopping at the top of the mountain, but instead, gates opening up onto a new space, full of possibilities and options.

Now this post isn’t meant to imply that everything is great. My institution is facing issues similar to other colleges and universities; enrollment challenges, budget concerns, and smaller staff/faculty numbers. We’re searching for new leadership and colleagues across the institution are stepping into interim roles while we wait to see how things pan out. We’ve definitely got our work cut out for us this year. I come to work every day, wondering what will happen next. As a supervisor, I’m trying to find ways to share information, hear questions, concerns, and fears from the team, and focus on the things we have in our control. Despite the uncertainty, I feel ready to dig in. Looking forward to seeing what’s next in year three.

Featured image by Hadija on Unsplash

Feeling Connected & Supported: An End of Academic Year Reflection

It’s summer here on campus. The library is quiet and I feel a sense of calm as I look at the things I want to accomplish this summer. As each academic year comes to a close, I find myself naturally reflecting on the year, to identify common themes, big successes, and challenges.

One thing that stood out to me as I thought back on this academic year was the way in which connections with others played a big role in me feeling supported. Within this “connections” theme, I see three subcategories. In this post, I want to take a minute to expand on these subcategories.

Opportunities outside the library

During the past academic year, I had the chance to participate in two opportunities that existed outside of the library (and didn’t have any other library colleagues involved in them). I was part of an inaugural Leadership Institute and participated in a mentoring circle for 3rd and 4th year tenure-track faculty. I appreciated the opportunities to connect with other colleagues across campus and to sort of pave my own path as I was the only library faculty member in these groups.

The Leadership Institute was a newly developed program on campus to bring together leaders across campus to discuss issues, challenges, and opportunities within higher education. I have previously written a little about this program when we took the leadership orientations questionnaire. Overall, I found the group to be a nice touchstone each month. With changes happening on campus, having this group to check in, talk about what was happening, and hear from other leaders and administrators across campus was really useful. In many ways, being in this group confirmed my desire to continue in leadership and administrator roles. I feel that this group helped me connect with colleagues and also continued to give me the language and resources as I grow in this space.

The mentoring circle was also a monthly commitment. Each month our mentor would bring us together to discuss campus resources, bring in speakers from different units, share insight on the tenure and promotion process, and create space to talk about what was happening with the university. I looked forward to these meetings each month because I appreciated the opportunity to be with others on the tenure-track. I’m currently the only person in the library on the tenure-track, so having others across campus navigating this campus process felt so supportive. I also appreciated our mentor, who was kind, took time to get to know us, and provided so many words of encouragement. I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear from someone, outside of the library, that I was doing well and on the right track with my work towards tenure.

The departmental team

Within the library, the department I lead (Education & Outreach Services, EOS for short), was another important spot of connection. As I mentioned in my one-year job anniversary post, I love the team I lead and especially the ways we laugh and enjoy our time together. This year the laughter continued and so did our work. Countless times during the fall and spring semesters I would leave a department meeting and feel such excitement for how we were all working together. I appreciated the moments where someone on the team poised an idea or next step that was in line with where I was leading the team. It felt good to assign projects to the department and watch them come to life. I feel like my relationships with each member in the department continue to grow and having that sense of community has been so grounding.

My network

The final subcategory that contributed to me being connected and supported was my personal network. From the group texts, the weekly Zoom lunches, the regular check-ins, Teams messages, and the in-person meets up at ACRL, I felt lucky to have a great group of colleagues and friends by my side. I was especially thankful for my regular check-ins with other teaching and learning department heads at other libraries (shout out to Charissa and Rosan). It was so nice to have colleagues leading similar teams to discuss our challenges, our opportunities, and support one another. As I think back on the year, I couldn’t have done what I did without this network of support and encouragement.

Overall, I feel like I’m headed into the summer with two feet firmly on the ground, ready to take on some big projects. I’m going to continue to create space to sustain these connections and seek out more opportunities to build and be in community.

I’d love to hear from you – who helped you feel connected and supported this past year? What other themes did you see from this past academic year? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments of this post.

Featured image by Conny Schneider on Unsplash

Communication & Leaving Things Behind

In March, I attended ACRL. The first session I attended was a morning panel entitled “Academic Library Leaders Discuss Difficult Topics.” The panelists (Jee Davis, Trevor Dawes, and Violete Illik) covered a range of topics and shared their insights with a full house. I took away many tidbits however, one insight stood out. The panel was discussing communication and how a common refrain from folks is that communication is just not transparent enough from leadership. In working through what this means, Trevor said, “Communication goes both ways.”

