I think that community is a really important part of librarianship. The first few years of my career, I worked in larger HE libraries, with more people around to bounce ideas off and develop friendships with. I was also lucky enough to be in a cohort of graduate library trainees with others at a similar stage in their career journeys, who I really clicked with. It was fantastic to be able to talk about library-related (and non-library related!) things with people who understood where I was coming from, and go to others for help and advice. I think librarians are, largely, a very helpful and warm group of people, and I credit so much of my learning and development to the expertise, kindness and activities of others.
I currently work in a tiny library team of just myself and a library assistant. Although there are other people in my department at work, they are not ‘library people’ and as such it can be hard to share my problems with them or get meaningful support. Before the pandemic, there was the opportunity to meet and discuss issues with other librarians through conferences and training events. I usually left these networking opportunities feeling refreshed, inspired and energised for my job. However, obviously in the past year it’s not been possible to ‘network’ with other librarians in the same way. Although some conferences and events have gone ahead, the online format has made it impossible to have more informal, personal conversations with others. I’ve also felt a little bit under surveillance when using my Twitter account to discuss work related frustrations, as a senior manager has pulled me up on some of my posts in the past. This has led to me feeling a little bit isolated and ‘professionally lonely’. This is where professional organisations like CILIP could help, but I left it last year to protest some of its questionable actions (good summary here). Also, I haven’t seen them do much to promote this sort of informal networking – all of the more successful initiatives in this area have been at a grassroots level (e.g. Jennifer Bayjoo’s excellent DILON community and Twitter chats like #ukmedlibs and #uklibchat).
As a result of these frustrations, I’ve been thinking about a few things over the past few weeks to try and stimulate the opportunity for more personal connections with other librarians, just thought I’d write them up here as a summary for myself and others.
Literature searching peer review
So this is a bit of an experiment! I had a really positive experience when the lovely Kirsten, a fellow health librarian working in a different organisation, gave me some feedback on a search strategy I’d put together for a systematic review. Around the same time, someone mentioned setting up a ‘Randomised coffee trial’ for health librarians in our region. I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two – pair up librarians for an informal chat to get to know each other, as well as improving our searching. We have 14 people involved in this pilot project, who should be meeting up in March 2021. I don’t often get the chance to speak one-to-one with others working in my field and I hope this will offer the opportunity for peer learning and mentoring in the area. I’ll do an evaluation in April. If successful I’d like to broaden it outside our area and encourage involvement from across the country, even! We have so much to learn from each other.
Discord – Library Social Club
I use Discord a lot for chatting with my friends whilst we play multiplayer games and am also in a couple of other public groups relating to my interests – specific videogames, bouldering, book groups. As mentioned previously, I don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing things openly on Twitter because it’s a more ‘professional’ kind of space, where I’m followed by senior managers in my organisation. Discord offers a little bit more privacy and I set up the ‘Library Social Club’ server for any UK based library workers to get together and discuss any work- or non-work-related things. It’s still quite new, and I need to work a bit harder on promoting it, I think. I’ve had some really interesting and supportive discussions with others on there – on topics as diverse as favourite cookbooks, which unions are appropriate for library workers, pet photos, or advice on Open Access resources and info. I also took part in my first ever Dungeons & Dragons campaign! I’m really enjoying being part of this community and it’s certainly helped to address the ‘professional loneliness’ feeling that I mentioned earlier.
Since setting it up I’ve heard some negative things about the Discord platform’s accessibility issues, so I need to think a bit harder about how to ensure that no one feels left out or unable to participate in this community.
Action learning sets
I am currently on a Health Education England Senior Leadership Development programme for Library Services Managers in NHS England. One of the elements of the programme is the chance to participate in ‘action learning sets’ led by the fantastic Jo Walley – which are essentially supportive peer mentoring groups. Groups are usually small, around 4-7 people, and the participants take turns to discuss an issue or goal that they are facing, whilst the others provide a safe space to explore these fully through asking open, supportive questions in a structured format. I was initially sceptical of this, but it was honestly such a positive experience. The chance to spend TIME on myself and my issues, to talk things through with my peers – I ended the day feeling so refreshed and inspired and supported!
I would love to be able to extend this opportunity to other librarians. I really enjoy being a mentor – I used to be a CILIP Chartership mentor before I left, and have also offered mentoring opportunities to other librarians and library school students wherever possible. I learn so much and am so inspired by others. There are a couple of issues to setting up effective action learning sets which I’m still thinking through. The first is getting buy-in. I probably wouldn’t have signed up if I hadn’t been made to by the leadership programme! It’s hard to describe how great it is on paper, it has to be experienced.
Secondly, it is a significant time investment and it’s not likely people will get time off from work to do this sort of CPD activity. A good session will be about 6 hours long, with loads of breaks in between. So ideally it would be a full day every 2-3 months. It does seem like a lot, but it’s important to have that space. It’s so rare that we get that opportunity to explore our issues and support other people in discussing theirs. At the moment there’s so much change in the world and people are probably really ‘zoomed out’, so I’ve suspended this idea for awhile but it’s on the backburner, to be pursued later in the year.
Anyway if you’re interested, or have any ideas/thoughts/comments, do feel free to get in touch! Librarians, you all inspire me and I’m always happy to hear from you. I’m trying my best to help enable these connections in this weird, lonely pandemic world.
The Adventures of YiWen the Librarian 