The Benefits of Library Twitter

I first created a Twitter account back in 2008 because I heard that it was going to be A Thing. Back then, I used my account in a similar way I was using Facebook: to connect with people I already knew and talked to everyday. I also used it to chat with the Harry Potter fandom, but that’s a different story. My account sat mostly dormant after 2012 until I became a graduate assistant during library school. My supervisor, an awesome academic librarian, recommended that we jump on Twitter to connect with other library professionals and engage in chats.

I’d never used my personal social media account to enter professional conversations before. I started with #critlib chats, which is how I found librarians with ideas I really liked. I followed them, lurked for a bit, and then eventually started participating in conversations. Three years later, I’m following an awesome, robust network of librarians.

Is this a love letter to all of the wonderful and supportive librarians on Twitter? Kind of. But, for me, library Twitter has been a great source of professional development and collaboration with people who are far away from my geographic area. I wouldn’t know about the amazing work that’s being done if not for this platform.

I’ll also note that I’m not naive enough to think that this is a perfect space. There’s crap people who spout racist, sexist, and homophobic views (both in the library profession and outside of it). There’s people I don’t agree with and that I don’t like. Twitter, as a platform, has been criticized for not moderating its platform against hate. It is, by no means, a neutral space.

That said, there’s a lot of good things that come out of library Twitter that encourage learning, engagement, and entertainment. Here’s all of the ways librarians on Twitter have helped me in my first year as a professional librarian.

Staying connected with the profession

One of my favorite things about library Twitter is that everyone is constantly sharing their work, other people’s work, their ideas, what’s happening at conferences, and everything in between. It’s been a way to find out what important topics are cropping up and what issues we have as a profession. Is there an article that everyone’s talking about? I’ll probably find it on Twitter. Who cancelled Elsevier? I heard about this on Twitter before anywhere else. You can find calls for proposals, opportunities to collaborate on research, and a place to share your own stuff. I also follow conference hashtags, which has allowed me to 1. find out that the conference exists, and 2. know what’s being presented at that conference so I can decide if I want to go in the future. I like that this network exists so that I feel connected to everyone’s work and scholarship.

A place to solicit ideas and get recommendations

Over the past year, I’ve had a couple of ideas that I wasn’t sure how to execute. Enter library Twitter. I’ve asked for help with an instruction idea,

A tweet asking instruction librarians for their activities on creating research questions

wondered what conferences everyone attends,

A tweet asking library folks what conferences they are excited about attending

and asked a variety of other questions as well. People responded! It’s been immensely helpful to have a space where I can ask a question or for feedback outside of my workplace, and then crowdsource the answers. I’ve seen others ask work-related questions or promote their research and surveys, so dialogue between librarians is constantly happening in this space.

It’s not just academic librarians

I can get stuck in my little, academic bubble, so it’s nice to hear from librarians who work in different areas. There can be a lot of crossover between academic and public, federal and academic, or any combination of libraries. That’s easy to forget sometimes. I’m not only interested in where libraries intersect, but also where different types of libraries don’t crossover. There’s unique considerations and issues in each of our spaces. The library folks in areas outside of academia remind me of that.

Twitter chats

I mentioned Twitter chats above. There are a ton of chats out there that happen at a scheduled time with a selected topic. There’s #critlib, #LISProChat, #Medlibs, and a large list of other chats. There’s chats outside of the profession too. To participate, you show up at the scheduled time, follow the hashtag, and answer questions as they emerge from the moderator. It’s a fast-paced way to discuss an important topic. It’s how I’ve found people I want to follow, and I think it’s fun.

The fun stuff

Speaking of fun, library Twitter is fun. I’m going to ACRL next month, which I’ll write about next time, and I’m excited to meet some of the people I’ve talked to on Twitter. There’s also pictures of people’s pets, gifs galore, and fantasy baseball leagues. There’s spaces to rant, share accomplishments, and connect with one another.

At the end of the day, library Twitter is composed of people who are sharing pieces of their lives (the good and the bad). I’m happy to be a part of it.

