Some thoughts on the “why” of professional development.
Photo by Bohdan on Unsplash. Alt image: a multicolored ladder leaning on a gray stone wall.
Premium skills
I subscribe to Book Freak, a substack newsletter by Mark Frauenfelder. In short, each newsletter summarizes a few main takeaways from “great books and thinkers to help improve yourself, boost productivity, build the life you want, and generally live better.” I’ve found it a concise way to consider new ideas from authors I would otherwise not have time to read (as my teetering bedside stack of similar books gathers dust in lieu of fantasy/sci-fi).
In a recent issue, Frauenfelder covered some key points from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work. According to Book Freak, Newport advises that the best path to a tailored and meaningful career is via “the accumulation of ‘career capital’ — rare and valuable skills that can be traded for greater autonomy and impact.”
I mention Book Freak a) because I like it, and b) because I want to clarify that I have not read So Good They Can’t Ignore You—only a very short summary of some of its points. I’m sure there’s plenty of nuance I can’t speak to. That said, the advice to “Identify the core skills in your field that are both rare and valuable” and “Make a concrete plan to systematically improve these skills” spurred some thought about what those skills might be for an academic librarian. I asked a few mentors. Their response was mostly that specific valuable skills would depend on whichever area of librarianship one found themselves in, given the disparateness of academic library specializations; or perhaps that rare and valuable skills, like knowledge of scholarly communication intricacies in my case, is what qualifies one for specialized library positions in the first place. I’m curious what readers might posit as rare and valuable skills in their areas, or whether there are skills whose rarity and value would span all academic library positions.
Skills for whom?
Yet, a disheartening counterpoint to all of this is that rare and valuable skills won’t help you thrive or even save your job if your library is being stripped for parts. Brilliant librarians are being laid off at universities around the country (e.g. Duke, Northwestern, UC San Diego, Western Illinois). Some of these layoffs were the result of direct attacks on higher education; some were probably due to structural economic changes to the information landscape; all of them represent a devaluation of library work. In this climate, grinding for new skills doesn’t guarantee job security, although it may help with a career transition. Tressie McMillan Cottom has said in many places that the “institution does not/cannot love you.” Institutions exist to maintain themselves at whatever cost. I feel that a lot these days.
The logic of pursuing skills that might endear us to loveless institutions is a concrete example of how soft power influences the way we move through the world: what is valuable for us to spend our time learning is defined by what is useful to the institution, or to those in power within the institution, or in an even broader sense, by those with power through the generations. But, in a classic structure vs. agency paradigm, we retain some degree of human agency within and despite the visible and/or discursive structures that order our lives. Here, I’ll invoke some (probably tacky) Foucault, or rather a more digestible interpretation of his theory on “technologies of the self” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Subjects are not simply constructed by power; they themselves partake in that construction and modify themselves through practices of the self. They are not just docile bodies, but actively refuse, adopt and alter forms of being a subject. One way of contesting normalizing power is by shaping oneself and one’s lifestyle creatively: by exploring opportunities for new ways of being, new fields of experience, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.”
Threading the needle?
So, I close with two questions: a) what would “technologies of the self” look like for those of us working in academic libraries, and b) could they ever overlap with pursuit of “career capital” skills that are rare and valuable to institutions that cannot love us? In a practical sense, I’m not sure if resisting the institution is the way for more of us to keep our jobs… perhaps you are inherently a subject of the institution when you agree to receive a salary. I generally like what I understand my job to be, and I want to keep doing what seems worth doing. I also want to pursue skills and ideas and actions that align with my interest in stewarding information for the public good, but it’s hard to predict how higher educational institutions may or may not value that ideal in the future.
The best answer I can posit right now focuses on the word “creatively” in the encyclopedia quote above. After reflecting on my individual values and goals, I’d like to explore skills that will allow me to approach my work more experimentally and flexibly in alignment with those goals. Creativity may sound like a cliché thesis, but it’s easier said than done; it’s the highest tier of Bloom’s taxonomy, and it’s challenging to even identify how to increase creative capacity. Some of the skills I may explore through this approach to professional/personal development might be perceived as directly institutionally valuable, and some might not – via a course on fiction writing, for example. The overarching benefit would be my ability to do or create something with those skills that feels novel and generative and aligned with my professional values. The ability to be creative in one’s work tends to help the institution in the long run, even if the goal of shaping oneself creatively would be partly to resist normalizing power, in this case. To the institution’s credit: I’m not sure it counts as love, but I do appreciate the professional development stipend.
