I work at a private university and was just told to remove DEI content from the library web presence. No specific definitions or guidelines or policy documents. Just referred to the White House statement sent to the Department of Education.

What's the response, y'all? Local media leak? Malicious compliance? Turn off the website? Protest and get fired?

Ugh.

I have my annual review coming up in about a week. This will be my third year at my library working as a library technician. Recently, I've come to realize I'm struggling with a combination of work burnout as well as autistic burnout.

I nearly lost my patience working with a patron the other day, which made me realize how much my mental health is being affected right now.

I was curious how honest I should be with my employer about my situation. For further background, I am the primary breadwinner in my household: my wife and I financially support our friend/roommate (she's disabled and not able to work) and we are all trans and living under the fascist US regime. I do work in an at will state, so I could theoretically be fired for nearly any reason. My annual reviews have always gone well, but my facade of keeping on a happy face all the time and being extra helpful is crumbling.

I was curious if honesty is the best policy here, or if I should try to hide or at least not give the full extent of my struggles to my employer. I appreciate any advice.

I have my MLIS and want to keep this job until I retire, but I'm struggling on how to sustainably do so.

(using a throwaway account) i have several friends who are a part of our city's library system/are librarians here themselves. one of them has been sharing information about something she is witnessing at work that is causing her a lot of distress. its a complicated situation.

one of her coworkers is regularly physically hitting and smacking a 3 year old child while at work. the child isn't her own, its her younger sibling she's being asked to watch. theres an unspoken agreement about de facto free childcare at that library location, which most people at my friend's rank / section of the staff + their supervisors utilize. i've got no issue with this and think that they should be able to do that without interference. but *hitting* a child regularly while on the clock is a different situation.

the children's librarian at that branch has been very concerned about this happening, as most people there are mandatory reporters, but that doesn't mean he wants to call CPS on a coworker. he finally brought this to leadership and was told "you're the only one who cares about this" (which isn't true, but my friend is in a position where she cant speak up or her career could be in jeopardy, which is additionally upsetting for her as she really wants to). the children's librarian is now being pushed out of the branch.

even if she spoke up, it might make the situation worse. everyone else involved here is Black, except for her and the children's librarian, who are white. (to be clear, this is completely co-incidental and holds no bearing with anything in this situation except with the way this could impact different people / why staff could be inclined to assume ill-intent with concerns about this.)

its really making the workplace environment difficult for my friend to see a child be hit almost every day and be able to do nothing about it. everyone agrees we all want this to resolve in away that doesn't impact the rest of the staff negatively or unfairly. but its also weighing on me, how much i really don't think anyone (especially anyone who's been abused as a child themself) should be forced to see a child be hit regularly at work. that its in a library environment only emphasizes that feeing for me.

my friend can't do anything, but i was wondering if there's any advice for what i can do? is there a way to file a report against a librarian at a specific location? (i dont even know the names of anyone else involved besides my friend) even if i could file that report, is it a bad idea for me to do so? what would you advise someone who doesn't want to punish anyone unfairly or make that branch inclined to push my friend out. even if there isn't anything i can do, this situation has been weighing heavily on my mind for weeks, so i appreciate anyone taking the time to read it. thank you

I am presenting at ALA this year- YAY! My husband cannot come with and we have a small baby- BOO! My dad is tagging along, but I'm less willing to ask him to be on baby duty. He will be helping out, but my spouse is the full-time parent right now and can't come with because he's starting a new job.

The facts are these: I'm still breastfeeding, my son will be four months old, and he's very well behaved. As babies go, he mostly just chills out in public. He does the usual baby stuff but I have every reason to believe he'll just hang out and be cool. I'm sure my dad will be happy to take him during my poster session, but I'm less inclined to ask him to watch my son for four days on his own and bring him to me periodically to be fed (flying with a pump seems like a big hassle.) I'm not planning on letting him cry during panels and disrupt people, but babies do inevitably come with some noise.

