Academic librarians encounter many challenges as we balance competing responsibilities within limited time. We share many of the obligations of teaching faculty as we contribute to the missions of our institutions, but with the unique day-to-day public service orientation of library work.
This panel will highlight our work as four librarians on the tenure track. We came to our library from diverse backgrounds and previous jobs, and our research interests are similarly diffuse. Individually, we felt isolated by our specific research agendas and externally defined expectations. Carving out space for our own long-term, professionally significant work was difficult when patrons and colleagues were literally always at our doors.
To re-prioritize our time and better balance our contributions, we created a peer support group that draws from both the writing groups common to teaching faculty and the professional learning communities (PLCs) that exist in K-12 education. As a writing group, we set aside time to work on our research and hold one another accountable for reaching our scholarly goals and timelines. As a PLC, we are able to pool our expert knowledge around research, teaching, and other areas of librarianship. We informally offer career and research advice; we teach each other new skills; we challenge and motivate each other; and provide an external sense of accountability for one another. We are also able to provide perspective and reality checks as we each seek to strike a sustainable work/life balance.
We believe that this model is adaptable to other academic libraries, whether or not librarians have faculty status and tenure-track positions. It could also work across institutions through our subdivision’s support. In addition to explaining our model, we will review published discussions of similar peer support networks and discuss ways in which attendees could modify our ideas for their own circumstances.