As a process that validates information credibility, peer review is undeniably and incredibly valuable—when it works. But sometimes it doesn’t work as well as we’d like.
Photo by Joaquin Alcaraz on Unsplash. Alt image: A lighted gatehouse stands in the middle of a dark road, with a barrier raised on the left side and another barrier lowered on the right side.
[Update 9/4: At request from Clarivate, I have corrected a reference to the organization’s treatment of eLife, which is partially indexed in Web of Science’s “Emerging Sources Citation Index.”]
As Peer Review Week nears (September 15-19), I’ve been reflecting on this process that has become so ingrained in the contemporary production and communication of scholarship. What follows are some of my meandering thoughts on the current state of peer review, about which I certainly do not claim to be the foremost expert. Many smart people have been wrestling with peer review for quite a while; I’m just another librarian-blogger weighing in.
Issues
Peer review is a critical component of today’s scholarly publishing process. The validation of information via peer review is perhaps the main value scholarly publishers purport to provide (in addition to infrastructure, like persistent identifiers and metadata). In an age of rampant mis- and disinformation, when most research is published in countries whose democracies and press freedoms are under threat, a process that validates information credibility is undeniably and incredibly valuable—when it works.
But sometimes it doesn’t work as well as we’d like. As of August 26, 2025, Retraction Watch’s database contains records for over 66,000 articles that have been retracted or marked as concerning since they began tracking in 2017. Over 43,000 of those articles were published in the last 10 years, between 2014-2025.
We can’t lay blame at the feet of individual peer reviewers for a problem so systemic and complex and persistent. A (literally) large part of the issue is the incomprehensible amount of scholarship flowing through the system: in 2022, just 10 of the largest publishers produced around 2.82 million journal articles. Retraction Watch reports 9,973 retracted or markedly concerning articles by those same publishers in 2022[1], meaning the rate was around 0.35%, or about 1 in every 282 articles. Even if that might otherwise seem like a permissibly low error rate, the sheer quantity of submissions in the system still meant nearly 10,000 deeply flawed or fraudulent articles made it through peer review in 2022, many of which appeared in journals owned by well-known and established publishers. That is a startling number and a direct consequence of the immense strain on the scholarly journal publishing system.
Even while acknowledging those conditions, the blind method of peer review also deserves some scrutiny. Double-blind peer review is the particular flavor I can speak to from experience, during which neither the authors nor the reviewers are privy to each other’s identities (you’ve likely heard of/encountered the oft-maligned Reviewer 2). Review interactions are de-identified and kept private from readers. The main rationale behind this approach to peer review is that anonymity (such that it can be achieved) protects both authors and reviewers from bias, whether positive or negative, and from potential retribution. These are, without doubt, important considerations that should not be dismissed lightly. Many disciplines have relatively small communities of scholars, and particular specialties within disciplines are shared by even smaller groups who might often be called upon as experts to review each other’s work. However, the need to invite niche experts as peer reviewers may result in unavoidable opportunity for bias, as a new report suggests peer reviewers are more likely to recommend studies for publications that cite their own work.
Involving disciplinary experts is necessary because peer review is meant to do more than check citation accuracy and assess methodology and catch evidence of generative AI authorship. It is also meant to help authors address valid questions about their work and communicate new insights more clearly via constructive feedback. This begs the question: is the blind peer review process constructive? Again, I can only speak to my experience participating in a few double-blind peer review processes for journal articles as both author and reviewer. I do think those reviews improved the clarity and quality of the ultimate products, but although I appreciated that improvement as both author and reviewer, the interactions between authors and reviewers didn’t feel particularly constructive. I recall them feeling somewhat rude, combative, and dismissive, despite the manuscripts’ eventual acceptance. This is all anecdotal, of course, and I could have been unlucky (and probably sound whiny). I’m curious to hear about other folks’ experiences. Still, I’ve come away from those interactions further convinced that anonymity does not usually bring out the best in folks, especially when they’re likely overworked. Overworked reviewers might even be tempted to make undisclosed use of Generative AI themselves for a little relief, to which authors are now responding by hiding prompts in their manuscripts to encourage positive reviews. In sum, one of blind peer review’s critical flaws is the lack of reviewer accountability, in both the spirit and integrity of the review.[2]
Another part of the peer reviewers’ role is to recommend the article for acceptance or rejection, so some level of judgement is a necessary part of the system. However, in a system where acceptance/rejection rates are a badge of honor for journals, one starts to wonder whether the current mode of peer review is still founded in the spirit of progressing knowledge, or if it’s been turned into a zero-sum game for publishers’ private gain.