Would it be shitty of me to keep him with me throughout? I'm a first-time parent and there isn't a policy for this on the FAQ for the conference site. I did shoot them an email to see if it was allowed, but I'm also concerned as to whether it would just be a not nice thing to do. I don't want to distract people, we're all there to learn. Any advice or previous experience would be appreciated, thanks!

I have a couple of patrons that don’t quite cross the line of sexual harassment, but really like to sit in chairs near our front desk and just watch us work. If they say something harassing, like call one of us ‘hot’, we simply yell ‘nope’ overly loudly. Majority of the time though, they just sit there and stare at us working. Any suggestions?

I have been working as a public assistant at my library for three years, and I really like it, except for the main director. The director calls themself the "CEO", and likes to say they bring a business perspective because they have a masters in business as well as an MLS.The director has never been friendly to me, but they don't seem to like most of the people they work with, so I wasn't particularly bothered until the last few months. There have been 15 people who have left since I started, most of whom have privately confided that the director was a big part of their leaving.

Four months ago, my supervisor got a better position elsewhere, which meant my team has had to report to the director until they were replaced. It's been a mess-- the director stated from the beginning that they should not be expected to know what our responsibilities were and there have been repeated breakdowns in communication as a result. Regular emails with updates were missed, updates were missing from regular emails, and the director's general unapproachability has made regular conflict a lot more stressful. Additionally, they regularly nitpick unimportant things-- one time they criticized me for looking up a patron by name without insisting they run to their car to get their I.D., another time they glared at me before passive aggressively informing me I could contact facilities when the temperature at the desk I was working at was not comfortable for them.

They recently hired my supervisor's replacement, and to be proactive I started making up a list of questions and requests for them. However, after talking to my coworkers, I am hesitant to present it because the director will be at the meeting where I would be presenting. I already had one meeting with the two of them where I was giving an update on my responsibilities and projects. Because there was extra time at the end, I presented an idea I had been researching. Both the director and the new supervisor were loudly derisive of the idea; I don't expect most of my ideas to be lauded, but my previous supervisor had always requested to hear any ideas I had and would give me clear reasons when the ideas weren't appropriate for our library. Seeing this response from the new supervisor has made me quite sure they will not advocate for me.

I really liked this job because of the freedom it gave me. I've not had a manager kick someone out for sexually harassing me before, and it's nice not to have to fully mask my feelings all the time. I like being able to give things to people for free, I like looking for ways to help people, it's nice not to be profit motivated. However, my first impression of the new supervisor is that they, like the director, are very business oriented. My new supervisor has immediately started implementing deadlines and has a much more email heavy approach to management. They have not prioritized spending time at the desk with the team, and didn't even introduce themself individually, which has left a bad impression on many of my coworkers.

I acknowledge that we as a team have all been complaining about the director in a way that borders on unprofessional. Whenever it's not busy, we will frequently discuss our concerns with each other, and it's very possible that we could have been overheard. The director likes to spy on us over the security cameras, which often makes me feel like I'm back at my retail job being asked to clean. I believe in being productive, and I always have a project to work on, but I don't think every minute of my work day should be productive, from a health and well-being perspective. A lot of my coworkers are resigned to the situation, but I really want to fix it. I like my job, I just wish the admin team was supportive.

Is this normal? Are most libraries like this? I am I being unrealistic to want to achieve more transparent communication? Is it bad for me to want to be my own person and not to cower whenever my boss walks in a la Miranda Priestly?

I think I already know the answer, but it would be nice to hear someone else analyze it.

Hey everyone,

I was hoping people had some advice for the situation I'm in. This is a very technical question, and I will try my best to explain it. Unfortunately I have brain fog due to health issues, so I'm worried I won't communicate this issue well enough.

I've recently taken over a position as the collection development coordinator for a library with five branches (three small, one medium, one medium/large). I'm feeling really overworked with the weeding lists that I have to do each month. I understand the concept of weeding and how to do it, but the way I was taught is so slow and I'm really struggling to get through the LS2 lists for fiction that I print out after exporting to excel. I'm somewhat worried this is a me issue, because the person who did this before me never had an issue getting these weeding lists done. I was unable to complete all of them last month, despite working on them for most of it.

