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praying mantis

The wheel is spinning, but the hamster is dead. – Swedish expression

The incongruity between the academic year and the calendar year has never felt so out of joint as it does right now. Already, the goals I set in June 2024 (which is when I set work goals for the academic year) feel a world removed. I’m ready to move on to other projects. While there is much to enjoy about working in academia, the temporal misalignment with the rest of the country’s annual work cycle is among the small annoyances.

Still, academics on the traditional semester schedule often have the weeks between late December and early January completely off so I’ve used that time to reflect and realign my work and play to my core values. (Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021)

This year, I’m hoping to finish the “reading and watching all of Shakespeare” project I stated in 2024. I made it through more than half the works before burning out in September. Now that I’ve had some time to read off the bard, I’m ready to tackle the second half of his oeuvre. Additionally, I hope to continue my occasional habit of posting “Recently in Academic Libraries” news roundups. I immensely enjoyed that process, so my goal this year is to find a way to work it into my schedule.

My theme for 2025 is “balance.” Prioritizing sleep and my physical health this past year was a huge boon to my mental health. I plan to continue that and additionally add in a new factor: music. My partner and I bought a piano last fall. I am never happier than when I’m playing music. It’s been two decades since I played (and I was never very good), but I intend to pick it back up. And possibly throw in a few additional instruments as well. 

My ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of time and attention I give to [library] work. It doesn’t bring me joy in the same way that it used to, so rather than getting mired in that feeling, I want to draw my attention toward those activities that make me happy.

What I’m reading 

🪧⛺️🚫 The Race to Pacify Protesters [paywalled] by Katherine Mangan. Universities are losing whatever moral high ground they once occupied. 

🇺🇸🕊️❤️ Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [gift article] Peter Baker and Roy Reed. May we all be so good with the time we have that folks wish there were more people like us around when we pass. 

🛶🕵️‍♀️📝 Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt by Jacqueline Kehoe. It’s great that folks are diving into the history of the lands where they sit. Even greater that they are working alongside indigenous communities to remap our understanding of urbanized areas. 

Links to the past 

  • 1 year ago: I was being very domestic this day.
  • 5 years ago: My son’s world is infinitely more interesting than my own.
  • 10 years ago: I have never not been obsessed with productivity systems. It’s just who I am.

Overheard online 

You may not believe in Count Orlok, but Count Orlok believes in you. – @chronodm on Mastodon

banner photo: found this lovely lady in the garden this past weekend

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“Staff expect us to create posters and social media posts for every program but they’re also creating programs that the community didn’t ask for. So, when no one registers, marketing gets blamed. You have to have some tough skin to work in library marketing because everyone thinks they’re a better marketer and everyone is a critic.” (source: The State of Library Marketing in 2025: Survey Reveals New Obstacles and Frustrations)

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badge from lmcc24 with my name

It’s difficult to summarize all that I’ve taken away from LMCC 2024. But I’ll try. 😁 This annual gathering of library marketing professionals reaffirms the value of all the time, effort, and skill I put in to the work I do as an outreach librarian. I’ll write more about this later after I’ve had time to process it all, but here are three key themes that emerged:

1. “If you want to capture students’ attention, it has to be worth paying attention to” (or, effective library marketing is high-quality). No one will know about your services, collections, or programs if you don’t first capture their attention, so make content that is first and foremost entertaining and engaging. If it doesn’t stop them from scrolling, it’s not going to get any eyeballs.

2. “If you’re talking to everyone you’re talking to no one” (or, effective library marketing is strategic). Your audience is not a monolith and they don’t want to be treated as one. Plan your outreach with intention if you want to have any chance of connecting what you offer to what students and faculty want.

3. “Let the professionals cook.” (or, effective library marketing is appropriately skilled and staffed). Libraries are finally starting to recognize that good marketing requires hiring folks who bring the requisite skills and giving them the space to make things happen. I can’t tell you the number of people I met this year who said they were the first professional marketer their library had ever hired. High-quality and strategic marketing takes time and experience.