You can follow me on Twitter @badgersssss

Thoughts on the DISC assessment

Earlier this year, everyone in my little division of the library, area studies, took a DISC assessment in order to learn more about dynamics within our group. The DISC assessment (trademarked DiSC for the particular version that we took) is based off the William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People. Marston posited that people present one of three personality traits: dominance, inducement, submission, or compliance. In 1956, Walter Vernon Clarke developed a behavioral assessment tool based on Marston’s model. Over the years, this assessment has been further developed, and marketed to organizations as a tool to discover how people act at work, why they act that way, and how they can be encouraged to work more effectively with each other. The categories have also been changed to (the perhaps more appealing) dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness.

I’m a fan of personality tests as a rule, especially ones that tell me which book character I am, but I don’t take them too seriously and was fairly skeptical of the test in general. However, it was stressed to us that this was not a personality test but instead a test that would show how we act in the workplace, so I answered the questions with an open mind and waited for my results. And let me tell you, when my results came back they were dead on. I tend to be timid, I avoid conflict, I love routines, and all of that was there in my results. I was impressed. Of course, the categories are very general, so it likely is easy to find yourself in your results.

That said, in discussing with others, there were definitely characteristics embedded within results that some of my co-workers did not feel resonated with themselves or their work styles. Our facilitators were quick to suggest that we cross out any terms we felt did not fit and change them to other adjectives that better described us. I appreciated this flexibility: even if it did not change our overall result, it did allow for some fluidity within the more detailed report and afforded it a bit more of a personal touch.

Depending on how the test is administered, there may be the opportunity for further reports to be generated to compare you to other people on your team. This is what we opted to do, and this meant that I received reports detailing areas where I would likely find the most difference between myself and my co-workers. The reports also gave us advice about how best to interact with each of our co-workers. With more discussion or group activities, this could be developed into an interesting exercise to discuss and improve upon group dynamics.

However, I do not see the DISC assessment as an immediate fix for teams. It might be a place to start, but it would take more work to build upon the results and create a constructive space within a group to discuss how to work together. It also seems that results could easily come out skewed, which might hamper further discussions. We were instructed to answer the questions while imagining work settings, which helps get at how you behave in work situations and not in your personal life (which might be very different). However, when taking the test, it would be easy to answer the questions based on how you aspire to act and not how you actually act, because we aren’t always aware of some of our faults or some of strengths. This, of course, could change your results and then change the baseline you’re starting from in any further discussions.

Another major qualm I have with the DISC assessment—brought up during our meeting by one of my co-workers—is that it does not address cultural differences. While it would be easy to claim that the test is not biased, this is an assessment based in the United States and it is therefore going to be relying on the norms and values of mainstream American culture. This especially applies when considering comparisons: how a person coming from one culture views their interactions with others could be very different than a person from another culture. There could be more value placed on being forthcoming or, conversely, more value placed on being tactful.

For me, I especially considered these ideas when answering the questions in the assessment and considering a work environment. I kept wondering what sort of work environment. I had my first serious job overseas in an office where fitting in and maintaining the status quo was very important, so I quickly learned not to allow any conflicts to surface and instead to work on them behind the scenes. While I know American work environments are much more up-front than this, I sometimes still slip into these patterns because I became good at interacting with others in these ways. Can the DISC assessment account for this sort of flexibility?

If your library is considering a DISC assessment, I think the biggest takeaway from my experience is to know what to expect. Learning everyone’s profile, even with comparison reports, will not in and of itself address conflicts or instances of miscommunication. To do this, you will still need to put in the work to have discussions about norms, expectations, and methods of communication. Do you need the DISC assessment to facilitate this? Certainly not, but if you’re finding that other methods aren’t working, this may be one way to get the conversation started.


If you’re interested in taking the DISC assessment, there are several free versions available online.

Have you ever taken a similar assessment in a work environment? What did you think of it?

When do new librarians start publishing anyway?

Confession: I’m 10 months into my first job in an academic library and I haven’t published anything. I haven’t been on a conference panel, and I haven’t given a full length presentation about my research. I’m not tenure track, so there’s no pressure to publish or perish; but conducting research, presenting ideas, and publishing papers is something that I definitely want to do.

Here’s the thing. I have a lot of ideas, and I know some of my research interests. I think I’m fairly lucky in that regard because creating a research agendas isn’t easy. I feel as if I’m just now getting the hang of things in my day-to-day professional life (learning my job, how this university functions, billions of acronyms) and can start to consider my next steps in regards to research. I’m settling in and thinking about what I can do next.

