M Roberts

Three Pieces of Advice for First-Year Academic Librarians

I thought my first year at Vanderbilt had flown by, but as it turns out, the first semester of my second year seems like it’s moving even more quickly! As I finish up the first five weeks of the semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about how different this year feels from last year, and how I wish I could go back and tell myself not to be stressed because before long, I would have plenty of outreach from students and faculty! If there were three things I could tell myself a year ago, they would be:

Spend time on relationships

One thing that I didn’t expect about librarianship is how important it would be to build relationships with the department that I support – and that although the relationship building may take time to pay off, it’s important not to give up on it. For example, I started holding in-person office hours in the Spring 2026 semester, setting up a two-hour mobile office once a week in my department’s building. In that entire semester, only one person came to office hours. Most faculty and students who walked by didn’t give me a second glance, not knowing who I was. I wondered if I should even continue with office hours this fall, but the department assistant was excited about setting them up, so I decided to give it another try.

This semester, my department has moved back into their permanent building (which was being renovated last year), and there’s a central seating area where I can hold office hours. Understanding that faculty might not know who I was, I also made signage saying, “Library Office Hours Happening Now!” with my name and other information, and I put up the signage during the two hours, so students and faculty who pass by would understand who I am and why I’m sitting there.

Now, when students and faculty walk by, they smile and often introduce themselves or say hello. I have twice as many classes scheduled this semester as I did last fall, because as faculty have gotten to know me and put a face to a name, they’ve started responding to my outreach. I spent so much time last year lamenting how no one knew who I was, but it turns out that I just needed to be persistent and give it a little time.

Don’t panic if you don’t know the answer

When I started this job, I jumped into a lot of aspects of librarianship that I didn’t know a lot about. For example, the collection development course that I took in grad school didn’t prepare me at all for the realities of managing an actual budget, so I learned that on the job with help from colleagues (and am still learning!). I also try to say “yes, and” instead of “no” whenever I can – and even sometimes when I maybe shouldn’t. Late last fall, a faculty member reached out to ask if I could help her set up Perusall for a class. I confidently said yes, then spent the remainder of the day teaching myself how to use Perusall so that I could teach it to her later that week (for anyone else who’s never heard of it, it’s a tool that integrates with a course management system like Brightspace or Canvas so students can annotate readings). And so forth.

Sometimes I’m surprised when faculty members act like I know everything and have all the answers. Is it just an aspect of librarians being seen as knowledgeable people, or do they actually think I can do it all? I got a piece of the answer to these questions in a conversation with a faculty member a few weeks ago. She asked if I could come and teach her class, stating that since I had taught the class before and I had been in my role for several years, she hoped it wouldn’t be a problem to teach on short notice (neither of those were accurate).

I agreed to teach the class and didn’t let on that I had never taught it before and that I had only been in my position for a year, but I learned a lot from that conversation. No matter how uncertain or new I feel, people likely won’t even notice unless I draw attention to it. My faculty and students aren’t counting how many months I’ve been in this job, they just know that they know me and I’m here to help. In situations where I don’t know the answer, I’m learning to take a deep breath, not panic, and that I’ll likely be able to figure things out.

Enjoy the moment

Through my first year as an academic librarian, and even in the first few months of my second year, there have been both highs and lows. I would also remind myself to enjoy all the moments – the good moments, because they’re great, the bad moments, because they’re learning experiences, and everything in between, because the time will go by so quickly. Volunteer, get involved on campus, and enjoy being where I am and doing the work that I do every day. I hope this helps academic librarians who are starting their first years this semester. You’ve got this!

First Year Reflections

Tuesday of last week, August 4, marked one year in my role at Vanderbilt. The time has flown by! One of my goals for the summer was to reflect on my first year as a librarian and to plan for the second year based on what I’d learned. Although I haven’t had as much time for that reflection as I’d hoped, for my final post as a First-Year Academic Librarian blogger, I wanted to share a few lessons learned that I’m planning to build on during the upcoming year:

Be proactive

I started this job last year only three weeks before the first day of fall classes. Although it felt like enough of a head start at the time, especially considering that I had only moved to Nashville a few weeks prior, I wish that it had been possible for me to start earlier. As it was, there were several classes that I had to get ready to teach or co-teach at the last minute, relationships with the department I support that I was trying to build in a hurry, and a lot of basic information about how everything worked that I had to learn. Even with support from the other librarians at my library, plus our library director, it all felt like a whirlwind.

