collaboration

First Year Reflections

Tuesday of last week, August 4, marked one year in my role at Vanderbilt. The time has flown by! One of my goals for the summer was to reflect on my first year as a librarian and to plan for the second year based on what I’d learned. Although I haven’t had as much time for that reflection as I’d hoped, for my final post as a First-Year Academic Librarian blogger, I wanted to share a few lessons learned that I’m planning to build on during the upcoming year:

Be proactive

I started this job last year only three weeks before the first day of fall classes. Although it felt like enough of a head start at the time, especially considering that I had only moved to Nashville a few weeks prior, I wish that it had been possible for me to start earlier. As it was, there were several classes that I had to get ready to teach or co-teach at the last minute, relationships with the department I support that I was trying to build in a hurry, and a lot of basic information about how everything worked that I had to learn. Even with support from the other librarians at my library, plus our library director, it all felt like a whirlwind.

One example of something that I wish I could have planned better for was when I met individually with around 25 students from the same degree program, almost all in October, for research appointments. I realized about halfway through the appointments that the students all needed help with the same skills – choosing databases and learning how to search with Boolean terms – and that it would be a lot more efficient for everyone’s time if I could have taught all the students that in one instruction session. This year, I reached out to the appropriate professor in late July and asked if I could come to a class early in the semester to teach everyone the basics of a library search. Happily, she enthusiastically agreed. My hope is that this year, I’ll be able to spend my appointments with students talking about their specific search topics and make the sessions more tailored to their research interests. But that wouldn’t have even been a possibility if I hadn’t learned from last year and proactively reached out this year.

Build community

During this first year, one of the main things I knew was how much I didn’t know. I had tons of questions (and still do), and more things to learn seemed to come up every week. Luckily, librarians are generally helpful people, and I’ve gotten very lucky with how many people around me have been willing to help me out. My colleagues at my library, Peabody, have been incredible, always willing to answer questions and take the time to walk me through different processes and procedures. Additionally, there were actually six new librarians (including me) who started at Vanderbilt last summer, and we all bonded pretty quickly. Being able to check in with them, ask each other questions, and serve as sounding boards has been a huge help. We also started a journal club that’s expanded to include other newer librarians, and having that built-in community is great.

I’ve also been able to make and strengthen connections with librarians outside of Vanderbilt. One of my professors from library school is now friend and mentor – in addition to our frequent Zooms, we’re also co-authoring a textbook chapter. The education librarian from UNC-Chapel Hill, where I did my MSLS, has also become a friend and colleague. We support a lot of similar degree programs, so we chat around once a month about what trends we’re seeing with our students, what helpful resources we’ve found, what new ideas we’ve tried, and more. And, because I get so many business-related questions, I’ve also looked for business mentors who can help with questions. In addition to all the business librarians at Vanderbilt, who have been great, I’ve also connected with UNC-Chapel Hill’s business school librarian. Building all of these relationships and communities has taken time, but it’s been time so well spent. My first year would have been so much harder without my colleagues and friends, and now I have these solid connections to move forward with this year.

Learn lots!

When I first started, my library director told me that “this is a learning year.” I agreed, because of course that made sense on the surface, but at the time I didn’t fully understand what she was getting at. It took going through this first year for me to really understand what she meant. There’s so much more that I know now after a full academic cycle. Some of it is tangible – like being proactive – but a lot of it is also intangible. I know which months will likely be busy and which will be slow(er). I know how much fun it is when the students come back to campus after the quiet summer. I know that I need to work ahead on projects because every day is different, and saving something for a specific day probably means that that day will get overtaken by something else and I’ll have to scramble. I know that a big part of my job is just being present, both at my library and at my department, and getting involved with whatever’s happening. And even with everything that I’ve learned in the last year, I’m very conscious that there’s still so much I don’t know. There’s always something else to learn.

Looking ahead

Students will be back at Vanderbilt in about two weeks. I’ve already done some prep work for the upcoming semester and academic year, but I have a lot more to do before classes start. I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom and meeting with students more regularly, as well as reconnecting with colleagues who I haven’t seen as much over the summer. Vanderbilt Libraries also hosts regular professional development sessions for newer librarians during the school year, so I’m excited to see familiar faces at those sessions as well (plus, more learning!). I’m also just really interested to see how I feel about this second year compared to the first year. My hope is that I can learn just as much, while also building on what worked from last year. I’m looking forward to it!

The academe is people and people are complicated

To fully understand the intricacies of your institution’s internal politics, you’d need a graduate level course on the subject.