A simple idea but for me, an insight that stood out. As both a current department head and someone who aspires to continue in administrator roles, I’m constantly trying to think about how to communicate information, at what level, and how frequently. But I think Trevor’s point serves as a good reminder; if you have the expectation for leaders to communicate, they also need you to communicate. Leaders can’t be expected to know everything, especially if the people who have that information aren’t sharing it up. Now granted, sometimes sharing up is hard because of the structures and or culture in place. However, this can be worked around. It requires folks to understand the structures and empower people to share, both good news and more challenging news.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sharing up recently because of a situation I found myself in. A colleague left the institution and in an attempt to try to solve a problem at the reference desk, I opened a can of worms on a service I didn’t know much about. The colleague left behind some information but it wasn’t robust. They also hadn’t alerted the partners in this service about their departure so when I checked in to gain some more information, the partners were surprised to hear about me.

Now I know that when folks leave institutions, it’s not always on the best terms or with the most generous timeline. I even wrote about the impossibility of tying up loose ends when I left my last institution a few years ago. There’s a lot procedurally to do to leave an institution and consequently, messes will get left for those still at the institution to clean up. However, what are ways to prevent messes, even before someone considers leaving? How do we encourage folks to lay the groundwork, document it along the way, and share that knowledge with more than just one person? This kind of structural work isn’t the most exciting but I think it can be some of the most important work.

This whole situation had me also thinking about my first post I wrote for ARCLog, about setting a project up for success, knowing full well that someday you might not be doing that work anymore. I know it can feel great to work on a project, know it inside and out, and feel secure that no one can do that work like you can. But ultimately, if we want that work to be sustainable and impactful, we have to make sure we are setting both the project and someone else up for success. I think this includes documentation of some kind and talking openly about the work (to all levels of the organization).

To be honest, this scenario isn’t limited to only when someone leaves an institution. I remember one summer at my past institution where my colleague and I had some family issues arise. We were going to need to be out for parts of the summer, primarily over our larger outreach work that we co-led. When my supervisor asked what documentation we had to support our colleagues stepping in to do this work, we didn’t have anything. Luckily, we had some time to get everything squared away before we were out but life happens, our jobs are just one part of us, and we need to make sure we have information to pass along.

So my takeaways from this situation is documenting what I can about this can of worms I opened up. I’m talking to folks (across, down, and up) in my organization about what I’m learning and how it applies to their work. I’m thinking even more about how I communicate department work to my supervisor and how I can create opportunities for the team to share their work, at a variety of levels, to various audiences. With summer just right around the corner, I’m hoping to get some time to work on some of that documentation for my work. It’s never too early to lay the groundwork for the work I’ve done and what I’ve learned along the way.

Would love to hear from you reader – do you have strategies to help communicate both ways? Do you have ways of creating work that is sustainable and actionable, even if someone has to leave your institution? Would love to hear your strategies and insights on this topic!

Coming out of a January fog

January and the first part of February is usually a tricky time of year for me. I’m both buoyed by the promise of a new year and bogged down by the weather and amount of daylight available to me. January feels like a slog; I’m just trying to make it through. There are moments during the first days of the year where I feel like my motivation is at an all time high. I see the connections between work projects, I see the direction for the department, and I see the impact we can have. There are other moments where I feel stuck and there’s so much coming at me I’m not sure what to pick up next.

I think this January has also been an interesting time to be at my university. Similar to other colleges and universities, we are facing budgetary challenges and declining enrollment. We also recently named an interim president and are settling into new leadership. There’s a lot of uncertainty that you can feel every time you step foot on campus. When I talk with my colleagues about May, the summer, even the fall, there’s always an unspoken (or sometimes spoken) phrase of, “But who knows what the context will be then.” The uncertainty makes it hard to move forward confidently. We might decide to go left only to learn we’ll need to loop around to go right a few months later.

All of these things – the slog, the uncertainty, the potential opportunities – has made me think a lot more about prioritization. How do we decide on what is a priority? How do we have those conversations? How do we make the tough decisions? How do we pivot? And how do we accept the change we know is coming but aren’t sure what it will look like yet? I don’t have any answers but I know that getting through the January slog means having the space to work through these questions and figure out where to step next.

And in these moments, when my head is turning, I am so thankful to have a network of support. The friends and colleagues I turn to get through the slog, hold the uncertainty, and celebrate the successes. I’ve been so appreciative to have fellow department heads at other institutions to talk to, a research group to get excited about and hold me accountable to research, my various text message threads with friends who send funny gifs, screenshots, all the emojis, and voice messages, my colleagues within the library to strategize with, and my colleagues across the institution who I can get coffee with and chat about what we can do together.

I feel that I’ve emerged from the January fog and that feels wonderful. What about you? How are you getting through these first couple of months? What’s been on your mind and who has been there to help support you?