Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 3: Growing Up and Stepping Out

Chapter 3: Growing Up and Stepping Out

I felt I had finally accomplished maybe a few things that I... that I could be proud of or felt like, “yeah, I finally kind of know what I'm doing.”

I have these roles - maintaining these tutorials, and I gave up on trying to turn the other librarians into capable technology people.

They're going to do what they're going to do, and if they want my help, I think we're good with that. 

During this period is where I started doing less technology work and more work with the educational institution community outside of where I was. I [became] involved in our [institution-wide improvement plan]. 

At some point, they sent out a call for ideas, “what should our next [institution-wide improvement plan] be about?” Of course [library-focused information topic] should be included. I was the only person in the library that seemed to want to make that argument, so I put forward that proposal. 

It got picked up through that development process and eventually added in with a few other things. It's a very ambitious [institution-wide improvement plan], and they told us that, but I ended up being on that leadership team for the [institution-wide improvement plan] through its duration, so the couple years I think when we were planning it and then the five years that we implemented this [institution-wide improvement plan], I was sort of there as the [library-focused information topic] representative or the library representative, 

That was a really big part of what I was doing at that time, and I felt it was a really important job to sort of be that library voice in that [institution-wide improvement plan]. It led to a lot of my scholarship during that time too, because we were doing a lot of assessment, because as part of the [institution-wide improvement plan], we were doing institution-wide assessment of [library-focused information topic] for those five years. 

We were getting student work collected from all different subject areas, and not just, because we were assessing [ library focused skills].

We were having faculty from across the institution sit down to assess these skills and they thought it was a really effective way to get faculty outside of the library to be thinking about [library focused] skills and the importance of those. 

So, we did a lot, we had a lot of assessment data to collect and talk about and did presentations over that four or five years and a publication. I was really enjoying that work.

It was not technology related. 

I have been given the freedom in a lot of ways over the years to do what I wanted, which is something I do enjoy.

Being able to follow the things that come up that I do like working on, and no one ever said, “I don't see why this is, you're the XXXXX / technology librarian, this isn't really your job.”

No one ever said that. 

So that's good because I really enjoyed that work and I was getting out- mostly working with people outside of the library, faculty in other areas and I felt I enjoyed that and I also thought it was a really important thing for us to be doing to be getting out of our walls. 

At the same time, I was also getting really involved in faculty governance.

I don't know, at some point I got elected to [faculty governance position] but I kept getting put on all these teams where I'd volunteer-  oh that sounds interesting, I'll join that committee and do that thing. It was giving me a great view of what the institution was doing- what our mission was, what the priorities were outside the library.

I thought it was good to know those things.

I have a chapter over here. 

I couldn't really figure out how to break it up, but this was definitely a period where I was expanding my horizons and getting out of what maybe I had been hired to do or expected to do.
I was just following the things that interested me. 

I guess that's it for that part.