One example of something that I wish I could have planned better for was when I met individually with around 25 students from the same degree program, almost all in October, for research appointments. I realized about halfway through the appointments that the students all needed help with the same skills – choosing databases and learning how to search with Boolean terms – and that it would be a lot more efficient for everyone’s time if I could have taught all the students that in one instruction session. This year, I reached out to the appropriate professor in late July and asked if I could come to a class early in the semester to teach everyone the basics of a library search. Happily, she enthusiastically agreed. My hope is that this year, I’ll be able to spend my appointments with students talking about their specific search topics and make the sessions more tailored to their research interests. But that wouldn’t have even been a possibility if I hadn’t learned from last year and proactively reached out this year.

Build community

During this first year, one of the main things I knew was how much I didn’t know. I had tons of questions (and still do), and more things to learn seemed to come up every week. Luckily, librarians are generally helpful people, and I’ve gotten very lucky with how many people around me have been willing to help me out. My colleagues at my library, Peabody, have been incredible, always willing to answer questions and take the time to walk me through different processes and procedures. Additionally, there were actually six new librarians (including me) who started at Vanderbilt last summer, and we all bonded pretty quickly. Being able to check in with them, ask each other questions, and serve as sounding boards has been a huge help. We also started a journal club that’s expanded to include other newer librarians, and having that built-in community is great.

I’ve also been able to make and strengthen connections with librarians outside of Vanderbilt. One of my professors from library school is now friend and mentor – in addition to our frequent Zooms, we’re also co-authoring a textbook chapter. The education librarian from UNC-Chapel Hill, where I did my MSLS, has also become a friend and colleague. We support a lot of similar degree programs, so we chat around once a month about what trends we’re seeing with our students, what helpful resources we’ve found, what new ideas we’ve tried, and more. And, because I get so many business-related questions, I’ve also looked for business mentors who can help with questions. In addition to all the business librarians at Vanderbilt, who have been great, I’ve also connected with UNC-Chapel Hill’s business school librarian. Building all of these relationships and communities has taken time, but it’s been time so well spent. My first year would have been so much harder without my colleagues and friends, and now I have these solid connections to move forward with this year.

Learn lots!

When I first started, my library director told me that “this is a learning year.” I agreed, because of course that made sense on the surface, but at the time I didn’t fully understand what she was getting at. It took going through this first year for me to really understand what she meant. There’s so much more that I know now after a full academic cycle. Some of it is tangible – like being proactive – but a lot of it is also intangible. I know which months will likely be busy and which will be slow(er). I know how much fun it is when the students come back to campus after the quiet summer. I know that I need to work ahead on projects because every day is different, and saving something for a specific day probably means that that day will get overtaken by something else and I’ll have to scramble. I know that a big part of my job is just being present, both at my library and at my department, and getting involved with whatever’s happening. And even with everything that I’ve learned in the last year, I’m very conscious that there’s still so much I don’t know. There’s always something else to learn.

Looking ahead

Students will be back at Vanderbilt in about two weeks. I’ve already done some prep work for the upcoming semester and academic year, but I have a lot more to do before classes start. I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom and meeting with students more regularly, as well as reconnecting with colleagues who I haven’t seen as much over the summer. Vanderbilt Libraries also hosts regular professional development sessions for newer librarians during the school year, so I’m excited to see familiar faces at those sessions as well (plus, more learning!). I’m also just really interested to see how I feel about this second year compared to the first year. My hope is that I can learn just as much, while also building on what worked from last year. I’m looking forward to it!

Developing an Evidence Synthesis Training Program

Last May, when I was preparing for my in-person interview for my current position, I was lucky to have the opportunity to talk with librarians at my graduate institution about questions I might be asked and topics that might come up during my interview. One of the main themes that came up in those preparation conversations was evidence synthesis, sometimes also known as knowledge synthesis.

If, like me a year ago, you’ve never heard that term before, it refers to systematically searching existing literature to find evidence and draw conclusions to answer a specific question. There are several types of evidence synthesis – some of the most common are systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and scoping reviews. This type of research started in the medical fields and has branched out from there into other areas, like education.

The librarians I talked to were right, and evidence synthesis was mentioned in my interview. I had done my homework and was able to speak to it enough, but one thing that had been clear from the research I did is that there would be a lot more for me to learn about this topic.

