Tag: career path

Burning with Your Own Passions

Since 2008, ACRLog’s “First Year Academic Librarian (FYAL) Experience” series has annually featured 1-2 academic librarians in their first year on the job in an academic library. This new series, “Where Are They Now? Former FYALs Reflect,” features posts from past FYAL bloggers as they look back on their trajectories since their first year. This month, we welcome a post from Kimberly Miller, Assessment Librarian and Liaison to Psychology at Towson University. 

“Where are they now?” 

Right now? Like many of you, right now I am at home seeking quiet and solitude away from the chaos of managing work, family, school, and self-care during a global health crisis. Thinking back to my first-year librarian experience, I can’t help but laugh and think, as our ALSC colleagues already reminded us, responding to a global pandemic was definitely not covered in library school.

What’s Happened?

In 2012, shortly before joining ACRLog as an First Year Academic Library Experience (FYALE) blogger, I was hired as Emerging Technologies Librarian & Liaison to Psychology at Towson University. In that role I provided technology leadership within the library’s Research and Instruction Department. I also taught information literacy workshops, provided student and faculty research help, and worked with the Psychology-related collection. While the open-ended nature of the role was sometimes daunting (what exactly “counts” as an “emerging technology” still remains a mystery to me), all-in-all it was a great first position because the diversity in my responsibilities provided a lot of areas for exploration and growth. And some of that growth, particularly around risk taking and experimentation, is captured in my FYALE blog posts. 

Over time, as I began to articulate my expertise and vision, I successfully advocated to narrow my position to focus specifically on “learning technologies” necessary to support formal and informal learning within the library. Other highlights between my first year and now include:

  • Changing my job description (twice)
  • Applying for, and achieving, rank promotion and permanent status
  • Participating in ACRL’s Immersion and the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship
  • Attending too many conferences and serving on too many committees
  • Starting an instructional technology doctoral program and, recently, transfering to the masters program (graduating May 2020!)
  • Becoming a parent
  • Serving in leadership positions within regional and national professional organizations
  • Collaborating with senior library leadership as librarian representative to the library’s Leadership Council

Turning Point

As I reflect on those experiences it’s clear to me that the month I had a child and was notified that I was awarded permanent status marked a significant turning point for me personally and professionally. When I returned to work, I realized I was spending more time managing projects and, indirectly, the people associated with those projects than I was exploring and creating technology-based instruction itself. And I was good at it. I loved my job and the people I worked with, and I had developed a talent for leading people to solve interesting problems. As a doctoral student, I also gained a deeper expertise in educational leadership and professional development necessary to take on new challenges. At the same time, I was growing tired of running into the same roadblocks and questioning whether what I did really mattered while seeing little opportunity to grow into new professional areas.

In my cubicle, a now-faded handwritten quote reminds me that “People who do not blaze with their own passions burn out.” This quote has been my guiding principle as I’ve made decisions, both small and large, about how I spend my time. Throughout my career, one of my driving forces has been a desire to deeply understand the rationale behind our work and the evidence needed to help make that work a success. With this in mind, I proposed that my experiences and interests made me a good fit for the new Assessment Librarian position our Dean of University Libraries announced in the Fall of 2018. After several conversations and some final job description editing, I transitioned into my new role as TU’s Assessment Librarian in January 2019.

Now and the Future

I’ll admit that, unlike technology, assessment initiatives are not high on the list of exciting or flashy library projects. But I would argue that’s because assessment is best when it is infused within all other work that we do on a day-to-day basis. Assessment is not just counting, number crunching, and correlating. The flashiest project will fizzle if we don’t know how or why it was successful. And that’s what assessment is about to me – it is being curious and asking questions about the way our services, systems, and collections support our community. Academic libraries make profound differences within and beyond our campuses, and the best way to continue doing so is to continually learn from our work. 

As an Assessment Librarian, I find meaning in dispelling myths about assessment while building our library staff and faculty’s capacity to apply evidence within their specific domains to provide excellent user support and services. While I help everyone learn about the nuts-and-bolts of assessment, I also get to tie assessment to how we explore new possibilities for serving our users. For example, in November I spoke to our staff as part of our library’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Spark series about using assessment to dispel the “myth of average” when designing library services, spaces, and resources. I’m excited to explore how I can continue to support this work in the next stage of my career.

While the jump from instructional technology to assessment may seem strange to some, for me it was a chance to lean into new skills and solve new challenges while leveraging the talents I cultivated in my previous role. I also continue to learn a lot about navigating the politics of projects that require working both horizontally and vertically within the library’s organizational chart. As the first person in this new role, I have come full circle and once again find myself with an open-ended opportunity to shape our library’s path forward on key strategic initiatives. This time, I get the unique and exciting privilege of a front row seat to the amazing work happening in nearly every area of our library. I can’t wait to see what else I didn’t learn in library school!