I’m not sure when new academic librarians publish their first paper or give their first presentation. Is there a typical timeline? Is this something everyone should do within the first year? The second year? These questions are probably coming from the little place where my imposter syndrome lives, but I’d genuinely like to know the answer to this as well. I follow a lot of prolific librarians on Twitter, so it seems like everyone is publishing and presenting all of the time, or like they walked out of the womb with a CV full of citations. It’s hard not to compare myself to others.  

That said, I’m glad that there are resources like The Librarian Parlor out there that help demystify this process, or else I’d be super lost. It’s also a place that addresses some of my questions. A recent article by Allison Rand really stuck with me because she talks about how hard the process is and what her beginnings as a researcher looked like. I’m trying to take this quote of hers to heart: “don’t let your past professional experience (or inexperience) define your professional path.” It’s good to remember that what I do next isn’t necessarily defined by what I’ve done before.

I’ve taken a few baby steps towards publications and presentations. For one, I’ve been writing for this blog, which is a helpful way to gather my ideas and write for a larger audience (quite frankly, this can be scary). I’ve started research projects with colleagues in the field and am putting some proposals out in the world. Even having informal conversations about research with others has been useful. I’ve also given a few lightning talks. Lightning talks are a low stakes way to begin presenting because you only have to prepare a 5-7 minute talk about a specific topic. I can talk about almost anything for 5 minutes. I presented two lightning talks locally, and am excited that my most recent lightning talk proposal will be presented at ACRL in April. This talk, and others that I’ve given are a stepping stone to what I envision will be a much larger conversation and research topic in the future.

And, for any other new librarians out there who aren’t sure if they’re on the right track with research, presentations, and publications, I feel you. We weren’t taught how to navigate the publishing field, and we haven’t had a lot of practice creating research studies; however, if we keep talking to each other about our research, are transparent about where we are and how we are doing, we’ll get there in the end.

When did you first publish or present your research?

Taking Care of my Mental Health

It’s not LIS Mental Health Week, but I’ve been thinking about mental health since starting my job as a librarian. In academic libraries, we work with students who are dealing with their own mental health issues. In my first, full semester as a librarian, I saw a student break down after she found out she failed a class and would not graduate on time; I talked to a student over chat who told me they were on the verge of tears because they weren’t prepared to do research for their project; I spoke with countless students on the phone who felt overwhelmed; and I’ve had grad students in my office who didn’t actually need help with research, but really needed encouragement and validation that they were doing alright. Beyond the university population, many of us work with the public and face the same traumas and difficult situations as our public library colleagues (I’ll never forget the  drunk individual who crashed my library instruction when I was a grad student, which is a story for another day). I often feel completely unprepared, but I do my best to keep learning and supporting the individuals in my library.

This can take its toll, but for me, figuring out how to support individuals struggling with their mental health is just one part of the equation. I also have my own mental health, including fear of inadequacy that will probably never go away, that I’m trying to take care of. I can only speak to my own experiences with things like panic attacks as a young adult, which disappeared after college, but came back during graduate school; or of lying awake at night, remembering everything I’ve ever done wrong and wondering why I’m the worst. Library school wasn’t the greatest time for my mental health, and studies have found that graduate students struggle with mental health issues at higher rates than the general population. I was worried and stressed out by a lot of things;  I worried I was inadequate, that I wouldn’t get a job, that I wasn’t doing enough, and that I would drown in my debt. I got sick and injured and fretted about healthcare. I cried a lot.

When I graduated and got a job, a lot of stress disappeared, but my mental health didn’t magically resolve itself. I found new things to worry about, which I imagine a lot of new professionals struggle with as well. It’s things like figuring out the politics people are playing, trying to gain the respect of your peers, unfamiliarity with tasks and processes that you’re now in charge of, paying back student loans, figuring out how to publish, starting a workplace revolution, wondering if you should be on more committees or in more organizations, and (at least for me) worrying if people even like you. I’ll also acknowledge that I’m a white female in a profession dominated by people that look like me. Librarians from diverse backgrounds have to navigate work spaces that uphold whiteness and engage in practices that are detrimental to their mental health, which is an added layer of crap some new professionals have to deal with. It’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of spiraling, negative thoughts that are difficult to interrupt.