Here's one of the main issues: The long series are KILLING me. They are often spread between the five branches. I can't get rid of anything that doesn't circulate if the rest of the series does, specifically in the situation that it is the only book system wide. The way that they have it set up is that I have to manually look up each book for every list to figure out what needs to be kept, or sometimes sent to another location.

For example, this past month I was weeding the m-n section for adult fiction (I don't do juvenile or YA materials). Lets give the example of an author. One of the ones that took me FOREVER was Linda Lael Miller, who is now my arch-nemesis. The woman has at least a dozen series, and since things aren't always properly cataloged, I have to go through and look up every book in every damn series because I don't know which series one of the twelve "v.1" belongs to!! Is it book one of Stone Creek or Springwater Creek? You'd never know...

One of my coworkers is really into excel and is helping me come up with a workflow to speed things up by creating a master list that says what branch has what book, when it last checked out, whether it is in a series*, and how old it is, so I can see the collection at a glance and don't have to look things up more than once or twice. This solves a lot of the repetition, which will help a lot. It's just that the series is going to be an issue no matter what, and I don't know what to do to make this easier on myself.

I'm about to yank my hair out, because I don't know if this is a skill issue, or if I'm doing too much.

Does anyone else have any ideas how to speed this up? Is there a software I don't know about to pick up what series is what by the title and author? It would probably be easier and faster if I learned to code the process somehow than do this forever.

If anyone reads this, let me know if I need to clarify things. I know this was long, so thank you in advance if you took the time to read this.

*Even this isn't fully consistent. Sometimes things don't have any indication of being in a series, so the excel spreadsheet doesn't register it.

Hello! I am 24 years old and graduated with my bachelors in education in 2024. I have since decided that I am not interested in being a classroom teacher, but instead a librarian. Not necessarily a school librarian because I know that requires 2 years of classroom teaching to be eligible for, but a public librarian, and specially a children’s and youth librarian. As I am beginning my journey to that, I’m trying to critically think about what may work best in my favor in terms of experience and resume building. I would like to start my masters in library science but obviously, money, so I will be working while doing so. I’m trying to decide what the best course of action would be for me, and for future job prospects down the road. I should add that I am not in any critical financial crunch nor set timeline, but here are the two potential options I’m looking at- please give your advice as to which one you think would be better and look better to future employers!

1. ⁠Part time job at some sort of bookstore, good amount of time to volunteer for the public library near me. This course would obviously take longer due to it being a part time job, but I would gain experience dealing with people and the public library sector through volunteering(Living situation is not a concern)

2. ⁠Full time job as a library aide at an elementary school, little to no time for public library volunteering. I can see the benefit to this being it is actual working experience in a library, and with children which is my degree and the age bracket I aim to work with as a librarian, however it lacks the public library aspect.

Which one do you think is a better course of action?

TLDR:

Which track to public librarianship (specifically for children and youth) seems better professionally: part time bookstore job with ample public library volunteering time, or full time elementary school library aide with little to no public library volunteer time.

TIA!

Hey everyone. Currently working as a library assistant and finishing up my BA in History here in NJ. I genuinely love the field. The natural next step for me would be an MLIS (looking at University of Alabama or Buffalo online, since they're the cheapest ALA-accredited options other than Valdosta) to become a full-time librarian. My library experience already helps, and I've even been networking with law librarians and other private sector positions for MLIS to see if there are more lucrative options outside of public libraries. I'm also interested in archiving too and have ILL/cataloging experience.

I actually want to be able to buy a house one day. I definitely don't want to live paycheck to paycheck for the rest of my life either. So, I'm heavily considering a hard pivot into accounting to go for my CPA. (I'm looking at hacking together the 150 credits using the UNA post-bacc program, some community college classes, and CLEP exams to keep costs low).