For introverted librarians (like me) in public facing positions, the parts of our jobs that require the most face time are often the most exhausting (although some folks learn to love it). I try to appreciate invitations to speak to groups/at events, but those calendar holds remain my primary source of professional anxiety, even if they’ve generally gone well in the past. The more you practice something, the better at it you become, so maybe public speaking gets to be old hat for liaison/subject librarians.

In my scholarly-communications-focused role, I very rarely speak to groups of students. Most of my external interactions are with faculty and administration, and not often in large groups. Through these interactions I’ve come to see myself and the library as responsible for, or at least involved in, connecting folks from across campus to work toward shared goals. This type of work presents different relational challenges from public speaking. I usually like this focused, small group work, particularly when shared with other librarians who think alike and speak the same technical language (turns out, most librarians are pretty nice!), but I’ve noticed how much that dynamic can change when working with folks outside the library.

If cross-departmental/interdisciplinary work were easily initiated or naturally occurring, we probably wouldn’t see as many calls for more of it or rewards for pursuing it. Much of that discourse refers to interdisciplinary research endeavors, but many of the same challenges hold true for work meant to improve the functioning of our institutions. My area of librarianship is geared toward those types of behind-the-scenes operations. As I’ve met and worked on shared goals with folks from other units across campus, I’ve come to realize how complicated it can be to navigate the human aspect of the university machine. The relationships in a cross-departmental group are influenced by years of reorganizations and budget reallocations and disappointments and hurt feelings and wrong impressions and conflicting philosophies, very little of which can be prepared for—and if you do know about those dynamics, you’re probably less likely to bring that group together in the first place, even if those people could provide the right mix of knowledge to address a given problem. To fully understand the intricacies of your institution’s internal politics, you’d need a graduate level course on the subject.

I know messy human relationships aren’t unique to the academe, but the academe does tend to attract many smart and opinionated cooks to a pretty complicated kitchen. As an early career librarian, I don’t think I’ve appreciated how insulated I’ve been from those rough seas outside the library, but sometimes our work can (and should) bring us into cooperative spaces with folks from other units. When I’ve found myself in such situations where the vibes are distinctly not good, my natural conflict aversion makes it more difficult to contribute. Over the past several years, reminding myself of a few truths has helped me push through these emotional challenges:

Notwithstanding the widespread need for better funding, academic libraries/librarians are generally well liked (Fagan et al., 2022; Weng & Murray, 2020). This reputation positions us well as arbiters in groups with complicated dynamics.
Librarians have unique disciplinary expertise about the information lifecycle and information systems. We have valuable insights that will not be considered without our contribution.
In situations with higher-than-normal levels of conflict, I try to remember to challenge cognitive distortions like personalization (“I am somehow responsible for how badly this is going”) or emotional reasoning (“This feels bad; therefore it must be bad/dangerous”) with reality-checking strategies (e.g. identifying the distortion; examining the evidence; thinking in shades of gray).

I’m not sure I have a clear thesis to share, other than to acknowledge: the human part of library work (or maybe all work?) can be hard, especially when you care about the work. I’m sure we’ve all felt that way at some point and it’s good to name the things that we find hard or stressful. How have you learned to handle complicated institutional politics in your work? Feel free to share in the comments.

Developing an Evidence Synthesis Training Program

Last May, when I was preparing for my in-person interview for my current position, I was lucky to have the opportunity to talk with librarians at my graduate institution about questions I might be asked and topics that might come up during my interview. One of the main themes that came up in those preparation conversations was evidence synthesis, sometimes also known as knowledge synthesis.

If, like me a year ago, you’ve never heard that term before, it refers to systematically searching existing literature to find evidence and draw conclusions to answer a specific question. There are several types of evidence synthesis – some of the most common are systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and scoping reviews. This type of research started in the medical fields and has branched out from there into other areas, like education.

The librarians I talked to were right, and evidence synthesis was mentioned in my interview. I had done my homework and was able to speak to it enough, but one thing that had been clear from the research I did is that there would be a lot more for me to learn about this topic.

Teaching Evidence Synthesis (To My Fellow Librarians)

Fast forward to January 2026, and my library director sat down with me to talk about evidence synthesis work. One librarian on our team had been doing this work for several years and is very well-versed in it, but the rest of us were much newer to it and had varying degrees of knowledge. My library director explained that she wanted to us to be able to tell our departments that we could help with evidence synthesis projects starting in the Fall 2026 semester. That meant that we had about six or seven months to learn enough to feel comfortable guiding our students and faculty through the process. My director asked me to take on the project of developing a training program to teach all of us about evidence synthesis.