In the same vein, the behind-the-curtains nature of blind peer review enables the devaluation of reviewers’ labor even though it is the core service publishers (or rather, editorial boards) provide to the scholarly communication system. The flip side of public accountability is public recognition, which is also lost in the blind peer review process. Scholars are expected to volunteer their peer review services as part of their contribution to the progress of knowledge in their field, while for-profit publishers just so happen to enjoy the material profits of that uncompensated labor. There are some exceptions to this rule as more journals work with services like ORCID to formally acknowledge peer reviewers. There are also strong opposing arguments, specifically for paying peer reviewers. Regardless, it’s not a big leap to connect the devaluation of peer reviewers’ labor to longer review timelines, difficulty in finding willing peer reviewers, and the increasing number of retracted journal articles whose peer reviewers missed major flaws and/or falsified information.
Libraries
How does all this impact academic libraries? To start, our collection development responsibilities position us as arbiters of information legitimacy. If something is in our collection, we’ve symbolically stamped it with our seal of approval to some degree. Of course, we can’t review and fact check of every piece of content in our collections, and even if we had the time, we wouldn’t have the expertise to do so across disciplines. We rely on “reputable” sources to facilitate this validation of credible scholarship, often via blind peer review. But if the system we’ve relied on to legitimize scholarship isn’t working as well as it could (in many ways), then as information professionals, we necessarily should be interested in potential solutions and alternative approaches. Further, considering our goals to promote information literacy, I’d argue that blind peer review obscures from readers the constructed and contextual nature of authority, the process of information creation, and the layers of conversation that underpin a specific piece of scholarship. Blind peer review is simply not an ideal fit in an information age when transparency and trustworthiness feel so imperiled.
So, are there viable alternatives to blind peer review?
Again, smart folks have been wrestling with peer review for quite a while. Below are a few interesting approaches that have been/are currently being tested. Many of these approaches would fall under the general category of “open peer review,” but they use the term “open” to mean different things about the review process, so I’m going to distinguish them more explicitly, if possible, although they do share an openness as compared to blind peer review.
Small Changes
The most modest adjustment to blind peer review is simply to make both authors and reviewers aware of each other’s identities. Let’s call this “pre-publication open identities” peer review. Although this approach may encourage more humanity between its participants, it leaves other issues (e.g. reviewer recognition, context) unaddressed.
For those who want to retain the current review workflow but don’t think pre-publication open identities review moves the needle much, “transparent” peer review would be the next step to consider. The basic premise is that some amount of the review interaction is included as part of the final published product. This alternative seems palatable to some of the larger publishers (like Wiley and IEEE, for example), as it doesn’t threaten much about their workflow or revenue streams.
A Big Change
To this last point: In a 2024 interview with the Scholarly Kitchen, Nici Pfeiffer, Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science (known most for the Open Science Framework), offered this response to a question about the biggest opportunities facing the scholarly communication community:
“The biggest opportunities that lay before us are the separation of peer review from the publication of scholarship, and more assessment tools to evaluate the quality, rigor, reproducibility, robustness, etc. of research outcomes. To realize these opportunities, we will need to embrace new business models for publication, how we reward and incentivize getting it right over getting it published, and putting research evaluation in the hands of the communities that practice it.”
If we were to rethink the publication workflow to achieve a more democratized and community-governed peer review process, what would that look like, exactly?
Both compelling and provocative, one approach that’s gaining traction is “preprint review,” also dubbed “publish-review-curate” by MetaResearch Open Review, one of its adopters (along with eLife, Open Research Europe, and others). In these preprint review/publish-review-curate models, authors post their preprint (i.e. initial draft) in an open repository and provide a link to the relevant review organization (e.g. MetaROR), who facilitates peer review, publishes those reviews and an editorial assessment, provides a platform for public comment from readers, and categorizes the review materials in a disciplinary collection on their site. In MetaROR’s case, the review service does not publish the author’s work, and the author retains copyright and is able to do what they wish with the work at that point, including taking it to a traditional publisher if they so choose. F1000 and eLife serve as both the preprint repository and the review service to consolidate all elements in one location (here’s an example of what this looks like). Some of these review services are free for authors and some are not; some allow reviewers to remain anonymous and some do not. To me, the ideal version would not allow anonymous reviews and would be free to use, although that may be hard to achieve.
