Tag: collaboration

How We Meet: Making Use of Departmental Time

During the last few weeks, I started planning for the summer. I like to think summer is still months away, but the spring temperatures have returned and we are entering the final stretch of the semester. Summer is approaching!

For myself and the team I lead, summer will be busy. We’re slated to teach a five-week intensive information literacy credit course – two hours a day, five days a week. We are co-teaching three sections of the class and working together to edit the curriculum to fit the needs of the program this summer. The course will run from mid-July to mid-August. Once the course wraps up, we’ll get one week to recover, readjust, and then we jump straight into the fall semester. 

As we talked about how we would prepare for this summer course, I realized that we would need to prepare for the fall semester in May and June. This would allow us to focus on the teaching in July/August and then give everyone a break before the fall semester. In thinking through all the topics we wanted to cover in the summer, I realized I would need to be savvy with how I scheduled department meetings in May and June. Lucky for me, I love planning meetings.

A little meeting context

In stepping into a department head role, I’ve tried to be intentional about when and why we meet. Especially when I started in the job, I wanted to make sure we had time as a team to come together, discuss current topics, and make decisions together. I used those meetings to gain additional institutional context and open up space for the team to see connections between their experiences. Those were the types of meetings that truly could not be an email and helped to establish a strong team foundation. For the most part, I scheduled the meetings in advance and would occasionally add a meeting into the rotation if a topic came up we needed to spend time discussing. I learned a lot from the fall, including some ways I wanted to change up our meeting schedule in the spring. 

In true pandemic fashion, our spring semester started off remotely. However, having a strong meeting foundation allowed us to go virtual without too many issues. I introduced a new format for the team – the monthly business meeting. Each month, we have a meeting to discuss individual team news and share updates related to some of our bigger projects (like one-shot instruction, our GEARUP program, and our Library Informatics program). The goal for this format is to open communication and encourage folks to share news to keep everyone in the loop. Originally, I had blocked 30 minutes for updates and 30 minutes for feedback on a certain topic. I quickly learned that dividing the time like that doesn’t work for the team. So business meetings are now focused on just updating and looping everyone in. I think they are working and I’m excited to keep tweaking the format throughout the year. Similar to the fall, I’ve had to add in a few extra meetings, but I think I’ve started to understand the semester rhythms and in extension, the department rhythms. A few meeting types we’ve established as a team are:

  • Instructional data sharing meeting: This meeting happens near the end of the semester and focuses on our one-shot instruction. We discuss data we collected from our students and instructors and also use the time to plan for changes to one-shots for the upcoming semester. It’s a great way to celebrate our work, see the impact, and discuss changes.
  • End of semester celebration meeting: This meeting idea came from someone in the department, who asked if we could have a meeting where we didn’t have a formal agenda and could just spend time together. It was probably my favorite meeting in the fall, because we got to be together, do a craft, and enjoy some holiday snacks. It’s a nice way to celebrate our hard work from the past semester.

Summer planning

With all of this meeting knowledge, I wanted to take a wider view as I planned for our summer meeting schedule. I printed off a full 2022 calendar and marked off when we had met this year and then tried to identify our summer meeting schedule. I started to notice the frequency of our meetings and the many meeting topics we covered each semester. I pinned up the four pages to my corkboard and you can see the full spread in the photo below.

Four sheets of paper are displayed and each piece of paper contains three months. Each month is marked up with meetings and notes about the purpose of each meeting.
The full 2022 EOS meeting schedule. There’s some meaning behind the colors and patterns, but it’s not important to tell the overall story!