At that point, I had two main sources of knowledge about evidence synthesis: I had taken the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Evidence Synthesis Institute, which had been very helpful but was also, honestly, overwhelming; and I had joined a review project with some other librarians at Vanderbilt. While the knowledge from those things helped, I knew I was only scratching the surface of this topic – so essentially, I needed to come up with a way to teach my fellow librarians, along with myself, how to do evidence synthesis.

Six months later, I think our training program has been an overall success, although the main thing I’ve learned might be that there will always be more to learn about evidence synthesis. I don’t think our training program will ever be truly over – it may just be less intense in the coming months. But as we start to wrap up the first half of this year and look towards the fall semester, here are a few key takeaways that I think helped to make the training program work.

Get Feedback and Plan Ahead

Before I did anything else, I sent around an anonymous survey to the librarians at my library to gauge how much they already knew about evidence synthesis and how comfortable they thought they would be if a student walked into their office at that moment and asked for help with a systematic review. Unsurprisingly, our answers were varied, but a common theme that emerged was that while most of us had some knowledge of evidence synthesis, we were less confident about being able to put that knowledge into practice.

As a result, I set up our training program to be partially learning and information intake, partially exchanges with other librarians (more on that a few sections down), and partially hands-on work. In the external trainings and conversations about evidence synthesis that I’ve attended since January, being unsure of how to put what you’ve learned into practice has also been a common theme for librarians. If I hadn’t gotten this feedback at the beginning and planned out all of our biweekly meetings to make sure we had practice time in July, I might not have thought to include time for actual hands-on, practice learning.

Document and Save Everything

Evidence synthesis and systematic reviews are complicated forms of research. I knew that it was very possible our group of librarians could have a conversation about something, and then a year later, I might remember that conversation and want to go back and look at exactly what we discussed. As a result, from the very beginning of the training program, I made sure to create agendas and schedules in advance, record our meetings and discussions (with my colleagues’ knowledge and consent), and take meticulous notes during each training program interaction. All of those things are saved in an organized folder that’s shared with our team, and after every meeting, I re-share the folder with team members to ensure they have access to everything they might need.

Ask for Support When Needed

From the beginning, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to teach my colleagues all of this information on my own. As a result, I leaned on the experience of people around me to help when I needed to. I asked the librarian on our team who has the most experience with systematic reviews to lead a few of our sessions. He talked us through how to use Covidence and how to design a search string, which are both invaluable parts of evidence synthesis. I also asked the librarians at Vanderbilt’s Biomedical Library, several of whom have been doing evidence synthesis for 5 or 10 years, to do a Q&A session with us about their experiences and advice. That Q&A was also one of the most helpful things we did, and I’m so grateful to the Biomedical Library team for meeting with us. Finally, I also looked for external opportunities that we could use to enhance our training. In mid-June, most of us participated in the online Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium (LESSS), and gained a lot of valuable knowledge from those sessions.

I also want to add that doing this type of training program wouldn’t have been possible without the direction that I’ve received from my library director and the support I have from my colleagues. If my fellow librarians weren’t willing to show up, be dedicated, and learn a lot, our training program wouldn’t have made it past the first few weeks.

In July, I’ll re-survey my colleagues and figure out how we’re all currently feeling about evidence synthesis, what we think we can put into place for the fall, and where we need to continue learning. This will definitely be an ongoing learning situation – a “yes, and” training program instead of a checked box saying that our learning has been completed. But even though I haven’t officially asked yet, I feel good about saying that we all know a lot more than we did when the training program started at the beginning of this year. I look forward to what the next steps will be in all of us continuing to learn and grow with evidence synthesis.

Can You Manage Our Library’s Instagram Account?

In my very first ACRLog post, I talked a little about how librarianship is my second career, and that before I went back to school for my MSLS, I worked for six years in communications and public relations. A part of my work at the public relations firm involved running social media accounts. Building on that, when I was a graduate assistant at a campus library during grad school, I also helped run that library’s Instagram account, which was a great way to bridge the gap between two different subjects (health vs. libraries) with a common denominator (social media).

At some point during my interview process for my current position, I mentioned this social media work. With that in mind, after I started at my current library, I wasn’t surprised when my library director asked me if I would be willing to create a social media plan for our specific library’s Instagram account and take over as the primary person to manage the account. I’m sure that I’m not the only librarian who has experienced this type of social media ask – so I wanted to share some social media tips and tricks that I’ve picked up both from my communications/PR days and from my librarian days.

