academia

Final Thoughts on My First Year

It’s already July, and I’m not really sure when that happened. Summer is starting to wind down and planning for the upcoming semester is in full swing. This is also my last post as an First Year Academic Librarian Experience (FYAL) blogger for ACRLog. I’ve had a great time writing posts, reflecting on my experiences as a new librarian, and meeting the wonderful people who make this blog possible. I highly recommend applying to write as an FYAL blogger to anyone who wants to give it a try. It’s fun, good writing practice, and a very supportive space.

Before I go, I’m using this post as an opportunity to reflect back on my first year, which includes the lessons and roadblocks I’ve run into along the way.

Relationships are the most important thing

If I tried to work through my first year as an academic librarian alone, it would have been a disaster. The relationships I formed with colleagues in my library, at the university, and with librarians outside of my workplace have been essential to both my career and my happiness. My colleagues have been supportive of my ideas, have advocated on my behalf during turbulent times, and are supportive of me as a person who has a life beyond work. Work is still work, but I’m genuinely excited to see my colleagues when I come in each week. This year would not have been the same without them.

I wrote about my struggles with my faculty identity nine months ago, and while there are still challenges working with colleagues outside of the library, I’m amazed by the ways in which my relationships outside of the library have grown. I’ve met more people, have had a year to build trust and work together with faculty in my liaison area, and have opportunities to try new ideas with colleagues from all sorts of backgrounds. I am optimistic that my relationships will continue to grow and take me in directions I could never have conceived of a year ago.

As for the relationships outside of work, I am grateful for my library friendships. Conferences have granted me the opportunity to meet really cool people doing amazing things all over the world. The local librarians in Colorado are a great bunch, and if you have the chance to hang out with them, you definitely should (come to a baseball game. You won’t regret it). The Colorado Association of Libraries New Professionals Interest Group (NPIG) has allowed me to connect with other, new librarians in both a professional and social capacity. Joining, and then leading, a group of new professionals has allowed me to meet people from all sorts of libraries and created opportunities to present at conferences.

Relationships and friendships are vital to my success and wellbeing. I wouldn’t be where I am without the smart and talented people surrounding me.

You can’t avoid higher ed politics

As great as most (but definitely not all) of my relationships are in academia, there are some barriers that you just can’t get away from. The politics of higher ed might forever confuse me. I’ve found out that I can’t always get things done the way I want to. Outcomes and events are tied to university goals or priorities; a college has done something one way for 20 years, someone else wants to change it, and now no one is happy; there was a union once, so that’s why some policies are in place; a certain room is in the building because of a long deceased donor, and no, we don’t have access to it; there are endless committees, and councils are different than committees. It can be exhausting, so if you’re new and feeling overwhelmed by politics and hierarchies and decision-making processes, I feel you. I’m still figuring out how this all works too. The more I learn about university politics, the less I feel confident I know anything. Talk to me in a few years, and we’ll see where I’m at.

Do the fun stuff

On a more positive note, I’ve had a great time participating in fun or unique activities on campus. I highly recommend attending events or doing activities that sound good. I recently learned that there are community garden plots on campus, and a lot of the summer faculty and staff grow their own gardens. I met the video team in the university marketing department because we played on a campus softball team together. I participated in a class that taught students how to assess and prescribe exercises to clients, so I got to hang out with students in a class and get free training (I’m surprised that this is the place where most students I run into know me from and as “the librarian who lifted weights with us in that class.”) Move-in day comes up in August, and I’m definitely getting involved with that again because it was fun to meet new students and their families. There’s opportunities to go on camping retreats, attend plays, and visit art galleries. This circles back to the idea that relationships are the most important aspect of librarianship to me. The fun opportunities are less formal ways to build relationships, and I have a good time doing them.