Teaching Evidence Synthesis (To My Fellow Librarians)

Fast forward to January 2026, and my library director sat down with me to talk about evidence synthesis work. One librarian on our team had been doing this work for several years and is very well-versed in it, but the rest of us were much newer to it and had varying degrees of knowledge. My library director explained that she wanted to us to be able to tell our departments that we could help with evidence synthesis projects starting in the Fall 2026 semester. That meant that we had about six or seven months to learn enough to feel comfortable guiding our students and faculty through the process. My director asked me to take on the project of developing a training program to teach all of us about evidence synthesis.

At that point, I had two main sources of knowledge about evidence synthesis: I had taken the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Evidence Synthesis Institute, which had been very helpful but was also, honestly, overwhelming; and I had joined a review project with some other librarians at Vanderbilt. While the knowledge from those things helped, I knew I was only scratching the surface of this topic – so essentially, I needed to come up with a way to teach my fellow librarians, along with myself, how to do evidence synthesis.

Six months later, I think our training program has been an overall success, although the main thing I’ve learned might be that there will always be more to learn about evidence synthesis. I don’t think our training program will ever be truly over – it may just be less intense in the coming months. But as we start to wrap up the first half of this year and look towards the fall semester, here are a few key takeaways that I think helped to make the training program work.

Get Feedback and Plan Ahead

Before I did anything else, I sent around an anonymous survey to the librarians at my library to gauge how much they already knew about evidence synthesis and how comfortable they thought they would be if a student walked into their office at that moment and asked for help with a systematic review. Unsurprisingly, our answers were varied, but a common theme that emerged was that while most of us had some knowledge of evidence synthesis, we were less confident about being able to put that knowledge into practice.

As a result, I set up our training program to be partially learning and information intake, partially exchanges with other librarians (more on that a few sections down), and partially hands-on work. In the external trainings and conversations about evidence synthesis that I’ve attended since January, being unsure of how to put what you’ve learned into practice has also been a common theme for librarians. If I hadn’t gotten this feedback at the beginning and planned out all of our biweekly meetings to make sure we had practice time in July, I might not have thought to include time for actual hands-on, practice learning.

Document and Save Everything

Evidence synthesis and systematic reviews are complicated forms of research. I knew that it was very possible our group of librarians could have a conversation about something, and then a year later, I might remember that conversation and want to go back and look at exactly what we discussed. As a result, from the very beginning of the training program, I made sure to create agendas and schedules in advance, record our meetings and discussions (with my colleagues’ knowledge and consent), and take meticulous notes during each training program interaction. All of those things are saved in an organized folder that’s shared with our team, and after every meeting, I re-share the folder with team members to ensure they have access to everything they might need.

Ask for Support When Needed

From the beginning, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to teach my colleagues all of this information on my own. As a result, I leaned on the experience of people around me to help when I needed to. I asked the librarian on our team who has the most experience with systematic reviews to lead a few of our sessions. He talked us through how to use Covidence and how to design a search string, which are both invaluable parts of evidence synthesis. I also asked the librarians at Vanderbilt’s Biomedical Library, several of whom have been doing evidence synthesis for 5 or 10 years, to do a Q&A session with us about their experiences and advice. That Q&A was also one of the most helpful things we did, and I’m so grateful to the Biomedical Library team for meeting with us. Finally, I also looked for external opportunities that we could use to enhance our training. In mid-June, most of us participated in the online Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium (LESSS), and gained a lot of valuable knowledge from those sessions.

I also want to add that doing this type of training program wouldn’t have been possible without the direction that I’ve received from my library director and the support I have from my colleagues. If my fellow librarians weren’t willing to show up, be dedicated, and learn a lot, our training program wouldn’t have made it past the first few weeks.

In July, I’ll re-survey my colleagues and figure out how we’re all currently feeling about evidence synthesis, what we think we can put into place for the fall, and where we need to continue learning. This will definitely be an ongoing learning situation – a “yes, and” training program instead of a checked box saying that our learning has been completed. But even though I haven’t officially asked yet, I feel good about saying that we all know a lot more than we did when the training program started at the beginning of this year. I look forward to what the next steps will be in all of us continuing to learn and grow with evidence synthesis.

