Hello, librarians!  I’m back – at last.  My brief podcast pause lasted a couple of weeks longer than I anticipated, so if you’re still with me and listening, thank you for that. I have made my cross-country move and am settling into my new, if only temporary, home.   I expected to be back sooner, but all my podcasting equipment got misplaced in my move and I just found it a couple of days ago! It’s good to be getting back to the podcast.  
 
Recently, I was working with a librarian who is contemplating a career move.  We were discussing the challenge of getting hired for a supervisory role when you have no library supervisory experience. 

 I feel safe in saying that all job postings for library management positions call for prior supervisory experience.  That’s a reasonable thing, but if you’re looking to move up into management for the first time it creates kind of a Catch-22. You can’t get the job because you don’t have the experience, and you can’t get the experience if you don’t have the job. 

The key to that dilemma is to secure leadership positions and opportunities in other contexts and offer those as your qualifying experience.

So today, I’m going to share three tips for preparing and presenting yourself as someone ready for a supervisory role in the library, even if you lack the experience. 

Complete show notes can be found at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-21.

In last week’s episode, called “Librarians, Let It Go!”, I mentioned that I was in the process of packing up and moving again. If you haven’t listened to that episode, you can find it at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-19.  

Although I have been back in New Mexico for only about a year and a half now, I’ve decided to head back to Georgia again. I came to New Mexico from Georgia over 20 years ago and raised my children here. New Mexico feels like home, but most of my family is back in the Southeast, so that’s why I’m Georgia-bound.

I’ve had to accept the reality over the past few days that it’s a little tough to produce a podcast each week when most of my belongings are in boxes and I’m keeping all the details and plans for a cross-country move in my head.  And trying to jugge a lot of activities and responsibilities. It’s honestly become a bit too much for me right now. 

So I’m pausing the podcast for a few weeks.  My hope is to be settled enough in my new home in Georgia by mid-May, with a little studio set up.  that I can reboot at that time. I plan to check in with you from time to time as I move through the next few weeks, but I’m not making any promises! 

If you haven’t listened to my other podcast episodes, I invite you to do that while I’m away. You can find those, along with today’s show notes, at masterfullibrarian.com/podcast.

I’d be really happy if you signed up for my email list while you’re there.  If you do, you’ll automatically get notified when I return to the podwaves again. 

You can also download my free gift, 4 Simple Steps to Achieve Greater Relevance, Meaning & Impact. I would really love to have you as part of my email family, and I promise I don’t abuse that by sending you a lot of junk that you don’t want to see!

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about topics that interest you that I might address on the podcast. I’m always looking for ideas for the podcast. You can email those ideas to [email protected], or connect with me on Facebook on my Masterful Librarian page. 

I hope that I hear from some of you and hear your wonderful and inspiring ideas for podcast episodes.

I’ll talk to you again real soon.  I thank you for your patience with me as I make this huge transition.

Once again, I’m packing up and moving everything I own.  A few days ago, I was standing in my house looking around at stacks of boxes and things still to be packed and I realized that it’s time again to let go of accumulated stuff again. It seems no matter how often I move and clear things out and pare down (I’ve moved four times in five years), there’s still more to clear out when I move.

And it got me thinking about our libraries and how we in libraries so often hold on to things for far too long. And that’s unfortunate – no one really benefits from what’s no longer needed or useful or current.

So today, I’m going to talk about three areas that all librarians need to examine with an eye to letting go of the old and making room for the new. We can benefit when we make it a regular practice to weed out, declutter, let go, and refresh. 

You can find the show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-19.

Weeding Your Collection

Are your shelves stuffed to the maximum and filled with books or videos from 20 or more years ago?  If they are, it’s time to do a serious weeding.

This is a necessary activity that we all know we need to do but may often put off because it’s time-consuming and somewhat laborious. Weeding was never my favorite activity.

There may also be institutional or community obstructions to removing materials – like a principal who thinks you shouldn’t remove anything regardless of how old or inaccurate, or community members who object to weeding out racially offensive materials.  

Even so, you should pursue ways to remove outdated, incorrect, damaged, and patently offensive materials from your library. 

Mounds of anecdotal evidence show that having bookshelves that are only about ½ to ¾’s full makes browsing materials easier and will actually increase circulation – at least for a period of time. This is especially true for younger children. A packed bookshelf makes looking at individual books difficult for small hands.

Hopefully, you have a documented policy and procedure in place that guides weeding of materials from your library.  If you don’t, I suggest you explore that as a possibility.  It’s always good to have an approved policy and procedure manual to support your actions in the library. But that’s a topic for another episode.

If there is no policy and you’re getting pushback from anyone about removing materials, then consider going guerilla.  Remove items one or two at a time and discard them somewhere away from the library.

I’ve had so many books picked up out of trash cans by well-meaning custodians and returned to my desk, even though they were marked “Discard” all over them!

Just be sure to follow any state or local laws and regulations addressing the discarding of items purchased with state monies of with taxpayer funds. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of the law about that. 

Decluttering Your Space

When you look around your library, what do you see?  Are your displays and posters so old you forgot when you put them up? Or maybe you didn’t even put them up, they were put up by your predecessor.  Have you got 75 stuffed animals that so many children have handled that their ears have frayed and their eyes have fallen off or they’re just dirty? Do you have artwork that is dull, age-inappropriate, or maybe even faded from years of hanging on the wall?  

