Musings on Search Committees

Job applications and interviews are nothing new to ACRLog. Violet finished off her series on being unemployed and interviewing in February, there are older posts about how to interview, and more recent ones about AI in the job search. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about things from the other side: how do search committees work and how do librarians get hired?

Hailley wrote about chairing search committees and how that impacted her other work. There’s also a lot of scholarly literature out there about search committees broadly and about librarian search committees specifically, including how search committees can work more effectively together and how search committees can push to integrate better interviewing practices and more diversity.

I write from a slightly different angle, wondering what the point of search committees really is. Having served on several at this point and been interviewed by a few more, I find myself with questions about the entire system.

Search committees, in theory, make the process of filling an open position at a library a group effort. To an extent that undoubtedly varies between institutions, they determine the criteria to judge candidates, conduct multiple rounds of interviews, evaluate and discuss candidates, and more. This is unquestionably a lot of work, especially if the search committee is thinking critically, properly screening candidates, and consciously working to bring in diverse and qualified candidates for interviews.

Doing this work effectively will also likely involve hard discussions and compromise. Search committees must work through how everyone on the committee perceived each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses and what these impressions mean when paired with the library’s needs. This is not easy work, nor is it clear cut. Different candidates will bring different things to a job, and it’s entirely possible that more than one would be able to do the job well.

What, then, is a search committee to do? Listen to each other, compromise, and try to work out what recommendations to make in a situation where there is no single right answer—at least if it all goes well.

But herein also lies one of the oddities of the search committee (in my experience anyway—every institution is different and I have no idea what else might be happening out there, which is partially why I’m writing this post). The search committee makes recommendations, but ultimately decision-making power likely rests elsewhere, possibly with upper library management or possibly with the university librarian or someone in a similar role. It can then very much be opaque as to how final decisions are made.

From what I’ve gathered on the subject, based on talking to people, my own experiences, and combing through the literature (though, to be honest, there isn’t a lot out there), it seems that those who make the decisions do everything from simply rubber stamping a committee’s decision, to making it clear what their preference is, to simply thanking the committee for their work. All of this is down to the institution and the individual in charge.

But it all leaves me a little troubled. Again, search committees, when they work well, are doing a lot of work. What’s the point of this work if, ultimately, the committee is only advisory? What, especially, is the point of this work when the committee has made efforts to remove biases and seek out diverse candidates if the committee are not actually the ones who can hire said diverse candidates? Are all the papers about more effective search committees missing the mark?

Cynically, I might say yes, but I understand that there’s nuance. For the diversity question, inclusion has to start at the bottom—in this case the search committee—and rise up through all levels of the organization. It is not a waste of time for search committees to make interviews more accessible and to interview diverse candidates. University librarians are also not constantly placing their thumbs on the scales and making their own decisions. Or, when they are, perhaps they have good reason to do so.

But still—is this a good system? This is a question that, in the land of academia in which we exist, can probably only be answered at the level of an individual institution: are search committees working well in this individual library? And, if not, what would librarians at this institution want to see improved?

Change, of course, is hard. In this case, any sort of change or even analysis of the situation should likely come from conversations about how things are working, including what’s going well. Any proposals for change would eventually need to go through the proper channels, be that a working group, a steering committee, or something else.

I’m not advocating for a complete overhaul of the system (unless we think collectively that’s a good idea), but there might be small changes that could have a positive impact. For example, the role of the search committee could be made clear to candidates during their interview—are they making the decision or is someone else? To the extent it’s possible, other factors impacting a decision could be shared with the search committee, bearing in mind, of course, that there are things that need to remain confidential. All it might take is setting clear expectations for the search committee, those making hiring decisions, and the candidates. To me, it seems that much is left unspoken, but as so many of the details vary from library to library, being more explicit does not seem unwarranted.

What about you? How do search committees work at your institution? How have they worked when you’ve interviewed? What’s worked well? Is there anything you’d change?

Becoming an Audiobook Reader

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Sarah Clinton-McCausland, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Open Education Librarian at the University of Maryland.