To me, the transparency of preprint review seems to encourage accountability, effort, and fairness from reviewers; allows for their labor to be incentivized; enriches scholarship with context that supports information literacy; and promises to expedite the entire review process. As Christopher Steven Marcum notes in his excellent essay on the firehose problem in scholarly communication, preprint review may help “…shift peer review from a monoculture maintained solely by publishers into an entire ecosystem largely maintained by researchers, their institutions, and their funders.” And although it might not solve the overload problem itself, it does begin to incentivize other contributions to the field aside from the publish-or-perish pressures that burden so many academics, and gives their institutions the chance to recognize credited peer review in tenure portfolios.
What’s your review?
If you’ve read this long, thank you, and I’m curious about your thoughts on peer review. Does it need fixing? If so, what pathway do you find most promising? As information professionals, we belong in these conversations. Thanks for your thoughts.
[1] To match the publishers studied by Hanson et al. (2024), I used the following search string in the Publisher field of Retraction Watch’s database, filtered for papers published between 01/01/2022–12/31/2022: [BioMed Central (BMC) OR Elsevier OR Frontiers OR Hindawi OR MDPI OR Nature Publishing Group OR PLoS OR Springer OR Springer – Nature Publishing Group OR Taylor and Francis OR Wiley OR Wiley-Blackwell].
[2] Single-blind peer review is another method, in which the authors are blinded to the reviewers’ identities, but the reviewers are aware of the authors’ identities. To me, this approach manages to both a) not hold reviewers accountable for their work and b) guarantee the chance for bias in the review process. Without any obvious benefits, and I don’t understand why a single-blind approach would be preferable.
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.
Interestingly, however, the current administration and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios have given no indication that they will backtrack mandates laid out by the previous administration’s Nelson Memo, which advised federal funders that grant recipients should make their funded research outputs publicly available without an embargo period (among other things). The goal of the Nelson Memo was to “…promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and accountability measures [that] will allow for greater validity of research results and more equitable access to data resources,” along with the rationale that “There should be no delay between taxpayers and the returns on their investments in research.” This memo was widely seen as a major win in the open knowledge community, and also apparently meets the approval of the current presidential administration and their appointees (more on that below).
For those unfamiliar, publishers of scholarly journals often require authors to agree to an embargo period, which means no version of their article may be made publicly available on any other platform for a certain amount of time (usually 6 to 24 months depending on the journal). This allows publishers to profit from subscription-only access to new research during its period of highest readership. After the embargo period, publishers have generally allowed authors to make available the “author’s accepted version” of the article (the version after peer review but before publisher copyediting and typesetting) in a funder’s repository, institutional repository, or disciplinary repository. The practice of sharing items openly in this way is often referred to as “self-archiving” or “green open access.” It is also very common for journals to offer a pay-for-open model, through which authors can pay an article processing charge (APC) to apply a Creative Commons license to their article instead of transferring all rights to the publisher. This is often referred to as “gold open access.” Federal funders have typically allowed authors to use grant funds for APCs.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) has long required grant recipients to deposit copies of grant-funded articles in their openly accessible PubMed Central repository, but until this year, the NIH allowed publishers to retain sole distribution rights for a 12-month embargo period if authors chose not to pay for open access. In turn, many publishers have offered authors the service of depositing the appropriate article version in PubMed Central on their behalf after the embargo period ends.
Showdown
Last year, in compliance with the Nelson Memo, the NIH announced an updated Public Access Policy, originally slated to take effect on December 31, 2025. On April 30, newly appointed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a 6-month acceleration of the policy’s effective date, to begin on July 1. The new policy “…requires Author Accepted Manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, on or after July 1, 2025, to be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, for public availability without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication.” Unsurprisingly, it seems several of the largest publishers are not happy about this new public access policy.
As an early career librarian trying to parse this complicated, evolving situation, I’ve relied heavily on my professional communities. Conversations on the University Information & Policy Officers listserv have been really helpful for my understanding. Jeremy York, Assistant Director of the Copyright Office at University of Michigan Library, kindly granted me permission to quote his summary of publisher reactions.
“Publishers are responding to the new policy in different ways. Some publishers, like Wiley and Springer Nature will no longer deposit works in PubMed Central on behalf of authors unless authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make the work available under an open license. They also are not allowing deposit by the author of the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central and see the pursuit of this ‘green open access’ route by authors as a violation of their publishing agreement.