Other takeaways include reaffirmation of my intention to lean more into video, especially high-quality video content; and the need to pull more analytics that might correlate my outreach work with library usage patterns.

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Back in January, I joined the board of the Library Marketing and Communications Group, the team that runs the Library Marketing and Communications Conference. This annual gathering of library folks involved in marketing, communications, public relations, social media, and outreach in academic, public, and special libraries, is my favorite professional event of the year.

The first LMCC was held in 2015 in Dallas, TX, with nearly 200 attendees. I first attended LMCC the following year in 2016. In the decade since, the conference has more than doubled in size; and this year will be my fifth time attending.

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy this conference. What makes it so rewarding is the opportunity to be with folks who understand my day-to-day:

“Regardless of whether we work in academic libraries, public libraries, as librarians or as professional staff, we all speak the same language. We understand that not everything can go on the website. We know that fliers are a net waste of everyone’s time. We know that creating social media content is a specialized skill that few people actually do well. We realize that more promotion does not equal more awareness. We understand the power of storytelling. We value having a consistent brand. And yes, we all spend too much times on our phones, but secretly (or not) we enjoy it.” 

If you’re going to LMCC 2024 this week, stop me and say hello! I look forward to seeing you there. Here is what I’m planning to attend:

Tuesday, Nov. 12

  • 9:00a: Board Planning Retreat
  • 1:00p: Pre-Conference: Maximize Your Library Impact With Strategic Collection Promotion by Angela Hursh and Caleigh Haworth

Wednesday, Nov. 13

  • 9:00a: Very Demure, Very Mindful, and Very Asian Futures in Library Marketing by Michelle Li
  • 10:00a: Bite-Size Market Research Tools: Micro Surveys and Usability Studies by Mark Aaron Polger
  • 11:15a: Marketing Library Services to Transgender Patrons by Zephyr Rankin
  • 1:30p: Social Media Strategy Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast by Tanner Lewey
  • 3:00p: Beg, Borrow, Steal: Finding and Implementing Ideas for Library Outreach by Meghan Kowalski
  • 4:30p: 10th Anniversary Opening Night Reception

Thursday, Nov. 14

  • 9:00a: Been There, Done That, Do It Again – A Conversation with Experienced Library Marketers with Jennifer Burke, Meghan McCorkell, and Nicole Fowles
  • 10:00am: IDEA in Action: Your Voices Best Practices – Empowering Students, Building Bridges by Kara Price, Laura Dowell, and Michele Villagran
  • 11:15am: Building a Video Powerhouse: Project Management, Quality Standards, and Staff Development for Effective Library Marketing by Rachel Yzaguirre
  • Lunch
  • 1:30pm: Embracing Short Form Video by Keith Keslerand Krystal Ruiz
  • 4:15pm: LMCC Open House

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men and women painting on a landscape model

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how academic libraries structure their support for external communications. By “external” I mostly mean on campus, though sometimes this can include communications beyond campus, especially in the case of large state universities, R1 schools, and those with fundraising needs.

This isn’t a topic I have explored in the published literature yet, but I have been poking around library websites to see what info I can glean from staff directories and organizational charts. The various configurations for managing comms I have found generally fall into four types (I call them “tiers” below), though there appears to be little consistency beyond these broad categories. If a research study on this does not already exist, I would find it worthwhile to investigate it further.

In my experience, there are three factors that make academic library communications effective: consistency, strategy, and quality. That is:

  1. creating consistent messaging, branding, and tone; 
  2. developing strategic objectives and determining metrics of success; and 
  3. maintaining a high level of quality content production and execution. 

Of the four models for communications outlined below, only libraries in tiers 1 and 2 can guarantee high levels of all three factors. This is not to say that libraries within tiers 3-4 cannot be successful, but only that it is far more difficult.