As I penciled in our summer meetings, I quickly saw that June would not only go by fast, but we would have to be intentional on what we chose to focus on. Ultimately, we could not cover everything. I tried to identify things I knew we needed to cover in order to start the fall semester off on the right foot. In planning our June meetings, I tried to incorporate some new meeting formats to see what might work best. I’m hoping to pilot the following meeting types this summer:

  • Mega meeting: Borrowing the name from a former department I worked in, this longer meeting is meant for bigger, conceptual discussions and collaborative work. For us, we’ll be doing a full day meeting (with food) to begin the work of preparing for our summer teaching.
  • Pre-Sprint Meeting: In the middle of June, I hope that the team can work on some larger projects and can focus on specific projects during a week-long sprint. To kick off that work, I want to begin with a department meeting on a Monday where we discuss the topic at hand, assign the work, and then go off into smaller groups to get the work done. For example, we’re going to revisit our curriculum maps and I want us to build out time to really focus on this work. 
  • Optional working meetings: I’ve blocked this time on everyone’s calendars and reserved a space, but it will be up to each individual on how they’d like to use that time. If they are working in small groups, it’s a block of time to get together and collaboratively work. But, I also scheduled these knowing folks will be on vacation or have other things to focus on. 

The summer meeting schedule still looks a little overwhelming, but I’m hoping these meeting formats will help us have the team conversations we need to have and help to assign the smaller group work. I’m curious to see how these meetings pan out and what I learn along the way. I know this summer will inform how we set up meetings in the fall. 

I won’t lie that after laying out all our department meetings in this calendar format, I had a minor freakout. Was I trying to do too much? Were we switching between topics and projects too quickly? Were we focusing on the “right” things? In speaking to a colleague, she reminded me that department meetings can be as frequent as I would like, as long as I feel that the time is used to move work forward. This was a good reminder. I know my leadership style is collaborative and during my first year, I will err on the side of too many meetings, because I want the team to understand my thought process and weigh in on the department decisions. Overtime I know the team will establish a rhythm and we will develop other mechanisms for making decisions. I feel like I’m learning a lot from organizing department meetings, something I didn’t anticipate when stepping into this role! 

So now reader, how do you meet with the people you work with? How many meetings are too many meetings for you? How do you keep in touch and keep the work going outside of regular meetings? I would love to hear from you on how you think about departmental time.

What’s Bringing You Joy? An ACRLogger Collaborative Post

For this month’s ACRLoggers collaborative blog post, we’re talking about things that are bringing us joy these days. We hope this post also brings you joy and or allows you to reflect on things bringing you joy this month.  

Ramón – I do my best to not think about work in my free time, so currently I’m reading Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis – The illustrations are amazing, of course. The last book I really enjoyed was Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammed Ali and Malcom X.

Alex – I’m trying to become more of a “podcast person.” I haven’t found any library podcasts to add to my list of regular listening, but I’m trying an episode here and there of any library podcasts that sound interesting! (And I’ve finally listened to the “Room of Requirement” episode of This American Life. It only took 3 years of recommendations from others!)

Emily – “lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to” on Youtube. This isn’t technically library-related, but makes me feel like an undergrad again! Instrumental music always helped me focus on homework, and these Lofi Girl videos fill my office with fuzzy, beat-forward good vibes.

Maura – I’m almost finished reading The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson and it’s such an amazing novel that I’ve found myself recommending it to people practically nonstop in the past couple of weeks. (I may also be dragging my feet a bit on finishing it, it’s that good.)

Jen – While I’m definitely finding joy in the various things I’m reading, watching, and listening to right now, those things aren’t explicitly library-related either. But I do enjoy when I can follow the thread of an idea I’ve been working on or thinking about in my professional space into whatever recreational book or movie I’m immersed in. For example, I just finished Writers and Lovers by Lily King (highly recommend, by the way) and was struck by the insights into the writing process (among other things) that it offered. I love to see those moments of connection across divides or contexts. 

What’s something bringing you joy in the workplace? 

Alex – I’m working on a lot of things with different committees and groups, and they’re all actually moving forward. None of the groups are stuck in that space of “what do we do next” or “let’s table that indefinitely,” and it feels great.

Ramón – The 10 plants I keep in my office! Whenever my eyes are tired from looking at screens or I feel stressed, I turn around in my chair & admire my green friends. 

Emily – Little flashes of community amongst students has brought me joy lately. After being virtual, then hybrid for so long, it felt like students stopped seeing the library as a lively, social place. It was getting lonely and sad! It’s great to see students study in small groups again, or meet with friends between classes in the library.