Try a bit of everything (but learn to say no sometimes)

In library school, I got involved with every organization, volunteer opportunity, and job I could get my hands on. This was a great way to put my name out there and build relationships. Not much has changed since then. I’m in several groups and committees both in the library and on campus. I’ve also joined groups, such as NPIG, that allow me to meet librarians across the state. There’s opportunities to collaborate on research, presentations, and workshops. I’ve said yes to a lot of things, and it’s helped me learn what I like and what I don’t like. At the same time, I’m getting to a point where I have to learn how to say no. I love being involved and busy during the day, but there’s a point when we have to step back and focus on the stuff we’ve already committed to. This is a reminder for all of us, myself included.

And so farewell

I’ll miss writing for this blog and using this space to process my own experiences and emotions; however, I’m excited to read future FYAL posts and learn from other, new professionals. I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone at ACRLog for your support. Thanks for checking in, providing feedback, and brainstorming ideas.

For anyone who wants to chat you can reach me on Twitter or through email. Best wishes to everyone as we enter a new, academic year!

Special Forces Formats

My business card states that I am head of the special formats cataloging unit. It’s an odd title – one of the many unusual titles that people who work in libraries have. Even speaking to an audience of librarians, special formats is such a broad classification that it requires some explication.

Organizationally, I work in the cataloging and technical services department. Our department is organized into units, each with an area of focus – monographs and acquisitions, serials, binding, database maintenance, special collections, and special formats. The primary focus of special formats are the theses and dissertations deposited at the library. We work closely with the graduate school to both preserve and provide access to these scholarly works. The nature of both access and preservation is changing – but perhaps that’s for another time. The University of Arkansas is unusual in that it describes the theses and dissertations with “full-level” cataloging, so that our library users have the best possible access to these items. After processing, the manuscripts are sent to the binding department and bound. Here’s the result – the bound theses and dissertations from May of 2012:

When I started in this position, I looked at the workflow for these items and worked with public services librarians to make the processing more efficient, while increasing access to these items in the catalog. This prompts me to share with you one of my favorite quotes from one of the titans of cataloging, Charles Ammi Cutter:

The convenience of the public is always to be set before the ease of the cataloger. ((Charles A. Cutter, W.P. Cutter, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Philip Lee Phillips, and Oscar George Theodore Sonneck. 1904. Rules for a dictionary catalog. Washington [D.C.]: G.P.O., p. 5))

Indeed, one could replace “cataloger” with “librarian” and you would have an excellent directive for all librarians, and a pertinent reminder for me as a first-year academic librarian – that I work to serve the patron, and their ease and convenience should be foremost in our minds in the work we do as librarians.

In addition to theses and dissertations, our unit is also responsible for a wide array of other media formats – video, microfilm, and internet resources. When I arrived, there was a sizable (but not insurmountable) backlog of microfilm and microfiche, as well as a few CD ROMS. With the “newbie” energy I had, I tackled those backlogs so that users could find those items in the catalog, and use them. Your energy and enthusiasm as a new academic librarian can be put to uses that help the user – but just because you are new doesn’t mean you need to reinvent the wheel. Take time to learn not only how things are done, but why. Work in an appropriate way to change the things that need changing – and direct your enthusiasm on projects that you might not want to do later on. Working on that backlog was perhaps not the flashiest of projects, but it’s something that helped the user and the department almost immediately. I’ve already identified some things I would like to change long-term, things I could not really do on my own. I need to build consensus to do these things – building consensus on “big” things both inside and outside the library being a major part of that “work in an appropriate way” idea I mentioned above.

Another reflection that comes to mind is that it’s important to adjust to change, and to accommodate new opportunities. Though not in my job description exactly, I’ve been working on a digital project of early Arkansas history, the Colonial Arkansas Post Ancestry digital collection. It has been an exciting opportunity for me to hone my skills in CONTENTdm, and to gain some interesting knowledge not only of early Arkansas history, but also the history of the colonial Americas. Being open to this change and the new opportunity it represented has not only made me a more effective professional, but also has provided me with an opportunity to collaborate and work outside the library and serve the needs of a very wide community – one beyond the library here, and even beyond the state of Arkansas.

Putting the user – faculty, staff, student, and even worldwide users – first helps me be centered in my daily work as a new academic librarian. Keeping the user first in any work that a librarian does is something we should all strive for.