The American Chemical Society (ACS), on the other hand, has implemented an Author Development Charge (ADC). If authors do not pay the APC to have their work published with an open license, they can still pay the ADC to be able to deposit the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central to comply with NIH’s policy.[1] If authors deposit the AAM in PubMed Central without paying the ADC, ACS sees this as a violation of the publishing agreement.”
The complicating factor here is that the NIH’s claims over funded research outputs predate any author’s agreement with a publisher. The NIH is simply exercising a right that all federal funders have held for a long time, called the Federal Purpose License. In the NIH’s case, their version of federal purpose license states grant recipients “…may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was acquired, under a Federal award. The HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] awarding agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes, and to authorize others to do so.”
In response, certain publishers are advising authors that the only way to comply with both a) the NIH public access policy and b) their journals’ copyright agreements is to pay some sort of fee. They are signaling an unwillingness to publish paywalled articles that will be made publicly accessible on another platform; if a preexisting claim to an article exists, then publishers may simply choose not to publish that article despite acceptance by an editorial board, unless the author pays a fee.
Yet, the purpose behind federal funders’ public access policies is not to force authors to pay for open access, as evidenced by the NIH’s announcement on July 8, which revealed plans to cap the amount of NIH-funded dollars that authors can spend to make articles open access (or in other words, cap the amount authors can spend on APCs) beginning in 2026.[2] Clearly, the NIH does not want to pay exorbitantly for articles it already holds rights over via the federal purpose license.
Breakdown
This is an important historical inflection point in the funder/author/publisher triangular relationship, in part because the NIH awarded over $26 billion across 41,304 research project grants in 2024, up from $22 billion in 2019 (although those numbers may deteriorate going forward given the current presidential administration’s proposed budget). Needless to say, federal funding is integral to the United States’ research infrastructure, meaning federal funders possess a lot of leverage to shift that infrastructure. What happens over the coming months as other federal funders’ public access policies take effect may significantly alter available open access publishing pathways for scholarly authors and influence subscription negotiations for libraries.
For interpretations of what this ongoing situation means for authors and advice about how to navigate the publication process as a grant recipient, I recommend Authors Alliance, who put together this excellent FAQ page [and update here] on the current “contradictory policy environment,” and are co-hosting a webcast on August 5, 2025 focused on new federal funder sharing requirements.
For academic libraries, one likely outcome in the immediate future is increased traffic on existing read-and-publish deals and increased pressure to engage in new and/or bigger read-and-publish deals from research faculty.[3] However, many academic libraries receive some portion of indirect costs paid by federal funders to universities for grant oversight, so any budget squeeze due to the White House’s proposed cap on indirect costs would make it difficult for those libraries to invest in new or more expensive read-and-publish deals.
On the other hand, if both publishers and federal funders were to hold firm in their current standoff, public access policies and publication fee caps could gradually redirect authors away from pay-for-open publishing models and toward outlets that allow for self-archiving or use a free-to-read, free-to-publish model (sometimes referred to as “diamond open access”). Big for-profit publishers are relying on their journals’ prestige and importance in tenure portfolios to withstand these shifting sands, but if the cost of publishing in their journals remains unaffordable for authors, readership and tenure committees could begin to elevate free or affordable open access journals in their place. Many such alternative outlets exist; for journals with zero-embargo deposits, you can check JISC open policy finder, and diamond open access journals are easily found on the Directory of Open Access Journals by selecting the “without fees” filter. It is worth noting that, among the big publishers, Sage stands apart by providing a relatively generous zero-embargo self-archiving policy.
A world in which libraries regain some financial relief from big publishers, and in which more people can benefit from openly accessible research findings, is one we should hope for. The actual outcome of this standoff is impossible to predict but is certainly worth monitoring for academic librarians.
[1] Several smart folks, including Authors Alliance, have doubts about whether authors will be allowed to use NIH grant funding to pay for an ADC. From Jeremy York’s summary: “The NIH guidance states that ‘Costs for publishing services that are charged differentially because an Author Accepted Manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy or the work is the result of NIH funding are unallowable because charges must be levied impartially on all items published by the journal, whether or not under a federal award’ (GPS 7.9.1).”
[2] The announcement did not indicate an effective date or exact cap amount.