I never thought I’d lose my leisure reading habit. Leisure reading, pleasure reading, or “free voluntary reading” is “reading because you want to… [P]utting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead” (Krashen, 2004, p. x). Growing up, it was also my favorite activity in the world.

For people who like to read, reading is fun—more specifically, it is cognitively complex, immersive, energizing, embodied, and grounding. It’s a kind of play that takes place within a relatively safe container, balancing flow and emotional regulation, escape and connection, uncertainty and exploration. Allowed to read whatever I wanted throughout my childhood and adolescence, I checked out stacks of books from the public library and pulled intriguing, probably-age-inappropriate titles off my parents’ shelves. Each new book set me down in a world of unfamiliar people and occurrences, generating a hungry curiosity that propelled me forward. Reading allowed me to contextualize my own experiences and learn more about my likes and dislikes, deeply shaping my sense of self. I always preferred “visual reading”—print paper books, and later, the occasional eBook—but when it came to genre, I craved variety.

Then I started college—a time of personal growth and intellectual demand. I learned how to read and analyze theoretical texts purposively for a grade, but this process—combined with a newly expanded social life—gradually shifted me away from leisure reading. In the years after graduation, I would come home drained from my office jobs and crash in front of the Netflix subscription I could finally afford. I got through a handful of visual books per year, but the process had become a slog. No matter the book, my attention would drift, nagged by an endless to-do list of chores and obligations. Discouraged, I’d return books to the library half-finished. I had quietly lost my reading habit, but I didn’t fully understand why.

A few years later, midway through my MLIS, I sought answers through a class project. I conducted qualitative research with twelve Millennials who identified as lapsed avid leisure readers. Many of them had grown up in middle-class U.S. households and attended college, but all had developed more complicated relationships to their leisure time in adulthood, which impacted their media habits. Participants reported that “getting into” a book was the biggest barrier to regaining a habit, but it helped to choose reading material that was purely for fun. Others met their need for narrative story by listening to podcasts and audiobooks or reading more long-form articles on their phones, all of which slotted more easily into the shorter pockets of transitional, unstructured time available throughout the day.

Free voluntary reading can be a powerful expression of what bell hooks (1994) and Paulo Freire (1970) term “the practice of freedom.” Once we’ve learned how to read, we can engage in the serendipity that reading engenders for the rest of our lives, reminding ourselves over and over that we are malleable and can dream beyond our current contexts. But there are many dominant cultural forces in the U.S. which discourage exactly this kind of visionary play. We know the form this takes in 2026: literal book bans; the monetization of our attention; rising living costs; the demand that we continuously optimize our time and energy toward paid work and quantifiable self-improvement. And of course we also face the extraction of our labor and creativity via generative AI, while we’re simultaneously told that genAI will render that same labor and creativity obsolete. After college, my study participants and I were plunged more deeply into the demands of a semi-post-recession labor market, and things have only gotten weirder since then. Everyone I encounter is stressed and overscheduled at best. In times like these, reading can be an especially powerful balm—a ladder in our survival toolkits. But it can also be harder to read when so much is happening.

My study participants’ stories echoed my own, but while they made me feel less alone, they still weren’t enough to kickstart me back into reading. Paradoxically, because I’d started to consider reading something that was “good for me” and morally superior to other leisure activities, it had morphed into another means of optimization. I had a narrow vision of “ideal” leisure reading as a disciplined, meditative, phone-free hour with a print book each night before bed. So I felt ashamed when reality fell short of my expectations: Why can’t I read anymore?? How come all I do is watch TV? It’s so embarrassing that I’m a librarian who doesn’t read! It took me a long time to understand that my perfectionism around my reading practices erased both my hunger to read habitually and the potential benefits.