The Supposed Summer Slowdown

I started my academic librarian position in August 2025. During the first few weeks of my role, before most of the on-campus students returned and the school year started, fellow librarians told me two (main) things: that I should enjoy the calm before things got busy again, and that the first year in my role would be a learning year.

I took both of those pieces of advice to heart and I can say now that both of them were very true. There was so much that I didn’t know back in August, and I learned a ton over the course of the year that will help me when the next school year starts. (I still have lots, lots more to learn.) I also made sure to soak in the quiet before orientation started and the students returned. My library is on the side of campus that has all the first-year student dorms, so we had a lot of students stop by with questions (library related and not) over the first few weeks of the fall semester.

I also heard from many librarians that things tend to slow down over the summer. Fewer students are on campus, many faculty members are taking time away, and the pace just tends to move more sedately. I’ve been looking forward to some time to reflect on the school year and work on the list of long-term summer projects that I’ve been compiling throughout the past year.

A month after graduation, however, I’m still waiting for this supposed summer slowdown to start.

Non-Traditional Program Support

In my role, I support nine programs, all of which are master’s or doctoral programs. Some of the programs follow a traditional schedule and enroll students on-campus full-time, but others are set up so that students can work full-time while completing their degrees part-time, often almost completely online.

I love working with all the students that I support. Fellow librarians have told me that it can be hard to engage online students, but I actually work the most with students in the part-time, online programs, especially the doctor of education program. I’m lucky to have support from a lot of faculty members and program leaders to help make this happen. I speak at orientation sessions for each cohort of Ed.D. students, and a new cohort starts three times a year. Although it’s primarily an online program, the students come to campus for their initial orientation and for several weekends throughout the three-year program.

The week after graduation in May, I taught my regular library session for the new Ed.D. students, and chatted with many of the students after my presentation. This was a Saturday, and the students were in orientation sessions for the rest of the day. I’m used to a couple of students booking appointments after a session, but on Sunday morning, I was surprised to see four or five students who had booked research appointments for the upcoming week. I had hoped to get started on my long term projects that week, but clearly they would need to be pushed to the following week. I figured that the students who reached out had wanted to go ahead and meet with me to get the recommended meeting with a librarian out of the way, and that my schedule would get back to the slow, standard summer I’d been told about after that first week.

However, I also remembered something that the education librarian at another institution had told me when I first started in this position. She also supports Ed.D. students who start three times a year. She told me that often, we don’t get the same summer break that other academic librarians do, because with a new (and large) cohort of students starting for the summer semester, they need a lot of library support just like any students do – except that they need support in May and June and even July, unlike many other students who are only taking classes from August through early May. I was now watching my colleague’s caution play out in real time in my own job.

Adjusting Expectations for a Different Type of Summer

It’s been four weeks since graduation and three weeks since this new cohort of students started. The research appointments haven’t slowed down – in fact, they’ve picked up. Working directly with students is my favorite part of my job, and I’m thrilled that so many of them want to meet with me for research help. But what I’m also starting to realize is that I may not be able to save my big, long-term projects for the summer slowdown like some of my other colleagues – because I don’t have a summer slowdown. For this summer, I’ll need to find a way to complete at least some projects that need to be done before the fall. But for the next school year, I’ll need to think back to this past year when I had slower months, and plan to complete other projects then. Spreading them out throughout the year is probably going to be more effective for me than saving them for a few “slower” months.

The advice I was given early on – that this year would be a learning year – is still true. Until this coming August, it’s still my first year as an academic librarian, and I’m still learning something new every day. But I love to learn, and it’s one reason I became a librarian. I know I’ll continue learning in my second year in academic libraries and beyond.

Can You Manage Our Library’s Instagram Account?

In my very first ACRLog post, I talked a little about how librarianship is my second career, and that before I went back to school for my MSLS, I worked for six years in communications and public relations. A part of my work at the public relations firm involved running social media accounts. Building on that, when I was a graduate assistant at a campus library during grad school, I also helped run that library’s Instagram account, which was a great way to bridge the gap between two different subjects (health vs. libraries) with a common denominator (social media).

At some point during my interview process for my current position, I mentioned this social media work. With that in mind, after I started at my current library, I wasn’t surprised when my library director asked me if I would be willing to create a social media plan for our specific library’s Instagram account and take over as the primary person to manage the account. I’m sure that I’m not the only librarian who has experienced this type of social media ask – so I wanted to share some social media tips and tricks that I’ve picked up both from my communications/PR days and from my librarian days.