What do I do first?!

Whether or not you have previous professional social media experience, if someone asks you to take over a social media account, don’t panic! Chances are that you have a LinkedIn, so remember that you already have some experience using social media for professional purposes, even if it’s not necessarily a professional account (like for an official organization or business).

Have a conversation with others in your library, both your supervisor and your fellow librarians and library staff, to figure out what the vision is for the social media account. Do you want to be funny? Wholesome? Informational? Make sure everyone understands the vision, even if they won’t be directly involved in managing the account.

I would also strongly recommend creating a social media content calendar (a search for “social media content calendar template” brings up a lot of results to help you get started). Plan ahead for what content you’ll post, and when you’ll post it. This is especially important when you first start running an account, because it will help you feel less overwhelmed. Thinking about content a few weeks or a month in advance gives you time to create things like images, infographics, or videos, and helps others know what’s coming too. It also helps you to think through your other responsibilities and figure out how often you can reasonably post. For especially busy weeks, if you have three days’ worth of content ready to go on Monday, that means you can go ahead and schedule it all to go out on specific days throughout the week. Check in with the folks you work with to see what ideas they have and ask if they’d be interested in helping to create any content (or starring in a fun video!). Even if you’re in charge of the account, you don’t have to do this alone!

How do I know what to post?

Some posts will be self-evident, so don’t worry about having to brainstorm super creative content several times a week. For instance, every time my library’s hours change, we post a fun image on Instagram that shows our new hours. When I was in grad school, every time the library where I worked got a cool new book, I would create a simple image with the cover, name, and author, and share it so students would be aware. For major library celebration days, organizations like ALA create graphics and social media toolkits that are free to download and use – for example, here are the materials they put together for National Library Week last week.

I’ve also used this blog post from a consulting firm that works with libraries and other community-focused organizations as a guide when I’m feeling stuck. Their focus on how to think about marketing through a library lens helps me refocus on what I CAN do as a busy librarian and what would be most impactful on social media, while also not taking up too much of my time when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

What else do I have to do?

As you’ve probably already guessed, there’s more to running a social media account than just creating graphics and posting them with a caption. The current goal for me with my library’s Instagram account is for me to post three times a week (ish). Each time I log into the account to post something, I also take time to answer any direct messages we’ve received, scroll through the account’s feed to like and post comments on other posts, and note any fun posts from other library accounts that might be an inspiration for one of our posts. No one knows exactly how the mysterious algorithm works, but we do know that engaging with other accounts is important for our own account’s numbers.

Pulling monthly statistics is also an important part of running an account – that way, you’ll know what types of posts get the most engagement. Even on professional accounts, the stats won’t be available forever, so I have a standing to-do list item at the beginning of each month to add statistics from the previous month to an Excel spreadsheet. For any posts that involve other people or organizations, I also try to tag those collaborators to give them the acknowledgement and visibility that they deserve. Finally, I also include alternate text for all the images and subtitles for all of the videos that I post on Instagram. Accessibility is important!

What other resources are there to help me?

There’s a whole library hive mind out there to help you in your professional social media journey! In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, a few that I often turn to are:

Library-focused posts, like this one, from firms and organizations that I trust (this particular firm has done webinars in conjunction with ALA committees multiple times).
Librarian-run substacks like Content Prompt (there’s more out there than you might think!).
Discord servers, Facebook groups, and Reddit threads of social media professionals, librarians running social media accounts, and more (again, there’s more of these than you would think!).

Why does it even matter for libraries to have social media accounts?

I’m a big believer that we need to meet people where they are. As an academic librarian at a library that’s serving busy students and faculty, our students are almost all on social media. That’s where they get information, find things to do, talk to their friends, and more. I know we won’t reach every student, but if we can reach even a few to tell them about events, resources, and more – and to encourage them to tell their friends – then in my view, it’s worth it. Students are overwhelmed with demands for their time and attention, and it’s not enough to assume that they’ll come to the library if they need it. We need students to know that librarians are here to help – and social media is one important way to get that message across.

Is it worth it?

As I mentioned above, last week was National Library Week, and the theme was Find Your Joy. I spent a lot of this past week filming my fellow librarians sharing what brings them library joy and where they find library joy, and editing their comments into a video. Did it take me all day on Friday to put this video together? Yes. Was it worth it? Definitely.