Maura – Like Emily I’m also enjoying seeing more students in the library again. While we were open last semester it was still fairly quiet on campus as most of the college’s courses were still mostly (or solely) online. Welcoming students back to the library to study, use our resources, or catch a nap between classes has been a bright spot for sure.

Jen – It’s been a hectic few weeks and I feel like I’m working just about five minutes ahead of every deadline — which is not my favorite context to work in nor the one in which I feel I’m able to produce my most thoughtful work. But at the end of the workshop I facilitated today (after having finalized it only this morning), a colleague who participated commented how helpful it was, that it was “just what I was looking for.” The point I want to make here isn’t that this particular comment from this particular colleague brought me joy, although it did. Reflecting on this brief exchange today in light of this prompt reminds me how much it matters to recognize each others’ effort and impact. I used to hesitate to share acknowledgements like this because I thought my small comments were expendable, disposable. But I feel exactly the opposite now: that such comments, however small, acknowledging that we see the work that our colleagues and our students are doing, that we appreciate their efforts, that we recognize their significance can go a long way. With them, I think we can create a bit of joy for each other and ourselves.

What’s a win (big or small) that has brought you joy in 2022? 

Ramón – Feeling more comfortable teaching my library research course & looking back on my previous work plan to see that I accomplished almost everything I set out to do!

Alex – A colleague and I got a chapter proposal accepted! The actual writing is not currently bringing me a lot of joy, but once I’m on the other side of the first draft, it will bring me joy again.

Emily – In Fall 2020, we started using LibGuides CMS to embed LibGuide pages into Canvas. This semester I’ve noticed more and more instructors requesting our “Ask a Librarian” feature (our embedded chat and contact page), and even embedding resources all on their own! It’s been good to see it catching on.

Maura – We’re hiring (again)! Near the end of last semester one of our IT staff moved on to another opportunity, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to recruit for their replacement so quickly. I’m also grateful for my colleagues in the library who are taking the time to run the search so thoughtfully. I’m looking forward to welcoming our new colleague in the (fingers crossed, not too distant) future.

Hailley – During the fall semester, I spent a lot of time facilitating conversations around our reference services. These conversations led us to make some big changes this spring, including launching a new form to help track our interactions on and off the desk, across multiple departments. Watching this form come to life (and knowing all the hard work and conversations that went into creating it) is definitely bringing me joy.

Featured image by Bekka Mongeau from Pexels

Keeping in Touch: Maintaining Work Relationships After Changing Jobs

In my non-work life, I can be a persistent friend. I like reaching out and saying hi, letting friends know I’m thinking about them. I love catching up over the phone, FaceTiming to work on an embroidery project and gossip, or when travel allows, visiting friends and seeing their favorite spots in their city. Keeping in touch isn’t an easy task, especially during a pandemic. And during 2021, I’ve reflected on my big friendships and have tried to figure out what type of communication works best for us to keep in touch. 

In changing jobs, I’m thinking a lot about how I want to stay in touch with former colleagues. This keeping in touch includes both work friendships (which I’ve talked about on ACRLog before) as well as professional relationships and collaborations. After five years at an institution, there were some folks where it still feels weird not to hear from regularly. Especially colleagues I frequently worked with or colleagues who were part of my day-to-day working life. I’ve been at my new institution long enough to have new day-to-day work colleagues, but I still miss some of those past work relationships. 

So far, my strategies for keeping in touch have included the tried and true update email, finding time for a Zoom catch-up, brainstorming a conference proposal together, connecting them with new colleagues when interests match, and seeking out their expertise and perspective as I settle into my middle manager role. I’ve also appreciated colleagues who have reached out to check in, propose collaborative projects, and or share news.

Ultimately, I feel strongly that keeping in touch with folks from previous jobs is important. While my role and responsibilities might have changed, I like to imagine new ways former colleagues and I can collaborate and learn from one another. Just like any friendship, it’s exciting to see work relationships evolve and change as we grow into new positions and people. I also feel strongly that intentionally working across institutions through maintaining past work relationships is crucial. Working across institutions means we can always learn from each other and see how different situations play out based on student populations and institutional context. 