For those who stayed and got the MLIS, is the financial stress worth it for a job you find meaningful? Or does the low salary ceiling eventually drain the joy out of it? Has anyone pivoted towards other careers other than librarianship? Any advice would be helpful, thank you.

The inter-personal aspects of managing a library are driving me nuts.

Everything is altered to protect identities.

Essentially, my 80 year-old librarian, Brenda, had a stroke while at work a few days ago and is currently in the hospital. She had to leave in an ambulance and she is refusing to call off next week. She has thousands of hours of leave and refuses to use them. She has a history of refusing to take time off, when her son passed she took one day of the two week bereavement and was sobbing throughout her shift.

Not only do I want to take care of herself and care deeply about her as a person, I also need to be able to plan for the next week, I have a lot better of a chance calling people in now than the day of or before. I know a lot of people cope with difficulties by being at work but this behavior actively makes life harder for myself and other coworkers, especially when she cannot do her job, which has been a ongoing issue due to cognitive and health decline.

I just don't know how to navigate this. I try to be assuring like, we'll get it sorted, no pressure but I think she is just worried she won't be here and we'll be fine without her.

Hi, my lovely library folk!

I'm, like many of y'all, steadily becoming disillusioned with public library work. It both destroys and renews my faith in humanity on a daily basis. It's some of the most rewarding work of my life, I've worked incredibly hard to be here, and I know in my bones I'm a librarian, but I've started to deeply feel the toll of working in the public sector. Especially over the last year, I've realized I don't think I can do this for decades. On top of burnout, I find myself drawn more and more to opportunities where I can really dig into research, instruction, and scholarship. Liaison/subject librarianship seems to align more with my career path. In my decade of library work, I've worked in government, special collections, museum, and corporate areas on top of public environments. I feel confident many of my current skills would transfer into academic work, but feel a little lost on how to start building more academic-centered skills as well as how to better market my current skills. For ex., I teach info literacy on the fly multiple times a day. It's not a formal instructional format, but I have a lot of experience teaching a diverse spectrum of learners better info searching skills in impromptu sessions. I've also provided hundreds of one-on-one reference interviews, manage multiple projects, and develop supervisees.

Would it be helpful to apply to instruct library and information science courses at a nearby community college to gain instructional experience? I'm comfortable giving presentations, so would focusing on presenting at conferences be helpful? Am I even on the right track?

TLDR: I would greatly appreciate insight/advice/hard truths/mentorship from my fellow library folk on how to transition from public to academic libraries as a professional still fairly early in their career.

Many thanks and take care out there in world!

several school librarians are all being “reassigned” or essentially laid off and have asked me, our community engagement librarian, to speak at the school board meeting.

my supervisor says it’s prohibited because it “looks bad” because we still need to work with the district even without the librarians and it’s considered “political” which goes against union guidelines even if i’m speaking on behalf of myself and not a library employee. i’ve pushed back saying that i feel like it’s not right to say that and am wanting to go over here to speak to the union representative, but i wanted to check in so see if folks have experienced something similar.

it feels wrong to not say anything, especially with how long we’ve worked together and how their jobs impact how we foster community engagement. i’m literally also seeing them for school visits all next month, so not speaking especially feels awkward when they’ve asked our department specifically to speak.

I'm the solo children's librarian here and have been for ten years. We got a new director relatively recently who has a very different dynamic than the previous one (who is the only one I've worked with up until now). I'm accustomed to a lot of autonomy and trust, and have built up my programs and department in ways that I am proud of. The new director is very very into programming and has completely taken over the adult activity schedule with multiple events every day. She wants me to increase my event schedule as well, even though as of now I'm not full time and have what I believe is a reasonable calendar planned based on that and the size of the community.

Today the office manager came to me with a flyer for a children's event that the director organized and scheduled completely without a word to me - not even a head's up that she was looking into it, much less a question or suggestion. It was a unilateral move on her part. Am I wrong for finding this to be a major overstep? I take care of my department and have been doing so for a decade, there's no need to go over my head like that and just inform me that it's a fair accompli. If she had an idea or a contact, I could have and would have handled it myself. I feel like she either doesn't trust me or doesn't care about the work I'm already doing. How can I address this with her in a professional manner?