What do I do first?!

Whether or not you have previous professional social media experience, if someone asks you to take over a social media account, don’t panic! Chances are that you have a LinkedIn, so remember that you already have some experience using social media for professional purposes, even if it’s not necessarily a professional account (like for an official organization or business).

Have a conversation with others in your library, both your supervisor and your fellow librarians and library staff, to figure out what the vision is for the social media account. Do you want to be funny? Wholesome? Informational? Make sure everyone understands the vision, even if they won’t be directly involved in managing the account.

I would also strongly recommend creating a social media content calendar (a search for “social media content calendar template” brings up a lot of results to help you get started). Plan ahead for what content you’ll post, and when you’ll post it. This is especially important when you first start running an account, because it will help you feel less overwhelmed. Thinking about content a few weeks or a month in advance gives you time to create things like images, infographics, or videos, and helps others know what’s coming too. It also helps you to think through your other responsibilities and figure out how often you can reasonably post. For especially busy weeks, if you have three days’ worth of content ready to go on Monday, that means you can go ahead and schedule it all to go out on specific days throughout the week. Check in with the folks you work with to see what ideas they have and ask if they’d be interested in helping to create any content (or starring in a fun video!). Even if you’re in charge of the account, you don’t have to do this alone!

How do I know what to post?

Some posts will be self-evident, so don’t worry about having to brainstorm super creative content several times a week. For instance, every time my library’s hours change, we post a fun image on Instagram that shows our new hours. When I was in grad school, every time the library where I worked got a cool new book, I would create a simple image with the cover, name, and author, and share it so students would be aware. For major library celebration days, organizations like ALA create graphics and social media toolkits that are free to download and use – for example, here are the materials they put together for National Library Week last week.

I’ve also used this blog post from a consulting firm that works with libraries and other community-focused organizations as a guide when I’m feeling stuck. Their focus on how to think about marketing through a library lens helps me refocus on what I CAN do as a busy librarian and what would be most impactful on social media, while also not taking up too much of my time when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

What else do I have to do?

As you’ve probably already guessed, there’s more to running a social media account than just creating graphics and posting them with a caption. The current goal for me with my library’s Instagram account is for me to post three times a week (ish). Each time I log into the account to post something, I also take time to answer any direct messages we’ve received, scroll through the account’s feed to like and post comments on other posts, and note any fun posts from other library accounts that might be an inspiration for one of our posts. No one knows exactly how the mysterious algorithm works, but we do know that engaging with other accounts is important for our own account’s numbers.

Pulling monthly statistics is also an important part of running an account – that way, you’ll know what types of posts get the most engagement. Even on professional accounts, the stats won’t be available forever, so I have a standing to-do list item at the beginning of each month to add statistics from the previous month to an Excel spreadsheet. For any posts that involve other people or organizations, I also try to tag those collaborators to give them the acknowledgement and visibility that they deserve. Finally, I also include alternate text for all the images and subtitles for all of the videos that I post on Instagram. Accessibility is important!

What other resources are there to help me?

There’s a whole library hive mind out there to help you in your professional social media journey! In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, a few that I often turn to are:

Library-focused posts, like this one, from firms and organizations that I trust (this particular firm has done webinars in conjunction with ALA committees multiple times).
Librarian-run substacks like Content Prompt (there’s more out there than you might think!).
Discord servers, Facebook groups, and Reddit threads of social media professionals, librarians running social media accounts, and more (again, there’s more of these than you would think!).

Why does it even matter for libraries to have social media accounts?

I’m a big believer that we need to meet people where they are. As an academic librarian at a library that’s serving busy students and faculty, our students are almost all on social media. That’s where they get information, find things to do, talk to their friends, and more. I know we won’t reach every student, but if we can reach even a few to tell them about events, resources, and more – and to encourage them to tell their friends – then in my view, it’s worth it. Students are overwhelmed with demands for their time and attention, and it’s not enough to assume that they’ll come to the library if they need it. We need students to know that librarians are here to help – and social media is one important way to get that message across.

Is it worth it?

As I mentioned above, last week was National Library Week, and the theme was Find Your Joy. I spent a lot of this past week filming my fellow librarians sharing what brings them library joy and where they find library joy, and editing their comments into a video. Did it take me all day on Friday to put this video together? Yes. Was it worth it? Definitely.

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