Something that’s tough for me in friendships is knowing when a friendship has changed. The same goes for former colleagues: not everyone is someone you have to keep in touch with. You grow apart and this can be especially true if you no longer see each other in your work ecosystem. I’m always reminded of wisdom I got from a professor at my college during my senior year: she told the graduating class we would only keep in touch with a couple of friends from our time at college. She told us that she knew we didn’t believe her (we optimistically thought we would stay close friends with everyone) but she was totally right. There’s only so much we can do to maintain friendships or work relationships. You can’t keep in touch with everyone and that’s okay. I’m hoping as in-person conferences return in the next few years, that will be a good space to reconnect and see those colleagues.

For me, I hope to apply a lot of my out-of-work friendship practices to maintaining former colleague relationships. Just like any friendship, keeping in touch requires a willingness from both parties and an understanding of what kind of communication works best for where we are now. I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve got a few catch-up emails to send out!

Featured image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

On secondary assignments and exploration

One of the things that got me excited—almost a year ago now—when I was applying for my job, was that here at the Michigan State University Libraries, it’s commonplace to have what we refer to as a secondary assignment. Essentially, this means that at least 25% of any given librarian’s week is spent working in a separate unit from that of their primary assignment. For example, many of my coworkers have secondary assignments in reference, but secondary assignments can be in anything from digital scholarship to special collections.

When I applied to this job, I was excited about the opportunity for cross-pollination and breaking out of single specializations that having secondary assignments provides. While I am in a residency program, which means that I am offered the space to explore different interests within librarianship, I also knew coming out of library school what sort of work I wanted to be doing. A secondary assignment seemed like the perfect way to balance exploring with focusing on my specific interests.

Thus far, secondary assignments have worked out well for me. I currently have two: accessibility and cataloging. Cataloging has been an interest of mine since library school, but my school also only offered one cataloging class, so after that any practice I got was exclusively through my internships. Having a secondary assignment in cataloging has helped me gain a more solid foundation as well as a chance to explore some of cataloging’s intricacies. Scheduling blocks of time for cataloging has also helped to make my schedule, which can sometimes feel untethered, a bit more structured.

My accessibility secondary assignment has been equally fruitful. I came into this position with little prior experience in accessibility work, but did know that I was interested and wanted to get involved. And thus far my secondary assignment has allowed me to do just that. I’ve not only learned about all the various accessibility initiatives happening in the libraries and on campus, but I’ve also started to make meaningful contributions, especially working with vendors. Having a secondary assignment has also given me time to focus on my own education with regard to accessibility, disability studies, and assistive technology. A secondary assignment so different from my area studies primary assignment also means that I can shake my days up, moving between different sorts of work to keep myself engaged.

Of course, having three different focuses can also be hectic. I have definitely spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to balance everything and which of my assignments deserves focus at any given moment. There are weeks when one or another just doesn’t get attended to, but this is also the nature of library work in general: no day is completely routine, no matter what your job description might be.

Overall, though, I have certainly benefitted from my secondary assignments and have found them to be useful ways to interact with more people in the library and to learn about the work of other units. Ultimately, secondary assignments have been exactly what I hoped they would be.

Even if your library does not have an equivalent setup, there are ways to create a similar, if more informal experience. For example, I don’t have any reference responsibilities, but I have found attending reference meetings to be beneficial in hearing more about library-wide happenings and connecting with colleagues I might not otherwise see on a regular basis. Meetings, discussion groups, or other similar events can lead to opportunities for collaborations across units. Look for other ways to reach beyond your unit to find others with similar or complementary interests.

Another avenue to explore would be finding areas where your job is flexible. If you’ve always wanted to learn more about a certain area of librarianship, are there ways you can work that learning into your current practice? To whom can you reach out to learn more and open up doors for collaboration? Carving out time and space might not be possible for everyone, but it’s worth looking for small ways to explore if that’s something you’re interested in.