A Wrinkle in Time

Since 2008, ACRLog’s “First Year Academic Librarian (FYAL) Experience” series has annually featured 1-2 academic librarians in their first year on the job in an academic library. This new series, “Where Are They Now? Former FYALs Reflect,” features posts from past FYAL bloggers as they look back on their trajectories since their first year. This month, we welcome a post from Susanna Smith, Acquisitions Librarian and Instructional Designer at Georgia Highlands College Library. 

Last time I wrote for ACRLog, back in June 2009, I was a librarian working as a Library Technical Assistant managing a one-person library at a small satellite community college campus in Alabama. Whew. Today … life is completely different, and not just because I’ve been working from home nearly a month! I’m currently the Acquisitions Librarian (who also wears a Reference and Instruction hat most days) at a medium-sized state college in Georgia. I received my M.Ed. in Instructional Design and Technology a couple of years ago so I also work as an Instructional Designer for our Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, developing workshops for faculty and consulting with them on course design. And boy, howdy, I’ve been busy. I’ve recently been working with a library team to revamp our student learning objectives, assessment tools, and our peer observation form. I was part of the group who successfully got the library faculty included in the promotion and tenure process. And in my acquisitions role I’ve helped us switch to a new LMS, started a major weeding project removing 20k plus monographs, learned to negotiate with vendors and manage database resources, and juggled what was for me a mind-boggling budget. That’s a long way from sitting for ten hours a day at a tiny library’s circulation desk!

So how did I get from there to here? As with most stories, it starts with an unexpected change in circumstances.

In 2011, I got a new job. When I started the paraprofessional position in 2007, I helped open a branch campus library and this new job was much the same, except I would actually be library faculty. WooHoo! So my husband and I packed up our bags, moved to northwest Georgia, and I set to work building a new library from the ground up. The physical space was already determined, but I designed the layout, chose the furniture, and built the collection (mostly with second copies culled from the main library). It was another one-person-library situation, but it became clear pretty quickly that we definitely needed a second person to hold down the fort because I was in the classroom so often. For three years I continued to teach 30-50 library sessions a semester on two satellite campuses, and spent the rest of my time at the reference desk. I even had the opportunity to attend ACRL Immersion, which was a life- and instruction- changing experience for me. (Quick plug: I highly recommend it, especially if you feel inadequate in front of a class full of students.)

But ultimately, I still felt the siren-call of technical services. In a past life I was a bookstore special orders and office manager so in 2015, when our beloved Acquisitions Librarian retired, I applied and moved to the main campus to take over. It was a dream come true! I ordered books, managed databases, worked with vendors, did some cataloging. I still spent time at the reference desk, but I was mostly involved with back-office technical services projects.

Until….

I realized I actually missed being in the classroom. Wait a minute … I’m an introvert … how was that possible? Those few classes I had to teach at my first job were always the least fun things I did. But after being in the classroom so much in my recent position, I’d come to enjoy the interaction and now I realized I wanted to continue that. Enter another unexpected opportunity: At about the same time as this surprising self-revelation, the college’s web-based course offerings expanded mightily. The library needed someone to become an “embedded librarian” and work with those online faculty and students. I volunteered, and discovered a whole new world. I worked with faculty directly to develop assignments and even, in a few cases, did some grading. I learned how to use technology in ways far beyond searching databases for information. I started working with assessment, and scaffolding instruction sessions which would lead to better student learning, and considering what a structured one-shot class should look like instead of the free-for-all “teach the students everything in an hour” that is still common practice.

That work led me, eventually, to an instructional design program in 2016 and to where I find myself now. As I’ve been considering what to write for this post, I realized how much has changed in my life over the past ten years. It didn’t seem like such a seismic shift when I was in the moment, but reflecting back I am in awe of how different I am today. And that brings me to another startling bit of self-reflection. What should I call myself? Librarian, certainly. But I also live a lot of my life now on the “teaching faculty” side of the house, wearing my instructional designer hat. I’ve had the opportunity recently to apply for a library managerial position as well as an instructional designer position. I decided against both because, as I told my husband, “I am a librarian at heart.” I never wanted to be an administrator, so that was easy. And I can connect students and faculty with the information they need when they need it using all my hats. In reference and instruction, I do it the old-fashioned way. In acquisitions, I listen to what they need and find the resources to meet that need. As an instructional designer, I work on a meta-level, through pedagogy and design and lay the groundwork for teaching BOTH faculty and students how to better meet their information needs.

If I’ve changed this much in ten years, I wonder what life will be like in 2030? Onward and upward!