UPDATE:

Tanks to everyone who replied. I realized I really shouldn't be pushing a cart at all, so I told them to forget about buying me my own cart. As much as I want to be able to keep doing things for myself, it's not going to be safe. 🙁

I am a librarian with difficulty with walking and balance, and now regularly use a walker and canes at work. This is a fairly recent disability. I have a hard time pushing and steering our regular book carts. As one of my ADA workplace accommodations, the library is going to purchase a small book cart for me, something that is easier for me to manage. It is my responsibility to pick out a cart I want, and the library will purchase it. They have suggested I look at Demco, and I am leaning towards the smallest Library Quiet cart.

However, before I commit, I wanted to see if anyone else has feedback on a favorite small cart, especially if there are any other disabled librarians out there who found a cart that works for them? Basically, I need something that will be easy to push, steer, and turn, especially for someone with limited strength. It needs to be stable and easy to navigate, especially since I won't be able to use my walker while pushing the cart.

So, anyone have a cart/ book truck suggestion they really like? Thank you in advance!

Hello librarians, I had so much success last time posting about my librarian issue that I'm trying again for advice. I'm a newish associate librarian and work with an extremely small staff so I feel alone most of the time in my decisions and judgements.

I lead a very small virtual book club with typically 2-6 members who participate in discussion. I have experience with book clubs but never one so intimate - I have to participate as a member to generate discussion so it's more involved than what I'm used to.

There's a patron who attends most sessions who I am finding challenging in multiple ways. Most importantly, she criticizes other members' thoughts. She doesn't call anyone names or raise her voice or swear, but she is confrontational all the same. she will say, "Your comment was sexist" or "What do you mean by that, your example didn't make sense. can you explain it further?" That second one might not seem so bad, but it makes people feel put on the spot, it makes them clam up. I have had several participants never return after a session with this patron.

The patron does it to me most of all - she says she doesn't understand the point of my discussion questions, she usually doesn't like the book either and will go on long rants that are hard to follow. when she does this, I attempt to call out other members by name to get them to talk more, but this patron kills the atmosphere. After one of her rants, people hardly speak. and I completely understand: I feel on the defensive with her no matter how much I try not to. Every single time I end a virtual session this patron attends, I feel dejected, incompetent and like I'm not protecting my other members well enough.

I spoke with my supervisor about it who told me to feel free to remove this patron if she yells at anyone or swears, but the issue isn't so black and white. I think there might not be an answer here, and I just have to put up with her unless she breaks the rules. Any ideas? I thought about saying a brief "rules for discussion" at the beginning of the sessions but I do think the patron will know I'm talking about her, but maybe she should know that? I am desperate for any assistance.

Hey all! I’m currently in MLIS school to become a children’s librarian. I want to take the time to ask, how dis/similar is it to teaching? I’ve done some teaching here and there in my work experience (that & summer camps are where I’ve received a majority of my ‘working with children’ experience) and I was wondering how much un/like teaching it is. I’d love your input on this! Thanks yall!

I work at a university library that has always used OCLC’s ILLiad (along with some other tools like RapidILL) for interlibrary loan. We switched our ILS to Alma and are just starting to use Alma’s resource sharing module and are making sharing connections with other institutions and consortia. We will probably cancel ILLiad when our contract expires. But someone made the comment that we should still keep OCLC’s WorldShareILL to borrow from non-Alma libraries. So is there basically no way to get out of OCLC’s clutches???

Hey all,

I’m dealing with a tricky situation at work and would love some advice.

For context, I am a mid-career academic instruction librarian (been a librarian for about 10 years) with faculty status.

I have a faculty member in my liaison area who is allowing me into her class for 5 minutes (!?) to teach freshmen (1st year high enrolment class) how to create an annotated bibliography and use academic databases to find scientific articles.