Does your library have anything similar to secondary assignments? What strategies have you used to interact with others beyond your closer colleagues or to learn about new-to-you areas of librarianship?

Supporting the other side

So far in my research career, I’ve put a lot of stock, energy, and passion around the benefits of hiring and supporting student employment in the library. It’s the topic that gets me most fired up at conferences, the thing I’ll tweet about until I can’t tweet anymore, and one part of my job that I keep coming back to, regardless of my job title. I believe in the potential of undergraduate employees to be crucial part of the library. I believe that if you set the bar high, undergraduates will rise to the occasion. But recently, I’ve realized that in that belief, I had forgotten about the other side: the role of the supervisor.

A few months ago, I worked with a colleague to put together a landscape survey around student employment in our libraries. The goal was to discover who in the library was supervising students and if we could find areas of synergy. We asked questions around hiring, on-boarding, continual training, and barriers to success. As we reviewed the answers, the one I remember the most clearly mentioned that as a supervisor, they felt unprepared because the rules and policies around hiring, training, and supporting student employees were unclear. It’s one of those things they never give you a manual for, you’re just suppose to know. And of course, any manual that might exist is in pieces, scattered throughout HR websites, the library’s intranet pages, and library legends told to you by your colleagues. This stuff isn’t clear or transparent and often requires lots of time to figure out. This was the first moment where I thought, “Okay, building a program is more than just for the students. The supervisors also are an audience to consider.”

Recently, I’ve been reminded of this fact when I was leading an informational session on our internship program. In the session, as we talked about the components of the program, including a new community of practice group I’m building, one participant asked, “Will the supervisors also meet regularly, just like the students?”

After a small beat, I nodded. “Of course.” I was reminded of the survey and once again reminded of my own assumptions around supervision. In reflecting on that situation, I think I assume that people who had studente employees for a long time just knew how to do in a meaningful way. But it’s becoming more clear that just because you have student employees, doesn’t mean that you know everything or feel supported.

And upon even further reflection, I realized that since I started trying to create some program structures for our interns, I’ve done my share of complaining about how I never hear from some interns and that I can’t seem to get through to some of their supervisors. I often chalk it up to structural issues, or a desire for an official announcement to the library about my role with our interns. However, the more I think about this angle, the more I realize part of the problem is that while I logically understand having an intern takes a ton of time and energy, I’m not valuing that idea in practice. I’m not recognizing or finding ways to support my colleagues who do this work. In other aspects of my job, I talk about how I am there to support my colleagues who do student engagement, and this also applies to student employees and their supervisors. This support can happens in many ways — from having intern community of practice meetings to getting the supervisors together to let them know they’re not alone in this. I’m a coordinator and that means both for students and for my colleagues.

For every program that we create to support our student employees, we are also responsible for creating the necessary structures and support for our supervisors. If we want unified programs, complimentary training modules, and a shared vision for student employment in the libraries, we have to create the network for our supervisors. This lines up so nicely with George Kuh’s definition of student engagement, where institutions must be willing to provides the resources and support for these opportunities. If we want meaningful internships or purposeful part-time employment, we have to be willing to provide the support (through professional development, regular meetings, and honest conversations) to our supervisors. Neither the students nor supervisors can do this work alone and both groups need to feel supported in this endeavor.

So where do I go from here? I’m trying to be more intentional and start thinking of how I can help build those structures in my role. I’ve started using the word “support” in talking to supervisors about my role with our interns. I’ll probably add monthly intern supervisor meetings to my calendar this fall, and start to note down obstacles that this group might face (and how we can problem solve together). As the moderator for both groups (students and supervisors), I’m in the best position to provide feedback to either group and translate each other’s needs to one another.  

At your library, how do you (or others) support the supervisors who oversee your student employees? Do supervisors meet on a regular basis? Are they given chances for professional development or ways to gain new supervisory skills? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter!

Featured image by Riccardo Bresciani from Pexels