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Takeaways from Two Virtual Library Conferences

Over the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to attend two virtual library conferences – the 2026 Southeast Collaborative Conference, and the Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students 2026 Virtual Conference. I wanted to use my blog for this month to reflect on what I learned from both of these experiences.

Southeast Collaborative Conference

This conference happened first, over three days in the second week of March. I thought the pacing of the conference was helpful, as they included breaks in the schedule so attendees could check in on our day jobs without missing any of the content. Additionally, most of the sessions were pre-recorded, which allowed the speakers to be active in the chat throughout the presentation, answering questions and responding to comments. I thought that really helped to recreate how an in-person conference feels, and the emphasis on engagement made sessions fun. I also really appreciated that the conference made all of the slides and materials available to participants as soon as the conference ended. Knowing that I can reference them later, and see the materials from sessions I couldn’t attend, means that I really got the most I could out of the conference experience.

I was excited to see a presentation on Generative AI Literacy from two librarians that I know from my UNC-Chapel Hill grad school days, including one librarian whom I took a class with! I learned a lot from the presentation that I can incorporate into my own AI instruction and workshops (with attribution, of course). The presenters even shared that they’re going to be developing asynchronous tutorials for Generative AI in libraries that will be freely available to anyone, and let attendees know that all events about Generative AI at the University Libraries are open to anyone, not just university affiliates. I had no idea that I could still join any of the trainings that are offered online, and am looking forward to signing up for as many as I can attend.

Additionally, I thought the keynote was extremely powerful. It featured state librarians from five states – North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee. One of the only live presentations at this conference, these leaders spoke candidly and eloquently about the challenges facing all types of libraries and library systems today, and what they’re doing to meet them head-on. It was inspiring and made me glad all over again that I chose this career.

Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students

This conference was second, held over two afternoons in the third week of March. This conference took place over Zoom, in four-hour sessions each day with no breaks. The format was more challenging than the previous week’s, but still emphasized the importance of engagement between presenters and attendees. I was especially excited about this conference, because all of the programs I support are master’s and doctoral programs, and during this first year I’ve felt unsure at times of the best way to approach supporting these programs. I really hoped that I could learn some tips and tricks from the presenters.

Unsurprisingly, there were quite a few sessions about Generative AI at this conference as well. These presenters didn’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of how to get the most out of Gen AI the way the previous conference did, but I appreciated the contrast of this approach that focused more on platforms and how graduate students tend to engage with these tools. Between the two conferences, I was able to add a lot of different tools to my Gen AI toolbox.

Several presentations also focused on how to approach orientations and workshops for grad students differently than for undergrads. I present a lot of library orientation sessions, and librarians at my institution are currently being asked to make sure our workshop offerings are robust, so these sessions were especially relevant to me. I appreciated how presenters focused on acknowledging graduate students have unique needs and may be juggling additional responsibilities when compared to undergrads, so it’s important to make sure the library is giving them the tools and knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.

I do wish that the sessions had been a bit more focused on specific actions that attendees can take in their own libraries. It seemed like many presenters were focused on sharing their work and what was successful for them, but not as focused on how their successes could be adapted for other libraries. I would have liked to have a few more concrete programming ideas that I could take back to my own libraries. Perhaps that’s something that I could work on as a presentation of my own for a future iteration of this conference. I also wished that the conference had stretched an additional half hour to add a break in the middle. I think it would have helped with tiredness and staying on top of other work at the end of the day.

Overall Takeaways and Future Thoughts

Although I’ve been to several in-person conferences before, I had never participated in an online conference and wasn’t sure how the experience would translate. I love the feeling of walking into a conference and knowing that everyone is there to learn, meet fellow professionals and maybe make future friends, and get everything that we can out of the experience. I was worried that these conferences would be lacking in the camaraderie and excitement of an in-person setting. Although I didn’t get quite the same feeling as I do when I walk in the door of a convention center, I was really happy to find that both conferences were able to recreate similar vibes over online platforms.

It’s also important to recognize that online conferences lower a lot of barriers of participation for many people – including me! I’m lucky to be at an institution that strongly supports professional development, but even that support wouldn’t have been enough for me to travel to two conferences in subsequent weeks. Holding a conference online also means that the cost to participate is likely lower – or in the case of these two conferences, eliminated completely. I really appreciate both conferences’ commitment to access, affordability, and availability.

Overall, I had a great time and gained a lot from my participation in these conferences. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for registration to open next year – and maybe I’ll even submit a presentation proposal myself!