Tier 1: The comms team

I suspect this mostly exists in R1 institutions or large campuses with multiple libraries. This is when the library employs an entire team of professionals to manage its communications needs. This might include a full time social media manager, graphic designer, writer, project manager, event manager, development officer, and/or videographer. Assuming that everyone on the team has the requisite skills and experience, this is the most desirable option and the one that securely enables consist, strategic, and high quality communications.

Tier 2: The comms director

Most likely to be found at mid-size university libraries. This is when you have a single full-time person entirely dedicated to communications. Their work might also involve planning and hosting events, and may vary considerably depending on (1) whether they are a librarian or staff and (2) whether they are housed within the reference department or administration. Assuming this person has the requisite skills and experience, this is also a desirable option, though without the balance and support of a team, there is the risk that either consistency, strategy, or quality could fail over time (also, burnout is a significant threat). Nonetheless, it’s a viable option.

Tier 3: The comms hat

Also may be found at mid-size universities, but more likely to be found in smaller colleges. This is when you have a full-time staffer who has been given the extra hat of communications. This might be a solo reference and instruction librarian, a collections librarian, or even a department head but it’s not their primary role. It’s almost a certainty that one of the three success factors will, out of necessity, fall by the wayside. 

Tier 4: The comms committee

This is the least desirable arrangement: communications by committee. While I don’t doubt there are some effective uses of this model out there, I would bet most are ineffective relative to the time and effort involved. This is when no one is in charge of outreach and it just happens depending on the variable bandwidth of the members of the group. Even with the best of intentions and structure, you cannot guarantee a consistent tone or level of quality. 

Finding the right fit

Academic library outreach and communications is a different beast than what one may experience in other types of libraries. For one, an academic library’s primary audience is a limited and captive one: students and faculty. Moreover, the distance, both physical and conceptual, that messaging needs to travel is relatively short. It’s in the secondary and tertiary audiences that variety comes into play: are donors a key demo? Campus senior leadership? State officials? How important is reaching the off-campus community? 

I don’t know what might be a best practice when it comes to structuring an outreach department, but I would venture that most libraries evolve from Tier 4 to Tier 1 over time, though most will never reach beyond Tier 2 due to staffing constraints. What I do know is that working in team environment has a number of benefits, including exponentially increased bandwidth, a mutually reinforced creativity engine, and a burnout buffer. However, it is essential that all members bring the requisite level of skill and experience to the table to make this work efficiently. 

Coda: The line between outreach and communications is a fuzzy one. The terms are frequently used interchangeably (guilty) but the latter has a much deeper and longer history of best practices, theory, and scholarship, mostly outside LIS. I think many libraries slap the term “outreach” on job descriptions and titles without giving much thought to the practical skills and knowledge necessary to make that work. That might be a topic for another time.

(header photo: library_of_congress on flickr)

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I jokingly referred to “Rule #2 of the outreach team” in a meeting last week to which someone aptly responded, “So what are the other rules?” That’s a good question. We like to stay flexible on my team (it’s necessary when most of your work is collaboration-based), so there are rarely hard and fast rules. But here are a few maxims we live by.

  • Rule 1: Make something people want
  • Rule 2: Save everything to Box
  • Rule 3: Invite more people to the table
  • Rule 4: Dirty hands make it right
  • Rule 5: “Yes and”

Of course, rules are meant to be broken so here are the notable exceptions:

  • Rule 5 (with caveat): Yes and… but we can’t say yes to everything.
  • Rule 4 (with caveat): Dirty hands make it right… but don’t be a hero.
  • Rule 3 (with caveat): Invite more people to the table… but always be clear who will make the call.
  • Rule 2 (with caveat): Save everything to Box… [actually, there’s no exception to this rule]
  • Rule 1 (with caveat): Make something people want… but sometimes you have to make them want to want it first.