For my own mental health, I decided to find a therapist. For the first time in a few years, I had stable healthcare. Unfortunately, I know that good healthcare is as a luxury in this country. It’s expensive, and it’s not accessible for a lot of people. When you do get things like sick days or time off, people can feel guilty using it. I also found out that I had my own stigma towards therapy. A lot of therapists in the area talked about helping those who were at a crisis point, and I didn’t feel like I was having a crisis. I started thinking that I didn’t really need a therapist, that I just needed to get out of my own head and sort myself out. Luckily, my fiance pushed me to find someone, and I requested an appointment with a therapist near me.

Having never gone to therapy, I didn’t know what to expect. I was super nervous to talk to a stranger about my feelings because I didn’t like acknowledging my own feelings in the first place. Now that I’ve been going to my therapist for a few months, I’m so happy that I contacted her. We get along really well, which is important in a therapeutic relationship. I’ve heard that some people have to visit a few therapists before they click with someone, and that’s totally normal.

The biggest thing my therapist has done for me is validated my feelings. Yes, it’s totally normal that I’m angry or upset about a situation at work. Anyone would feel that way! Academia is a weird place, and it’s fine to find things confusing. I’m allowed to feel stressed or scared or overwhelmed about things that happen to or around me. I just have to figure out how I want to respond to my feelings and the situation. She’s given me underlying theories about why people behave in certain ways, the evolution of emotions, interpersonal effectiveness, and the values we hold. I’ve been given strategies and homework to work on whatever I want to work on. Therapy has helped me feel less anxious and stressed, and given me the opportunity to explore who I am, what I value, and who I want to become.

Besides therapy, I try and make time to hang out with people I love. I ski and run and water plants and bring my dog to cool dog parks. I know other people who craft, learn new skills, read books, listen to music, and do whatever else makes them happy. Finding hobbies and doing things we enjoy are vital to good mental health. I hope that other new professionals find ways to take care of themselves, whether that’s through therapy or partaking in activities that relax them. This is the beginning of what is, hopefully, a long career.

How do you take care of your mental health?

How I’m setting my goals for this year

When I started at my job four months ago, one of my first tasks after getting settled was to write out a list of goals for the year. All the librarians here do this as part of the evaluation process, and for me personally I’ve found it very helpful to be able to look back at my written goals in order to figure out what I should be working on during any given day. That said, what with the new year and the new semester fast approaching, it felt like it was time to reevaluate my priorities in order to assess the progress I’ve made so far and to work better next semester.

My first step in this process was thinking about where I want to be at the end of the semester and in a year’s time in terms of knowledge, skills, and experience. For the most part, this has meant figuring out what I need to learn to feel more capable of carrying out my job. For me, this covers all sorts of things: learning more about faculty research interests, learning more about the collection I manage, learning more about South Asia, learning more about LibGuides. Basically, I started out by thinking about where I want to be and what I need to learn to get there.

Then comes the part I’m more excited about. For every goal, I’ve made a list of actions to complete in order to achieve it. For most of these actions, I’ve made them general enough that they can be repeated over and over to build experience or knowledge. For example, in order to learn more about my subject areas, I’ve decided to read at least one monograph per month (that I would not otherwise have set aside time for) and one journal article per week. Or, in order to increase accountability, I’ve decided to update my work journal every Friday. I’m now working on scheduling recurring reminders for these tasks in my to do list so that I can better integrate them into my work week.

Since I’m still new, a lot of my goals have to do with learning and exploring, but so far I’ve found that this method of scheduling repeating tasks works for other goals as well. You can schedule time to review calls for papers or book chapters or time to work on developing instruction skills or working on lesson plans. In the same way that some people schedule every task on their calendar in order to make sure they get done, this method makes sure tasks appear on my to do list consistently. It also helps to establish a routine so I know that, for example, I’ll be reminded at the end of each month to organize my reading for the next month.

For me, this technique also works because (as with so many people before me) I’m still working out how to deal with all the freedom my job affords me. With this method, I’m able to divide up my time based on priorities to make sure things don’t fall by the wayside (as definitely happened sometimes this past semester).


What about you? How do you like to organize your time and goals? What new resolutions do you have for this semester or year?
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