Unlike many of my study participants, though, I didn’t consider audiobooks a suitable alternative. The same white supremacist culture which prizes optimization tends to value written over oral language, and steeped in that culture, I’d come to believe that listening to audiobooks wasn’t quite “real” reading—and also that I just wasn’t an audiobook person. The deeper truth: I was scared I wasn’t actually capable of listening to audiobooks. My education and career have always rewarded my visual reading skills. Having both my sight and hearing (and a love for music and podcasts) made it easier to spend years ignoring how much I struggled to follow linear narratives in audio. My brain tends to slip around and chase other thoughts without printed text or images to ground it.

Still, it was obvious that audiobooks had the huge advantage of letting me do other things while reading. In theory, I could visually read much faster than I could listen to someone else reading, but I slowly came to acknowledge that it might be worth trying to read in my nonpreferred modality if the alternative was not really reading at all. Halfway through 2023, I checked out my first audiobook: a literary mystery-thriller by a favorite author I’d only read in print before. I raced through it in a few days and immediately borrowed another one.

I quickly confirmed that audiobooks’ affordances allowed them to fit into the interstitial, transitional times in my schedule, making chores more tolerable while letting me get into a book more easily. I started delving into books that had sat on my list for years, rediscovering the joy of reading only what I wanted to and abandoning anything that felt like just a “should.” I slowly became more comfortable with the affordances of audiobooks, and they’re now the first format I reach for when leisure reading. In other words, I think I’ve developed “audiobook literacy.”

I am still simply not as adept with aural media as visual, though, and probably never will be. In the past few years, I’ve gently observed my experiences, trying different strategies to accommodate and scaffold my audio reading needs. Now, for most books, I’ll try to obtain the print or eBook version at the same time so I can refer back to it periodically. (Sometimes a text-only book will convey additional layers of meaning through font and text formatting, making the book “sound” different when read visually. If I can’t get the print version of a given book, however, I have to just accept that it’s OK to get a different variation of the experience!) For literature with more characters or complex plots, I’ll also enhance my comprehension by taking notes and making family trees, timelines, or other diagrams by hand. (I love a sweeping multigenerational family saga—and a diagram!) I finally got through Wuthering Heights in audio this year by referring to the Project Gutenberg eBook and creating a chaotic but extremely helpful family tree based on the Wikipedia entry.

The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading. Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical” (Deniz et al., p. 7722). Our brains paint similar pictures regardless of modality.

That said, I still find that print and audio produce different reading experiences, and releasing my reading perfectionism has been a whole accommodation strategy in itself! I have a better time when I approach an audiobook knowing the experience won’t be exactly the same, and not expecting myself to “succeed” in audio the same way I can in print. I’ve developed more patience for my need to replay the same passages multiple times after spacing out, more tolerance for the vocal dissonance between my own internal narrator and the audiobook’s. I’ve learned I actually prefer some books in audio, especially thrillers, memoirs, and author-read titles. I enjoy giving my eyes a break and practicing my close listening skills. Sometimes I even remember audiobooks better than their visual counterparts, maybe because I have to work harder for them.

I’ve also learned that print and audio are fundamentally complementary. When I engage with a book in one format, I’m more likely to engage with the other—maybe even switching off depending on my mood. Learning to be curious and flexible about format—not just genre—has allowed me to take advantage of the affordances of audio, making reading a joyful and rewarding experience again.

Developing audiobook literacy has unexpectedly impacted my work as a subject liaison librarian in various ways, too. I’ve come to see leisure reading practices as a powerful way to develop transferable information literacy skills. They can teach us more about information contexts and affordances; show us new ways to navigate our own and others’ access needs; and help us reenvision inequitable systems. In reference and instruction interactions, I’ve started demonstrating how to access sources in different formats by default (e.g., “this database also lets you listen to journal articles in audio”), and I highlight library accessibility services in resource lists. My own experiences remind me that media format preferences are deeply individual, and disability status and access needs are complex and constantly shifting. I can’t ever assume where someone else locates themselves along those spectrums, especially because they may have very good reasons for not telling me or the institution.