In The Sweatshop Or Reaping The Lottery Win

Are you feeling overworked these days? Do you feel the pressure to publish, present and serve on a dozen different committees? Does it seem like you are trying to do the work of two librarians, and that you just never have time to get much of anything truly constructive done? If so, welcome to the “Ivory Sweatshop”. That’s the term used in an article in this week’s Chronicle [Paywall Alert!] to describe the current academic workplace – or at least the way it feels to many faculty. What the article really attempts to do, is to frame the way today’s junior faculty feel in comparison to those who went through the tenure process a decade or more ago. The consensus of those interviewed appears to be that faculty are under much more pressure now to produce – and are being held to a much higher standard than colleagues who have already achieved tenure. I hear from academic librarians who know they aren’t keeping up with the latest news and developments as well as they should because they are challenged to find the time. This is reflected in one of the comments in the article: “This job has gotten a thousand percent harder than when I started out,” says Mr. Bergman, who began teaching in 1967. It takes a lot more time now, he says, for scholars to keep current with advances in their discipline.”

In the very same issue of the Chronicle there is a personal essay [Paywall Alert!] that presents a quite different picture of what it is like to work in academia these days. The author, a tenured faculty member at a rising research university, shares the process he went through in working out a midlife crisis resulting from that perennial question – what should I do with the rest of my life. His ultimate epiphany about his lot in life and what to do about it could be described as anything but feeling like working in a sweatshop. He writes:

That led me to the moment of clarity I had been searching for: I woke up to the fact that achieving tenure and promotion are like winning the lottery. With the odds against landing a tenure-track job in the humanities growing longer every year, I had hit the proverbial jackpot and been granted an opportunity that very few people have: the freedom to pursue my own interests on my own terms. Within the constraints of my job obligations, I could do whatever I wanted with my life.

That’s sounds like a pretty good deal. Who wouldn’t like to be in a position where they have many options and could take advantage of any of them. How many of you feel like you’ve hit the lottery in your position? Or do you feel like you are working in an academic version of a sweatshop? Which is it in academia? Depending on what you observe and who you talk to you will hear both versions. More likely you’ll hear from someone who feels like they are in the sweatshop complaining about a colleague who they believe has hit the lottery. It’s the “why I’m I working so damn hard while that co-worker seems to be barely doing anything at all?” I don’t know if the difference is simply an outcome of being on the tenure track versus having survived it. There’s no question that those on the track are feeling enormous pressure to succeed. But it would be a bad case of generalization to suggest that everyone who has made it shifts their career into neutral.

I have a good friend at a research university that has a very rigorous tenure process. Although he received tenure two years ago I’ve noticed no slowdown in his work or research agenda, and if anything he seems even busier. The difference I observe is that the pressure has shifted from external – exerted by a tenure process – to internal – the pressure one puts on oneself to achieve beyond the normal expectation. I wonder if there are also differences in perceptions based on being on the front line versus being in the administrative office. I know that reference and instruction librarians can feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with the demands placed upon them. I can also tell you that it’s no picnic for administrators these days, especially when we are all expected to be doing much more with fewer resources.

My own philosophy is that it’s always better too have to much to do than not enough, and it’s not that hard these days to come up with more than enough to keep the pressure cooker on medium to high range. Doing so doesn’t have to mean that you are working in a sweatshop though. In fact, I think that on the average day, a faculty member or an academic librarian, no matter how many deadlines there are, no matter how many committee reports are due and no matter how many classes there are to prepare for, is incredibly fortunate to have a challenging and rewarding career – and that’s why so many new professionals seek to enter this arena despite the odds of landing a job and why many who are past the age of retirement refuse to leave [Paywall Alert!]. And when you compare the work of many employed in academia to those individuals performing jobs where there is considerable physical labor or unpleasant or dangerous working conditions, you can’t help but conclude that those of us working in academia are more lottery winners than sweatshop toilers. How would you describe your situation? Sweatshop loser or lottery winner?