[3] For those unfamiliar, read-and-publish deals (sometimes referred to as “transformative agreements”) between libraries and publishers provide a mechanism for an institutions’ authors to publish through an open access pathway without themselves paying APCs. Instead, the institution can draw from a pool of funds or credits to cover the APC on behalf of the author. This open access mechanism is part of the library’s subscription to the publisher’s journal portfolio. Aside from libraries shouldering massive subscription costs, the main drawback of read-and-publish deals are that libraries are often subscribing to journal access as opposed to purchasing perpetual access for that year’s journal issues. This move toward conditional access and away from ownership creates an increasingly difficult situation for libraries to extract themselves from, lest they lose access to journal backlogs from the years they subscribed instead of purchased.
I always found something comforting about the rhythms of the academic year. After each semester, there’s time to pause, reflect, and think about what’s next. As we make our way through June, heading towards a new fiscal year, I’m doing a lot of reflection.
Since July 1, 2024, I’ve been in an Interim Associate Dean role. I took on this interim work alongside my day-to-day responsibilities as a teaching and learning department head. The interim role appealed to me for many reasons; the type of work, the ability to work alongside an Interim Dean I had a strong working relationship with, and my own career desires. While it felt daunting to be doing two jobs, I knew my department was in a strong spot; we were successfully onboarding two new colleagues and had a clear vision of the work ahead of us. It also felt slightly less daunting because the interim was a one-year appointment, so I had a clear end in sight.
As I think about the last year, “difficult” comes to mind, but not necessarily in a negative way. I felt stretched and pulled and challenged in new ways. I felt like I was learning and growing constantly, my brain shifting and changing as I got further into the administrative headspace. I had to be more honest about my bandwidth, capacity, and time available during the day. Simply put, I just couldn’t do it all. I was more honest with my department, trying to let them into my workload while also still trying to be present and available for what they needed from me to be successful. There were days when I felt overwhelmed and underwater and other days where I felt like everything was clicking.
As the interim appointment went on, I started to find my footing. I started to build the infrastructure, the processes, and the buy-in. I got chances to work with folks across the library, to support their work and also help to showcase it to campus colleagues and other audiences.
The spring semester felt most stressful. It was a semester where I had to dig in and just get through. This semester, of course, was happening within the larger context of a new federal administration, a state legislative session, and all the uncertainty we faced each day. I’m appreciative of the many great blog posts from ACRLog colleagues who spoke about book bans and book removals, how to continue moving forward when things are not normal, balancing the forest and the trees, and how to center community now, more than ever. Throughout the spring, I went day by day. I would ask myself what work needed to get done and how could I ensure I had enough energy and bandwidth outside of work to commit to my relationship, my friendships, and myself. Ultimately, this meant things fell off my plate of work. I had to recognize what I could do in the time I had and let everything else be on pause.
Upon entering May, I started to feel like I was emerging from this interim space. I felt like I had time to read, think, and engage more deeply in projects, instead of just punching through a to-do list. I got new chances to connect with colleagues, like when two co-workers and I drove down to the University of Kentucky for a Scholarly Communications workshop. The end of the interim appointment was in sight and the next steps about the possibility of being in the permanent role became clear.
On July 1, I will permanently move into the Associate Dean role. A colleague within the unit will become the new department head, and I know the department is in good hands. I am grateful for the last four years of being department head. This role was my first major management role, and I was able to bring my student-centered, community-based, collaborative, participatory approach to this work. Together, we built infrastructure, expanded our capacity, and cultivated a caring collaborative community. We laughed together, discussed big ideas, and helped one another be better librarians and educators. I can’t put into words how proud I am of the department and how thankful I am I got a chance to lead this group.
I’m really excited about this next chapter. I’m excited to spend the next year focusing just on one role and really digging into it. I’m excited to keep working with our amazing department heads and supporting them and their teams. I’m excited to work with our Dean. I’m looking forward to learning and stretching.
As I wrap this post up, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention and thank my incredible support system. I couldn’t have done this interim role without them. I feel fortunate to have so many big friendships, near and far. They cheered me on throughout the whole interim appointment. They talked me through stressful times, provided advice, and gave me space to relax and unwind. This work isn’t done alone and I’m so glad to have such a good support network around me.
Okay, now I’ll wrap up with a bit of a shameless plug…did you enjoy this post and want to hear more about interim leadership? If yes, considering joining us on July 10 from 2-3 PM ET for an ACRL LDG webinar about navigating interim leadership. Hear from myself, Jen Jarson, Brianna Marshall and Ariana Santiago. We’ll talk about interim leadership and provide a space for some small group discussions. This presentation won’t be recorded, so don’t miss it. Register today!
I would love to hear from you; have you been in an interim role? What did you learn? How did you grow?