I’ve also deepened my commitment to promoting play and leisure for their own sake. I suggest students pursue the projects that most spark their curiosity and interest, but I also encourage them to carve out leisure time outside of school and work whenever possible. As an icebreaker, I sometimes ask students to share any piece of leisure media they’ve enjoyed recently, emphasizing the validity of all formats. I’ll also disclose my own preferences and access challenges when appropriate. This can segue into conversations about accessibility, platformization, and the pros and cons of different formats in context—all applicable to scholarship, too.

My own information literacy skills (and institutional affiliation) also make it easier to access leisure reading materials. I usually get audiobooks and eBooks from my public library via Libby, but I occasionally buy them from Libro.fm or check LibriVox for public domain titles. I borrow print books from my workplace (including via interlibrary loan) or the public library, access public domain titles via Project Gutenberg, and sometimes purchase from Thriftbooks.com or Bookshop.org. I want to support students in developing a similar sense of information abundance and more pathways for meeting their leisure needs even after graduation, so in orientations, I talk about how public and academic libraries complement each other, and I explicitly promote our local public libraries as major sources for leisure reading and learning. Students aren’t always aware that they can get a public library card for free and access more “fun” books in print, audio, and eBook forms. In this current moment, it also feels good to help spawn more lifelong public library and local bookstore patrons!

Few things feel more essential right now than leisure and play, and activities like leisure reading can bring a deeper sense of meaningfulness to our lives in a way that job skills on their own don’t necessarily. By becoming an audiobook reader and developing a new literacy, I’ve been able to tap into this feeling more than I have in years, and I’m endlessly grateful that I was able to release my format perfectionism and regain one of my favorite things to do. I’m excited to keep exploring how to center play, leisure, and reading in my life and librarianship.

References

Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722-7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Krashen, Stephen. 2004. The power of reading: Insights from the research. Libraries Unlimited.

Reflective Writing

Over the winter break, I completed a translation of a novel—the first novel I’ve ever translated. I’ve translated excerpts from novels before, as well as short story collections, but a complete novel was a new (and somewhat intimidating) experience for me.

Ultimately, my process for translating the novel was no different from any other translation I’ve done, involving a rough translation and then many, many revisions, including one where I read the whole book aloud to myself. When creating the actual translation, I was lost in the language—working out the author’s style and parsing the ambiguities within individual sentences—but when it came to the revisions, I found myself moving further and further away from the original words in the text and thinking more and more about the novel as a concept. By the time I submitted it, my eyes were practically spinning around in my head and I was muttering to myself, “I see how he did it. I see how he did it.” Through the revisions, I got closer and closer to the bones of the novel, to the way it was working on a structural level—Why did the scenes come in the order they did? Why did it center around three friends?—I saw it all.

What all this introspection made me want to do was write a translator’s note—an impulse I have never before understood. Translator’s notes have always struck me as a little too meta. I want a translation to stand on its own, without any notes telling a reader what to think. I want readers to come in with their own knowledge and use that to make something of the story. After all, that’s quite literally how I approached this translation: the book was assigned to me and I read a couple of sentences about it in Indonesian before I began. But after spending so much time with such a long work, I wanted to get meta. I wanted to talk about everything I’d seen while translating and everything I had learned (and am still learning) about the author.

Some translations do include translator’s notes, but that’s not going to be the case for this particular publication. Instead, I’ve decided to channel all my reflective impulses into a zine, because that seems like an easy communication method for me lately (more on that to come in another post).

What this has raised for me, on a higher level, is the concept of reflective writing in general. For big projects like a book, it makes sense to get a little reflective, but I wonder what would happen if I put more reflective writing into practice on a more regular basis. I obviously do some reflecting for this blog, but I’m wondering how writing reflections after I teach a class or after I attend a talk might impact my overall work.

It’s my plan in the new year to try some of this. I’d like to pause from time to time and do some writing on things I’ve accomplished—what I’ve learned, how I’ve worked through things, and what I’d like to do differently or try next. I don’t want to be too prescriptive about it, but I do want to see what structuring more writing time into my work might do. At the very least, I’m hoping it will help me retain new things I’ve learned, but I think it will also help me identify patterns and come up with new ideas or things I want to try.