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fireworks on the horizon of Marina del Rey

O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Henry V, William Shakespeare (1599)

This year, I pledged myself to reading and watching the entire works of Shakespeare. Since January, I’ve been working through his opus in roughly chronological order of production as well as watching recorded performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I am just about halfway through, having read the following:

  • 1-3 Henry VI
  • Richard III
  • Venus and Adonis
  • The Comedy of Errors
  • Edward III
  • Sonnets
  • Rape of Lucrece
  • Titus Andronicus
  • Taming of the Shrew
  • Two Gentlemen of Verona
  • Love’s Labour’s Lost
  • King John
  • Richard II
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  • The Merchant of Venice
  • 1-2 Henry IV
  • Merry Wives of Windsor
  • Much Ado About Nothing
  • Henry V

A few thoughts on the process thus far. Not surprisingly, the more that I read, the easier it gets. I’m picking up the vocabulary (sack, to jar), the cadence and form, and most importantly of all, the style. The more I read, the deeper my enjoyment. As an English major in college, Shakespeare was required (I’m currently reading from the Riverside 2nd edition which I bought as an undergrad) but I did not enjoy it at the time. Perhaps because I didn’t understand it or didn’t grasp the genius of it. Or because I was rushing a fraternity and hadn’t slept in three days. Either way, its beauty was wasted on my youth, but I’m trying to make up for that now. 

What I’m reading 

🤖✍️👨‍🎓 AI and the Death of Student Writing by Lisa Lieberman. “When I used to read good writing like that, my heart would leap with joy. The students are getting it! I’d think. Now my heart sinks because I know those sentences/paragraphs/whole essays are probably computer-generated.”

🫏🇺🇸🗳️ This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault by Ezra Klein. “Even if top Democrats believe Biden should be replaced, they face a collective action problem.”

Garden update 

sapling in dirt and straw

This summer, I’m attempting to grow pumpkins for the first time. If the quickness with which these sprouts emerged is any indication, I will have quite a lot of vines on my hands.

Links to the past 

  • 1 year ago: “I would love to see a separate award for excellent marketing, communications, and strategic outreach (and/or programming) for higher ed libraries. The needs of our communities and the best practices for reaching them differ just enough from our colleagues in public libraries to merit our own arena.”
  • 5 years ago: I was taking some time off the grid, off email, and off projects to reflect, reconsider, and reconnect.
  • 10 years ago: I was moving content to this here site!

Overheard online 

I feel like a perfume called The Conservator would just be lanolin (for knitwear) and a whiff of an unknown but clearly toxic solvent. 

@curatedjenny on Mastodon

banner photo: Marina del Rey fireworks seen from the Westchester bluff

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three women working inside the fuselage of an aircraft

Folks often ask if it’s slower at the library during the summer. Yes, there are fewer students and faculty around. Many classes are online and the building is quiet for the first time in months. For the outreach team, however, we keep moving forward! From now through August, my team leans heavily into planning mode: outlining new project workflows, coordinating people and resources, preparing annual reports, and most importantly taking the time to update and fix what we couldn’t to pay attention to during the academic year. 

We have nine summer projects we’re hoping to complete before students return in August:

  1. Universal design for learning and events: Using principles from UDL, my team is looking for ways to improve our programs and events, making them more accessible for a wider range of attendees.
  2. Comms coordinating meeting: Our current way of coordinating external comms usually involves asynchronous messaging on Teams. We are looking at creating a more formal structure and timeline for both ideation and creation of materials.
  3. New event assessment tools: We just wrapped up a year-long pilot test of a new survey tool for library programs. Now, we need to take what we learned to create custom survey instruments for each event.
  4. New library merch: We’ve emptied out our library merch pile! It’s time to design and order new library branded merch for fall. 
  5. Update exhibitions guidelines: There are a number of recurring pain points in our hosted exhibitions program. I’m hoping updated guidelines with clearer expectations for our exhibitors will help.
  6. Improving partnerships protocols: We work with more than 40 partners throughout the year to host events and reach students. I’d like us to “up our game” by examining what makes a good partner, determining best practices, and updating our protocols.
  7. Banned books exhibit: Our banned books exhibit needs a refresher. We’re planning to update how we contextualize and talk about banned books beyond simply highlighting commonly challenged titles and listing annual stats.
  8. Student job descriptions: We’ve used the same job description for our department’s student workers for the past 5+ years, but the nature of the job has changed significantly since 2020. It’s time to rewrite the job description and possibly restructure the program.
  9. Finding the lights: A simple one, but one long overdue. For some of our larger events that happen in the evenings, we oftentimes need to adjust the lighting. Unfortunately, in our large, mostly open area building, it’s not always clear which switches control which lights. So break out the label maker! We’re going to finally figure this out.

