Justin Fuhr

Seeking First Year Academic Librarian Bloggers for 2026-27

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 2025-26 FYAL bloggers Lisa Shin, M. Roberts, and Eleanor Ball 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 Monday, September 14. 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 Justin Fuhr. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Seeking 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 2024-25 FYAL bloggers Jonathan Rowe, Heidi Uhey, and Brianna Calomino 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 Monday, September 22. 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 Justin Fuhr. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Building My Career

Why is professional identity important to you? For me, it helps to develop career goals, pursue professional development opportunities, and build confidence in the professional expertise I have to offer students, faculty, and library staff. As part of my professional identity, I no longer identify as an early-career librarian. If I had to pinpoint when this happened, it was around the five-year mark working as a librarian, which was earlier this year.

I was a member of our library’s community of practice for new librarians and archivists. A year ago, I stopped attending meetings, not because I don’t love talking about issues relevant for new librarians, but because I don’t feel “new.” (There’s also a suggestion in the terms of reference that ‘new’ librarians are five years and earlier into their careers).

And again, earlier in the year, there was a call for a summer research institute that caught my eye. When I read about the intended audience, it was for LIS students and early-career academic librarians, to move their research forward. Research is something I feel passionate about so I was still interested. But as someone on the cusp of leaving early-career librarianship, I didn’t want to apply and then take a spot from a student or someone who does identify as early-career. In the end, I emailed the facilitators, explained my situation, and was able to take part.

I’m currently on my first research leave, which has given me the space to reflect on my career. I’ve written before on feeling like a work-in-progress, and I think this is an important way of thinking as of course I’ll never truly know everything there is to know about academic librarianship. Like many librarians I know, continual learning is a big part of our careers; we’re curious and interested in learning. But what comes with time and experience is the confidence and expertise to perform our jobs at a higher level.

Rather than focusing on specific skills I want to develop, or situations where I thought I could improve my service, I’m thinking of a bigger picture. To bring up the building metaphor again, I’m thinking in terms of structural integrity, not just individual bricks. I’m thinking of how to sustain myself in a profession that has librarians burning out, so that I can continue to provide library services to my patrons.

As part of this bigger picture, I think about what I still want to accomplish throughout my career. The Hockey Hall of Fame has a category for ‘Builders:’ that is, individuals who have contributed to the game of hockey, beyond playing or officiating. I want to grow in the profession, but I also want to help grow the profession; like Glen Sather or Bud Poile before me, I want to be successful in both playing and building.

With all that’s going on at home and abroad, at times I find it helpful to focus inward, and spend time thinking about not only my own career, but how I can help others in the months and years to come.

This is just one milestone in a much longer journey. I’m able to think of myself moving from Apprentice to Journeyman. As a journeyman, I’m still on a journey to truly master librarianship—if that’s even possible. I’m thankful to all who’ve helped me along the way. And above all, I’m grateful to have found a permanent job as an academic librarian. Step-by-step and brick-by-brick, I’m building my career as an academic librarian.

Contribution & Collaboration

Somehow, when the ACRL conference organizers were picking dates for their 2025 biennial conference, they didn’t consider that it falls at the same time as my kids’ school’s Spring Break. I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and although this year’s conference is just south of my city, beyond the 49^th parallel, in Minneapolis, I just can’t make it work with my schedule. With the political climate in the US as it is, and with increasing reports of Canadians being detained or being denied entry at the US border, I can say, at least at this moment in time, that it is a relief to not have to be potentially disrupted on a trip to the US.

While I’m not attending ACRL this year, my research collaborators and I have a poster accepted and one of our collaborators will be presenting at this year’s conference. We’re presenting our initial findings of the use of author contribution statements in library and information science (LIS) scholarship, and how gender plays a part in what research contributions (e.g., methodology, writing, project administration) authors play. Are LIS journals using or requiring the use of author contribution statements, such as CRediT? Which research contributions are most common in LIS scholarship? Is there any correlation between specific contributions and gender? These are the research questions we’re looking into.

Our project on contributorship in LIS literature has got me thinking lately about the different ways my colleagues and I all contribute to each other’s work. In a lot of ways we’re siloed as liaison librarians, developing library services and responding to requests for our assigned faculties and departments. But also, in a lot of ways, we inform and contribute to each other’s work, in much the same way a research team contributes in different ways to their research study.

Whenever I meet with a colleague for coffee, I’m always interested in hearing about what they’re working on. Occasionally, at some point in the future, something will come across my desk and I’ll remember the conversation we had. At that point, I can touch base with my colleague again for their input or if I’m in a hurry, I can use the knowledge I received from my colleague to inform my own response. I’m also a big fan of proactively reaching out to one of my colleagues if I run into a challenging situation, to get their take on it and what they would do, or what they have done, if they’ve experienced something similar.

It’s the same whether I’m working on something in the course of my professional duties, or throughout my service work, or in my research. It’s almost like a CRediT statement, but throughout your entire body of work: some of my colleagues may contribute and collaborate a lot on the things we work on together, or they may contribute in lesser—but equally important—ways, when I’m taking the lead on something or the person responsible to accomplish a task.

But to bring it all back to ACRL—I haven’t made it to an ACRL conference yet: I didn’t attend the online conference in 2021 and had prior commitments in 2023 to attend ALA’s LibLearnX and Annual Conference; maybe ACRL 2027 is the year I finally make it.

For all those not attending ACRL, you can view the poster my research collaborator will be presenting here: https://osf.io/jb6vp. If you’re attending, be sure to say hi to Caroline Monnin in the Exhibit Hall (Poster #12) on Friday, April 4 from 2:00-2:45PM!

Home For a Rest

It’s time for a break, to be—as Spirit of the West sings—home for a rest! I’m in the final week of our Fall term, with a two-week break to look forward to. I don’t know about you, but I always feel ready for an extended time off at this time of year.

With my collections ordering finished for the year, all of my in-class and library workshops done and dusted for Fall, and with not a creature stirring, not even a mouse, at the reference desk, we’re ready to wrap things up for 2024.

2025 looks to be a year of change at my library. Our library system is currently grappling with a potential move of a portion of our physical collection to a storage facility outside our province, the potential reorganization of our librarian complement, and the announced retirement at the end of 2025 of our University Librarian, bringing in new library leadership.

There will be a lot of work to be done by not only library administrators, but also librarians with each of these changes. I’m eagerly and anxiously looking to how each changes and shapes our library.

For now, I plan to rest and relax on my break. I will be spending my holidays with my family and friends, watching and listening to endless entertainment, playing shinny at the outdoor rink, and cat-sitting our friends’ cat.

What am I currently reading?