What about you? Do you have any goals or resolutions for the new year? Do you regularly incorporate writing into your work? How has that gone for you?

In Search of Serendipity

Wow, this year has been a lot. In every conversation with a colleague, it seems we’re talking about workload, institutional turbulence, the roller coaster of extreme weather, and/or the state of the world. I feel like I’m alternating between a head-down-and-muscle-through mindset and a frazzled lack of focus edging on burnout. Seeking some kind of mental reset, I’m thinking back on a conversation I had a few weeks ago.

I’ve mentioned before (like here and here) that my colleague and I co-host a podcast, “From Concept to Creation: Uncovering the Making of Scholarly and Creative Accomplishments.” The idea of the podcast is that we talk with folks from our institution about the process of their research and inquiry experiences — the steps they took in a research project or on a professional path and the practices, attitudes, and skills they used or developed along the way. The goal is to peek behind the curtain to reveal the parts of this work that are so often invisible (and undervalued), to increase the transparency and therefore the accessibility of these experiences, and to normalize the challenges and roadblocks that we inevitably encounter along the way. (You can check it out on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, if you’re so inclined.)

We’re putting together the lineup for season 4 this summer so we’ve been having exploratory conversations with potential guests. We use these meetings to get to know folks and their work and to brainstorm if and how we might structure an episode around their experiences. It’s a thread from one such conversation that keeps coming to mind for me. In reflecting on his professional progression, one potential guest commented on the social and societal pressures to define life paths from an early age. He characterized his own journey as loose and amorphous, encouraged by his parents to live in the moment rather than establish a clear trajectory or goal. This approach, he felt, allowed him to take advantage of the opportunities he encountered, to veer off course you might say. By contrast, he noted, the kind of pressure so many young people feel to focus early, to identify a dream job or find a passion, narrows their perspectives. Serendipity is missing from so many people’s lives, he said — being open to the world around us reaps great rewards personally and professionally.

I can see what he means. Too narrow a focus reduces opportunities for unexpected discovery. But not just the opportunity — also the attitude. When our lives are increasingly governed by algorithms, for example, not only is our exposure to unanticipated information limited but our confirmation bias is also exacerbated. And it seems to me that when the workload or the world (or both) are overwhelming, when we feel overloaded or uncertain, it’s natural to close off, to make ourselves small. With that comes a reluctance to engage with the opportunities around us, or even the inability to see them as opportunities — to see them as inconveniences or even threats instead.

My podcast work is a kind of exercise in serendipity, come to think of it. On the one hand, there’s no real external mandate for me to do this project (that adds to my workload). So by committing to it (and sometimes taxing my capacity), I’m likely limiting my ability to see and engage in the other opportunities around me. At the same time, though, the podcast creates the opportunity to participate in the types of meandering conversations I really don’t have anywhere else in my professional life and with people I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I would have had no reason to have had this rather fun and thought provoking conversation with our potential guest, or even to explore the train of thought that led me to discover his work. Time and time again, when my collaborator and I wonder why we keep giving ourselves this work, it’s this idea that we come back to: we find so much inspiration in it.

It strikes me then that maybe serendipity isn’t actually as happenstance as it sounds. It can take intention to make it happen. Maybe we have to build a structure to create space for it, seek it out — whether that means carving out time and mental space by adding a new project to our to-do lists or just adding a regular block on our schedules to read at random or follow a meandering thought and see where it goes.

How do you search for serendipity? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Musings on Reference Services as Instruction and Formation

Some thoughts on the reference desk as a space for teaching, student formation, and care

It has been a few weeks since commencement, and the switch that many of my colleagues said would happen at the start of the summer when I began my role almost a year ago has happened. The reading rooms and common spaces in my institution’s main library are near-empty, the only commotion coming from staff conversations, campus tour groups, and facilities workers going to and projects in the building. Traffic at the reference desk has also slowed considerably, creating the benefit of a much slower pace and offering the benefit of more time to get work done but also the challenge of staying vigilant of users who might approach with questions. As I’ve adjusted to this change in atmosphere and tempo, I’ve started to think more deeply about the past semester and how I can improve my own reference practice. One improvement I have been thinking about is how to better incorporate instruction into interactions I have with users, especially students.

