Before I start..
This is my first week of doing week notes! I am trying to keep them short and sweet to begin with, to try and make them a habit rather than something daunting. I have tried to make blogging a part of my work before, and I really liked contributing to the (now defunct…) DigiDex blog. It’s really hard to find time for this kind of work in the busy-ness of term being in full swing, but I am hoping that if I start it now when things are relatively quiet I will have a better chance of doing it then as well. I’m going to keep to a loose structure of looking at a list of reflection questions I have collected from various blogs about Weeknotes and responding to the ones that I think of something straight away.
What was hard?
We’re doing a big project type thing at the moment relating to our LibGuides. Basically every academic library has some version of a libguide as far as I have seen at least, I think of them as kind of like finding aids for databases and other complex online resources. We have something like 450+ databases in our subscribed resources and a lot of them have really unhelpful and uninspiring names like EBSCO that give you little to no indication as to why you would like to search in them. Some people (even people in my own library!) denigrate the libguide as ‘just being a list’ – but I can personally say that all the guides my team is in charge of editing are way more than that. We provide context and order as to why you would use X over Y, and I consider it to be some of the last collection work I get to meaningfully do in my role. So I take it incredibly seriously and I try to keep guides up to date in content, order, and description. What is hard about the current overhaul of our LibGuides? An edict has come from our library exec team that there can only be 1 libguide page per school. Nevermind that the content is not currently organised that way, or that they aren’t intended to only be used by students and researchers from the school the content might (by name) seem like it is most related to. So we have to take 10 guides and their I think 55 or so subpages (god even more for things like languages and history..) and fit that content into 6 guides with a maximum of 35 subpages. It’s a nightmare. Every time I have tried to work on this project this week it has made me equal parts angry and sad. I am dragging my feat on it and finding it extremely difficult to complete because I know I am letting our clients down with this overhaul. But we have to do what we’re told, no matter how little our workloads and the client experience has been taken into consideration for this decision. Stay tuned for the new look to go live at the end of the month I guess!
What did you experiment with?
I would quite like to publish these Weeknotes somewhere, but I got pretty burnt out trying to maintain my Wordpress site when I had my first attempt at a work blog. I looked at Hugh Rundle’s post You should get a blog for some pointers, as well as asking a friend with some coding and interesting webdev experience what he thought about static site generators and other markdown based ways of coding websites. My top three suggestions from those two sources that I have started experimenting with are NeoCities, BearBlog, and Pika. I haven’t made a choice yet but it’s fun to get back into this kind of creative part of the internet, I used to have a geocities site and did my first ever coding on Neopets back in the day. I really miss the creativity and innovation of web 1.0 and 2.0, and am trying to use the internet in a more thoughtful way than the big tech companies want me to.
Other things I’m thinking about...
A job went up that is in my local council, but it is full-time and a pretty substantial pay cut. In the gilded cage of the university I stay.
Things I read...
I am going to try and make reading one article a day another goal during this quiet week or two before my during-term work picks up. Today I will highlight: Gerts, E., & Wakeling, S. (2025). How to Train Your Librarian: The Inclusion of Pedagogy and Learning Theory in LIS Degrees. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 1-16.
I work with Emma, although not always as directly as I would like as she is on the Canberra team, so it is a joy to get to read something she has written as well as something that I related to very deeply. Two key things came to mind after reading that I jotted down immediately upon finishing yesterday afternoon and wanted to include here.
One - that in our library a temporary role was created for ‘Education Services Librarian’ intended to come into our unit to overhaul our pedagogical approaches to library presentations /workshops and our online library induction learning unit. Two people were hired under this new position, as a 12-month contract. They were both great to work with, and had some great ideas and definitely made an impact on our approach to workshops/presentations. But they were both teachers, not librarians, and neither had a core understanding of library theory. And why would you expect people who had trained as teachers to have that? The problem comes when we had to spend so much time explaining to them why the library works the way it does, and how the kind of lesson planning they were used to is actually fairly impossible to apply to library content where we tend to be invited to one class during term for a subject, sometimes for as little as 15 minutes. I strongly believe that these roles were not well thought out and that the money used to create them would have been better spent on ensuring that the roles these Education Services Librarians were supporting were properly filled. Because we are still facing a staffing deficit in my unit even though both of the people who were hired moved on before their contracts were up. I think you could recruit people with teacher-librarian training into my regular old Academic Services Librarian role and create a project group for them to help the rest of us with the same pedagogical discussions that the new role inspired, and then we would have librarians who stayed on and could do the vital client-facing work that I do.
Two – Role stress is such a real and huge issue, I’m really grateful for the specific teaching/instruction aspect of that phenomenon that this research highlights, but I think I would like to read more deeply into role stress and specifically how it relates to academic librarians. And not just because I am fairly certain that it is a central concept in another colleague’s research (a recently completed PhD no less).