There you have it. If you need me this summer, I’ll likely be plugging away at one of these projects above. For my academic librarian friends: what group projects are you and your teams working on this summer?

image credit: The Library of Congress on Flickr

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Four men in suits and hats are seated in chairs on the front porch

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

A few weeks ago, Meredith Farkas posted on X about her experience as a blogger in 2024. I understand the frustration. Once upon a time, there was a robust community of LIS bloggers. In the years between 2005-2012 in particular, I had to regularly cull my Google Reader (rip) because I would subscribe to more RSS feeds than I had time to reasonably consume. 

I recently when looking for some of those sites and was pleasantly surprised to find that Everybody’s Libraries appears to still going strong. And others have emerged, like Ryan P. Randall. Like Meredith said, most seem to have disappeared or gone silent: Librarian in Black, Pegasus Librarian, Academic Librarian, The Waki Librarian, Pop Goes the Library. 

Of course, it wasn’t just the LIS world. Blogging in any field was at its height in the late aughts. There was a deep and thoughtful conversation happening then that feels lost now, owing in part to the move away from long-form text. The recent rise in email newsletters seems to be bringing this back (have you seen the comment threads on an Anne Helen Petersen post recently!?), but what made it so special then was that the conversations seemed to be happening on people’s own domains, rather than walled communities like Substack’s Notes. Even if those domains were a free Blogger site, when you visited someone’s page, it felt like walking up to their front porch.

I know. “Back in my day.” But what if…

What would it take to bring blogging back, at least in small pockets? Intentionality. Back then, setting up a full WordPress or Typepad site was the simplest way to participate in the conversation. The conversation moved slower, but that’s all we had. Social media drastically lowered the barrier to entry and accelerated the speed, but that came with a cost: the loss of the personal. Yet with a little bit of coordination and purpose, a dedicated group of LIS writers could bring back the blogosphere.

Here’s how it might work:

  1. Gather a group of writers. Each would need to have their own website. The site would need to have commenting and trackbacks functions built in. We can work out the technical bits later (though, I would look to IndieWeb): the key factor is having a space for conversation.
  2. Depending on the size of the group, each writer pledges to write 1-2 posts per month/quarter/year. I think the ideal frequency would be for the group to put out at least 1 post per week. You could go even further and select monthly themes, but it’s probably best to let folks write on what they are most knowledgeable or passionate about.
  3. In addition to regularly posting on their own site, each writer should plan to post at least 1 long-form response post to someone else in the group. This could be planned in advance or not, but the key here is to create [hyper]links among the group.
  4. Each writer should plan to comment on every other writers’ post.

Of course, what I’m describing is what we used to call a “blogring.” This happened organically among communities of writers (we even had site badges for it!). And since it happened on our own domains, it still felt like a community of individuals and less homogeneous than the UX experience of today’s social media. 

I know. “Back in my day.” But what if some things once forgotten could return. Would we welcome them?

What I’m reading

💻🌿💡 We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon. “Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one.”

🤪🔗📄 The internet used to be fun. I stumbled across this page after writing the section above, thankfully, because this is a rabbit hole I plan to dive into for a few days! “I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written.”

⛴️🪝🌏 The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat. I’ve seen this article shared repeatedly over the past week. It’s a #LongRead but worth the entire ride. So much of our infrastructure relies on an aging feet and diminishing workforce.

