Like approximately half of all academic librarians, I’m classified as faculty. This year, I went through my first faculty evaluation . . . and our evaluations fall in mid-October, six weeks after I started my position.
It was an intense six weeks.
My portfolio is 80% teaching/librarianship and 20% service. In six weeks, I assembled ten artifacts to represent my teaching, librarianship, and service; wrote a cover sheet for each artifact; wrote my teaching philosophy; and, of course, updated my CV (which it seems like I am never done doing).
When I started this process, I was totally overwhelmed. How could I effectively present my case with only six weeks under my belt? I didn’t even know where all the restrooms were yet! But I just got my evaluation letters back, and I’m happy to say everything turned out well. Today, I want to share the five biggest lessons that helped me succeed during the faculty evaluation process.
1. Stay calm.
This is the most important lesson I learned. Your first faculty evaluation will likely feel overwhelming and stressful, but remember: The librarians evaluating you want you to do well. Seriously! They want you to succeed in your role (otherwise, why would they have hired you?), and evaluation is about recognizing that success.
Since my first evaluation only covered the first six weeks I was in the role, the pressure was even lower. As my faculty mentor said: “Don’t burn down the library, and you’ll be fine.”
2. Start now.
I consistently worked on my portfolio during those six weeks, and I still scrambled to make the deadline. This year, I’m determined to avoid any last-minute panics. Once I turned in my 2025 portfolio, I immediately started a list of items I wanted to include in my 2026 portfolio and jotted down notes for the cover sheets. I’m also trying to be more proactive about keeping my CV up to date. Once the fall semester begins, I’ll block out two hours in my calendar every week to work on my portfolio.
3. Understand your context.
What does success look like in your library, to your professional assessment committee (PAC) and department head? Finding this out will help you establish clear, achievable evaluation goals. Meet with your PAC chair and department head well in advance of any deadlines and ask what their expectations are for you in your first evaluation. Keep an open line of communication going for feedback and questions.
As I spent time co-working with new faculty colleagues across campus who were also preparing their portfolios, I noticed that evaluation procedures and standards varied from department to department. Every department has its own departmental standards and criteria, which explain what “Needs Improvement,” “Meets Expectations,” and “Exceeds Expectations” ratings mean in that particular department. It was important to focus on what my PAC and department head wanted to see from me during my first six weeks, rather than comparing my portfolio to those of my friends in chemistry, education, or business. That could have led to faulty expectations for my rating or to time wasted creating portfolio components I didn’t need.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
I’m not sure if this is just me, but I have a bit of a complex around the idea of “cheating,” which I think is left over from my undergraduate days. When I was assembling my portfolio, I was afraid to ask for help because I worried it would be considered cheating to ask my colleagues for feedback on my portfolio before I turned it in. But nobody covers this stuff in library school, and you’re never going to learn how to do it if you don’t ask. Plus, as previously stated, your colleagues want you to succeed, not to flounder helplessly in silence.
I found it helpful to explicitly voice this concern, directly asking my PAC co-chairs and other colleagues how it would be acceptable to get feedback before I turned in my materials. To my surprise, everyone was happy to share examples of their own portfolios, answer my formatting questions, and provide feedback on which artifacts I’d chosen.
5. Don’t be afraid to advocate for yourself.
My portfolio is 80% librarianship/teaching and 20% service. However, I also had quite a few scholarship items I wanted to include, including a conference presentation, my tenure guest editing a literary journal last fall, and a handful of creative and critical publications. In my opinion, I would have easily been able to “Meet Expectations” for scholarship if scholarship were part of my portfolio, but it isn’t. This is because my contract is for a three-year term and not a tenure-track position. I knew that my predecessor had been tenured, and the reason I’m not able to be on the tenure track is more a result of budgetary issues than anything else. It felt unfair that my predecessor would have been recognized for the very same work I was doing, but I wouldn’t be recognized due to factors outside my control.
After some hesitation, I decided to bring these concerns to my PAC co-chairs. They encouraged me to include my scholarship in my portfolio, just under the “service” category. In my portfolio documentation, I made the case for how my scholarship could be understood as service and argued that with the combination of scholarship and service I was documenting, I should receive a rating of “Exceeds Expectations” in the service category. But the moment I submitted the portfolio, I felt a rush of embarrassment. I mean, who did I think I was? I’d only been here six weeks, and I thought I should receive “Exceeds Expectations”? I was overwhelmed by the urge to scrub all my scholarship, which surely wasn’t very good anyway, from my portfolio. But I’d already submitted it. There was nothing to do but wait.
As new librarians, it can feel precarious to advocate for ourselves; not only are we new to our institutions, we’re new to the field as a whole. Sometimes, we need to pick our battles, but some battles are totally worth fighting. When I got my evaluation letters back, I found that my PAC gave me an “Exceeds Expectations” rating for service, and my department head gave me the highest level of “Meets Expectations.” I know I would have received lower ratings if I had not advocated for myself. If you notice an element of the evaluation process that feels unfair, don’t be afraid to bring it to your colleagues and suggest a change.
Epilogue: Personal Reflections
In the process of writing this post, I realized something: When I graduated from library school and entered the workforce, I had no idea that I would need to undergo a huge mindset shift regarding the evaluation of my work. I was raised to understand that “going above and beyond” is a success, and “just” doing what you’re supposed to do is a failure of will and intellect. If you’re only “meeting expectations” in the classroom, not exceeding them, are you going to get an A+? Are you going to land a GAship? Are you going to stand out in a brutal job market?
But this mentality just doesn’t translate to a 9-5 job setting—or at least, not to mine. It’s like trying to use a meat tenderizer to prepare spinach or a salad spinner to prepare a steak. I remember how flabbergasted I was when my department head said he expected and wanted me to get a “Meet Expectations” rating. Let’s step back. Doesn’t it make sense that your supervisor wants you to meet their expectations? But I was so identified with the idea that “succeeding = exceeding,” I genuinely couldn’t understand him. What do you mean, you want me to meet expectations? I thought. Isn’t that like getting a C?
That’s what makes this so tricky: Relentlessly obsessing over “going above and beyond” during my MLIS led to me acquiring the experiences and accomplishments that helped me land this job. But now that I have a job, I need to evaluate myself using a different mindset than the one that got me here. It took me months to realize that how success is evaluated in the workplace is different from how success is evaluated at school. Although tedious, the faculty evaluation process was a valuable exercise because it forced me into a new perspective. I had to go point-by-point through the departmental standards and criteria and connect them to the work I’d done, which forced me to see my work through the eyes of my colleagues (librarians with decades of work experience) rather than through my own (heavily biased, for reasons already discussed). More than any of the other lessons I learned during the evaluation process, it’s this mindset shift that will help me succeed in my 2026 faculty evaluation.