C&CS Presents: “Library Staff Morale & the Academic Hierarchy”, April 20 @ 12 pm

C&CS Presents

Library Staff Morale & the Academic Hierarchy with UC Berkeley Faculty and Staff

April 20 at 12:00 pm EST

Register Here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIocOCrqzItE9JiOasSHfB2HhlpsD35SJO7

Academic librarians have increasingly gone public with their experiences of low morale and burnout, yet less attention has been paid to the workplace experiences of library staff. As Kaetrena Davis Kendrick notes in her work on the persistent harm of low morale among librarians, “the cost of silence can be high.” Our research team includes library staff, former library staff, a recent MLS grad and MLIS student, and librarians. Through 34 structured interviews with academic library staff nationwide, we seek to demonstrate how organizational culture, library hierarchies, and management style affect staff morale. In this webinar, we present our findings establishing that efforts to address equity in compensation, provide professional growth opportunities, and create more collegial work environments can all improve staff morale. Finally, we suggest how you can make changes in your own libraries to assess and improve morale across staff hierarchies. 

Objectives:

Attendees will:

• Reflect on their roles in academic hierarchies in order to better advocate for themselves and their colleagues
• Gain a better understanding of how the divide between administrators and librarians and staff can have powerful effects on staff morale
• Understand the importance of support for professional development and growth on staff morale

Presenters

Celia Emmelhainz is the anthropology and qualitative research librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously the social sciences data librarian at Colby College in Maine. She leads workshops on qualitative research data management and ethnographic methods, and enjoys teaching others how to conduct qualitative research. Comments welcome @celiemme on Twitter.

Natalia Estrada is the Political Science & Public Policy Librarian at UC Berkeley, providing reference and collections services for Political Science, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and Legal Studies. She is also the California Documents Specialist. Her experience in the UCs also includes previous positions in the Engineering & Physical Sciences Division, Life & Health Sciences Division, and UC Hastings. She is an Association for Research Libraries’ Diversity Scholar for 2018-2020 and has published and presented in several professional venues, as well as conducted various qualitative research projects (including how graduate students conduct library research).

Bonita Dyess is a Library Supervisor at UC Berkeley and has been a UCB library staff member for five years. Collectively, Bonita has been an academic library staff member at a few academic institutions for almost 10 years. Currently, Bonita is an MLIS student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.    

Ann Glusker is the Sociology, Demography, & Quantitative Research Librarian at UC Berkeley.  Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA (for which she is still homesick), she came to Berkeley from Seattle, Washington.  There she worked in medical and public libraries and also, before changing careers to librarianship, for 10 years as a public health epidemiologist, responding to data requests and doing community health assessments.

All C&CS Sessions are recorded and made available via the CRD website following the presentation.

This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, Governor.

Support is also provided by the College and Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association: https://crdpala.org/.