Several months ago I realized I’d lost my librarian mojo and since that time I’ve been struggling to reclaim it. Being the person that I am, I have been hyper-analyzing my mojo loss. I have been disenchanted at work, feeling weary and dissatisfied, and yet, it feels like it’s all out of my control.
It seems alot of people are talking about librarianship and burnout, here , here and Karen Schneider at Freerange Librarian even offered a few tips to avoid it here.
I'll be honest -- I'm not burned out (and this post is really just my perception of libraries as a WHOLE, not any one specific library -- I do realize there are some great libraries and some that are not).. I am excited about FRBR (finally something that makes sense albeit with silly terminology) and RDA (at least as a transition point towards the semantic web), content management systems, institutional repositories, and discovery tools that can harvest all resources (and markup resources with appropriate semantic description and structure), rss and social media and how we can (in theory) can change the perception of what cataloging is. Those of us who have worked in technical services areas have unprecedented change ahead which *should* mean opportunity.
..but then reality hits... budget woes, an aging population of librarians who are not retiring, library workers who are checked out and doing the bare minimum, positions unfilled (the work is spread around), job descriptions and workflows that have not been evaluated in 5 - 10 - 15 or probably for some libraries, 20 years.
In spite of the fact that I love librarianship as a profession, at times, I wonder if I am cut out to wear the ill fitting coat of librarian. Some days, it feels like my grandmother's church coat - moth eaten, staid, conservative, slightly out of style but serviceable -- and other times, a too tight hipster leather jacket with lots of pockets to show off all of the many shiny cool gadgets...
...so when I read about burnout, I realized that's not it exactly for me... mostly, along the way, I lost some of my librarian religion. I've always had a career goal (and as budgets crashed, I've watched some of them wither, while others were butchered to the ground). I am very adaptive. If one door closes, I am usually reaching for the next already... but I now find myself in front of a brick wall. I really don't know where I go from here. I know my interests, I know what I enjoy doing (not only doing technical work, but also teaching, training, and writing, as I am doing at the moment.) I can learn just about anything (ok, brain surgery might take some time, thankfully, I am not looking to do that - lol). I've been looking at PhD programs, especially in Digital Humanities, Ed Technology, etc. LIS programs have been mostly eliminated due to the significant residency time.
The big question which has been in mind for the last year now, is do I stay [in librarianship] or do I go? Is there anything in the closet of librarianship that actually fits me?
1 comment:
AMEN! I've been calling it burnout for a long while now but it's really EXACTLY as you have named it, Robin. My friends and colleagues have been encouraging me to apply for a sabbatical, but no matter no matter how hard I try to come up with an idea, all I see is that brick wall--for exactly the reasons you describe. Thanks for putting the words to what I have been feeling. The loss of my library religion. Sigh.
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