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: I was reminding myself that projects or initiatives carried on the backs of individuals is not sustainable. Moreover, it’s bad leadership.
  • 3 years ago: Reading about writing, parenting, and wisdom.
  • 10 years ago: They could see into my soul.

photo credit: Missouri State Archives on Flickr

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black and white photograph of two archways at the end of a long hall

“Life begins at forty”

at least, according to Walter B. Pitkin, 1932

At some point in the past few years, I crossed a professional threshold. I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but as I look at the field I see myself as from a former era. I’ve been transferred out of the new guard. I am not concerned. Not ashamed. Not anxious about it. I simply notice it. The foundations of my graduate work, my professional experience (especially in the early years), and the ethical lens through which I view my work is distinctly different from what I’m seeing in folks coming out of MLIS programs and who are driving the most impactful work in libraries today.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am here for it. The ability to frequently move between subjects and learn new things was the most attractive aspect of pursuing a career in academic librarianship. It still is to some extent. But the assumption that my colleagues will share like, or at least translatable, perspectives on our work is no longer a given. Not by a long shot. It feels different than it did when I was traveling more in professional conference circles circa the early 2010s. No, I don’t suggest I’m unique in this regard: I acknowledge that anyone in any field of study will reach this place at some point. I only observe that I am reaching it now. 

This realization has me thinking about thresholds. I’ve crossed many in the past decade: parenthood, management, and home ownership. The loss of a pet. Having to leave a job you love. The first (but not the last) major health crisis. I’ve just completed my first full decade as a capital-L librarian making the span of my career, for the first time, more librarian than not. Which prompts the question: what’s next? 

What I’m reading

Maggie Hicks on private colleges and free speech: “Some private colleges are limiting how and where students can protest, put up posters, or hold events on controversial topics. Unlike public universities, private colleges have more leeway when it comes to actions that might limit free speech. This is dangerous, said one faculty member interviewed: ‘Without alternative places to hold events, he said, students lose the opportunity to encounter views outside of their own. People need spaces where they can express their views passionately, through events like demonstrations and in controlled environments like a panel or classroom, he said.'”

Ezra Klein on ditching email: And taking a more intentional approach to email. Personally, I still use gmail but I no longer save any email there. My inbox (and my archive) are completely empty. If I receive information that needs to be saved, I move it to a better storage location (e.g., my calendar, files, reminders, etc.). 

Anne Helen Peterson on Moms for Liberty: “And what [the Moms for Liberty are] doing is undercutting the professionalism of librarians and teachers and people who work with children every single day. And not just your child, but lots of different children.” Moms for Liberty are a scourge. It’s not just their ignorance about how education works, but the hubris that makes them assume they know more about what’s best for children than the people who are actually trained, educated, and have years of experience understanding not just their kids, but all our kids’ needs. 

Ted Gioia on attention and technology: “These addictive and compulsive behaviors are troubling. But even more disturbing is how the largest corporations in the world are investing billions in promoting and accelerating this compulsive use of their tech tools.”

And finally: Further proof that tardigrades are the most metal of all creatures.

Garden update

white daisies in foreground with pink yarrow in background

While my daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths have all since flowered and are working their way towards another 9 months of dormancy, the flowers I planted and cut back last winter are in the fullest bloom. Snapdragons, daisies, corn cockles, yarrow, and pincushion flowers are at their most stunning this month. In starter pots, I have ageratum, cosmos, and white marigolds from seed sprouting. 

Links to the past

  • 2 years ago: While my literature review project never took off, I still maintain that “institutional isomorphic forces” drive most of academic libraries’ use of social media. 
  • 5 years ago: I was with colleagues sharing the results of our survey on librarian-parent stereotypes, and apparently freezing my ass off.
  • 10 years ago: Our worries about discovery tools were so quaint back then. Also, we’re still dealing with it.

Overheard online

Hey if you want to see more composite organisms made of algae and fungi in a symbiotic relationship, know what you have to do? Lichen subscribe. 😎

woodsiegirl on Mastodon

header image credit: Nationaal Archief on flickr