Reference as Formation and Care

As I think about how I can connect my reference and instruction work more closely together, I am also trying to be realistic that most of the questions I will receive will likely be directional and about our policies, while fewer will concern the type of needs (namely research or citation support) that would make formal instruction necessary. Despite this, I want to make sure every interaction I have, no matter how brief or transactional, has instruction as part of a continuum of formation and care. Within the context of my Catholic Jesuit institution, this continuum looks like putting into practice the term cura personalis (“care for the whole person” in Latin) which is a Jesuit spiritual practice that emphasizes holistically paying attention to and caring for the mind, body, and spirit of ourselves and others (Otto, 2013). This continuum also looks like forming users into individuals concerned not just with acquiring knowledge but also better understanding their moral and ethical centers and how their bodies respond to social conditions around them

Who do I Serve?

In the eight months or so that I have staffed my library’s reference desk, I have encountered a range of different requests. Undergraduate and graduate students in search of help finding sources for an assignment or dissertation, course reserves, or a quiet spot to study. Prospective students and their families requesting building directions and the best place to get lunch on campus. Faculty searching for access to an award-winning film or an out-of-print novel. New staff from other departments wanting confirmation that, yes, their benefits do extend to library material access. Visiting scholars from other states or countries bearing a page full of call numbers. Alumni requesting copies of yearbooks or transcripts from the last century. Residents of communities surrounding the university who inquire about using WiFi or guidance on navigating municipal government services.

These are just a few of the users who have stopped by the reference desk, usually short on time and having unsuccessfully looked for the thing they needed on their own, even if that thing might not be fully understood and require dialogue with someone else to define and find. I have found when dialoguing with users that I have had to practice engaging with and excavating the explicit and implicit elements of users’ needs with patience, empathy, care, and respect, making sure that interactions end with a path toward a thing (be that a physical or electronic material or a referral to another area of the library) they can hold. I am constantly trying to improve my use of dialogue to chart a path for users in their scholarly or information search. I am also recognizing more and more that reference is also not just about getting to users’ core needs but using those interactions as opportunities to provide instruction on library-use, research, and more.

Fostering Connections Between Reference and Instruction

Though it might seem easy to categorize reference work and library instruction as two different areas, I have noticed quite a bit of overlap between them. In the case of reference and one-shot instruction, both appear to have a transactional quality: users receive information they need or are referred to someone/place else with an answer, and the interaction ends without expectation that the user will come back in the future. Both require adherence to strictly marked out time slots and teach users directly or indirectly fundamental skills in searching for and evaluating information and navigating library systems. On the flip side of the transactional overlap I mentioned, both carry the opportunity, even if not guaranteed, of relationship-building. There is a name and face that a user gets for the help they received, making it possible that they will return with another need.

Where do I hope to go?

Going forward, one other point of overlap between instruction and reference work I want to focus on is the potential of both to help form students into informed citizens and critical thinkers. There are a few ways I think I could make this happen. First, I might devote more time to providing attention and care in each reference interaction by not rushing a user to an answer but slowing down and working with them to discern from source/s of information: “what do I need?” “What am I curious about?” “What questions am I discovering?” Second, I might help patrons interrogate sources of information for power dynamics, privileged voices, biases, and harmful and oppressive ideas and systems of knowledge embedded in them. Third, I might model the habit of getting informed about the somatic and psychological condition of others and how they are searching for and processing information by asking how their semester has gone, what they have enjoyed, and what they are struggling with. While I know these three approaches won’t be possible in every interaction, I do want to keep them available as another tool in my reference kit that I can bring out when the moment is right.

References

Otto, A. (2013, August 15). Cura Personalis. Ignatian Spirituality. https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/cura-personalis/