Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 5: Epilogue

Chapter 5: Epilogue

I guess what I would say is despite the trend of negativity that goes through all those chapters, I do enjoy the work, but particularly working with the students. One of the coolest parts of my job that I've had for at least XX years now is some semesters I get to work with a variety of students, incoming first-generation college students, low-income students.

I work with these students to help introduce them to college life and college -level research, and by far away it's the highlight of my year. 

I absolutely love it.

So, there are parts of this job that I really enjoy.

I would argue that I saw the role that instructional tech was going to take in this job, and so was doing that [academic professional development] when I did- when the idea of blended librarianship was still kind of new. 

I think that was a wise choice at the time, but honestly an argument I've made for years is that the way people tend to describe that position is most librarian jobs at this point.

When Stephen Bell, came up with the term blended librarianship, it was kind of like, oh, you have to be willing to teach, or teach online. (Bell and Shank 2004) A lot of people do that now. 

There's hardly anything unique about that now.

As far as knowing some of the technologies from the educational tech side, or knowing some of the techniques for teaching from that side of the deeper educational psych side, I still think there's some advantages there that were unique to my education and training in that regard. 

But I think those walls have broken down so much.

I don't even know.