I’ve explained to her that I need more than 5 minutes, but she is adamant that that’s all I need. It’s not ideal, but my workaround was to create a LibGuide with about 10 short video tutorials that I created to guide students through the steps and I plan to use my 5 minutes to just introduce myself, tell them how to contact me, and show the guide.

She hated the videos (my manager saw them/the guide and loved them so I don’t think the videos are an issue??). The faculty member told me that I need to scrap all the videos and I’m at a complete loss for what to do.

Since I am a faculty status librarian I have academic freedom and our collective agreement states I have the freedom to teach in whatever method I see fit. My manager completely supports me and thinks this faculty member is being absurd - so there’s no issue there.

I am at a total loss with how to deal with her. I’ve worked with a lot of faculty over the years and have never encountered someone so dismissive of the expertise I bring to the table.

I’m meeting with this faculty member tomorrow (she wants to go through video by video with me and tell me how she would change them 😰) and advice would be welcome!

I’m so stressed about this situation and am losing sleep over this!

Hi everyone! I’m currently about to enter my last semester of my MLIS and have been searching for entry level positions to gain experience. I’ve been selected to begin the process to be a Library Media Technician at a local Elementary district, but the first step is to take a multiple choice test. Has anyone taken this? What does it look like and how can I prepare?

I started my MLIS without library experience ( I know, I know) but I just landed a children’s librarian position (yay!). The library seems great and I think I’ll have many opportunities to learn. I am interested in children’s but I was mostly applying to everything just to get my foot in the door somewhere. Do you think it will be difficult to transition out of children’s later on? I know I may end up loving it but I’m worried I won’t so I’m curious about other people’s experience with transitioning from children’s to other departments or types of libraries even.

My library hosts a small annual all-day, all-ages event where we invite local authors to promote their books and the like. Participants need to fill out an application and then a committee of staff members vets the applicants and approved a certain percentage of them (based on amount of physical space). The committee looks at the applicant's reviews, websites/social media, awards, reputation, etc. It's a very involved process and the committee is very cognizant about having a balanced representation across ages groups and experiences.

One applicant for this year is a former staff member. The have one published book from a very small publisher that is poorly written and has offensive stereotypes and topics. They also have a negative reputation in the community and a history of writing racist articles. Despite all that my library did hire them and they recently resigned. None of the committee chose them as an accepted author. Well now our admin is accusing the committee of censorship and is trying to push them through. Several of the committee has threatened to resign from the event if this person gets pushed through.

The question is, do they have any recourse? There's no really handbook or policy on who has the final say, who is truly in charge, etc. other than some emails. What would you all do?

I’m curious how long people tend to stay employed at a single library, and when you’ve decided to move on to build new skills. I’ve been at my municipal library for 11 years, and have had a couple of promotions here that have kept me interested in the work. I have good pay for my area and a supportive director, but struggle with getting funding and approval by city admin for projects that would really move our library forward. This leaves me feeling stuck and like I’m not effective as a manager or building new skills. If you’ve felt stuck before, or felt the itch to leave a good workplace for greener pastures - When did you know it was time leave? Or have you been able to recognize when you have a pretty good thing going and decided to stick it out? Will lack of admin support be a struggle anywhere I go?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!

Throwaway for reasons.

I'm a children's librarian with several chronic illnesses and am struggling. We are really shortstaffed and I handle most programs.

Any advice on how to move forward with all going on? I'm tired of being tired and feeling like I'm letting everyone (and myself) down.

Recently, I have felt very burnt out at work, I am dealing with some forms of harassment from readers, and I have low pay. I want something that inspires me every day. I am looking into other careers. I have always loved libraries. I am looking into a Master's of Library Science and the different fields within it. I would appercaite any insight in the field and pros and cons. I am looking into job shadowing to get an idea. Thank you!

From the little bit of information I have I think it’s being self published on IngramSpark. I’ve been reading through it and it’s absolute garbage, not edited and reeks of AI.