Trust me, if you have pictures of former principals in a high school library or worn and possibly germ-ridden plushies in your space, you need to do some updating.

If you have these things, it’s time for a major decluttering and refreshing of your physical space. 

For complete show notes, please visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-19.

Hello librarians!  It’s National Library Week and I just want to celebrate all of you for everything you do for your students, children, communities, and society every day.

If you haven’t listened to my episode 2, “Librarians, You Matter More Than You Know”, I encourage you to take some time today and listen to that. You can find it at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-2.   It’s full of heartwarming stories of how librarians make a difference to the people they serve. What you do every day is vital to us all – even if that isn’t always acknowledged and appreciated.

Libraries and librarians are always working hard to provide resources, services, education, and programming that supports your users.  That’s just how librarians roll.

Libraries are the great equalizers, ensuring that everyone, regardless of ability to pay, has access to the world. 

But over the last year, during the stressful and often scary pandemic lockdowns, libraries and librarians really stepped up – as I knew they would.  

You found ways to safely provide curbside service to school children and to community members.  You got innovative with ways to be sure people could still access your wifi – sometimes going as far as erecting shade structures outside your buildings and in some places bringing in porta-potties so students could stay  for a long time and work on their schoolwork. 

You developed virtual library lessons and learned how to provide story hour virtually.  You even held summer reading programs using Zoom, though you might never have used Zoom before then or any other type of meeting platform. 

Some of you even opened back up with limited hours and occupancy and had to enforce mask-wearing and social distancing – which often was ugly and unpleasant.  

You worked hard to overcome physical and virtual challenges and to find a way around these new and ever-evolving obstacles. 

And you did it all with shrinking budgets, reduced staffing, and, even, while working from home.

So to all of you working in academic, public, school, and special libraries all over this country, I say Happy National Library Week and thank you.  I and hundreds of thousands like me appreciate all you’ve done since March 2020 and before.  

We couldn’t have done it without you. 

 Are you a public, academic, or special librarian who’s been thinking the grass might be greener in the school library fields?  Are you thinking it would be refreshing to work in a brightly colored space filled with the best children’s books and lighting up young people to the joys of reading? 

If so, today’s episode is for you. You can find complete show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-17.

 When I was young and early in my career, I was working for the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I had a colleague, another librarian,  who was also one of my closest friends. We both got married about the same time and had our first children around the same time, and after the birth of her son, she told me one day that she was leaving Lister Hill and going to work as a school librarian in an elementary school – she had been an elementary school teacher, before getting her MLS. 

In a word, I thought she was crazy and told her so.  I also said, in these exact words, “I would never work in an elementary school.  That sounds horrible!”

Well, you know what they say – Never say never.  Fast forward about six years and guess where I was?  Working as the elementary school librarian for a small district in New Mexico. How I got there is a long story, but I will always be immensely grateful for that opportunity and experience.

 And boy, was I unprepared for the job when I took it.  

 Turns out, being a school librarian, especially an elementary school librarian, is nothing like being an academic or hospital librarian!  Who knew? There were so many things I had to learn and unlearn about what it means to serve in a library.  

So today, I want to share some ideas about what you should do, be, and know, before you start thinking about a job with a winter and summer break.

 Get Your Teaching Credential

 In any school district worth its salt, all school librarians, aka teacher librarians, aka library media specialists, need teacher licensure. It is possible to secure a job without that but trust me you’ll pay.  

 If you do what I did and walk into that library with no classroom management knowledge or experience and no lesson-planning know-how, you are in trouble. And more importantly, so are the kids you’re serving. 

 There is nothing sadder to see than someone like I was, who knows nothing about engaging and guiding children, trying to provide any kind of meaningful learning experience to a room full of seven-year-olds. Things tend to spiral out of control quickly.  It’s like the substitute teacher syndrome – the kids can smell your inexperience and fear. And it can drive them into a frenzy! 

But seriously, there is an art to keeping children engaged, managing disruptions, redirecting behavior, and communicating effectively and you learn those things in teacher training courses. 

So please, if you want to be a teacher librarian, enroll in a teacher training program first.  See how it feels, find out if you really like working with kids and if they like working with you before you quit your day job.

For complete show notes, please go to masterfullibrarian.com/ep-17.

Librarians, have you ever spent hours, days, or even weeks, writing a grant application for what you felt was an exciting new program, service, or collection, only to have it rejected? If you have, you know that’s a lousy feeling. 

And although most granting agencies will give you feedback on why your library didn’t receive funding, it still may not be clear to you how to do better next time.

Today, I’m going to give you four tips for writing a better grant application and increasing the chances that you’ll be funded. You can find complete show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-16.

 I’ve had the privilege and responsibility of being a library grant reviewer several times.  And most inexperienced applicants make the same, or very similar, mistakes.  There’s no reason for you to make those same mistakes.

Tip One – Use Good Metrics for Measuring Impact

In my opinion, this is the number one mistake most applicants make in requesting a grant.  I don’t know of a single funding agency that doesn’t want to see that your program, service, or collection is going to actually make a difference to your users. Otherwise, they don’t want to give you any money.

You have to provide metrics for how you’re going to measure that impact. 

And in case you’re breaking a cold sweat at hearing the word “metric”, relax.  A metric, according to Merriam-Webster, is just a standard of measurement. 

You don’t have to have come up with some complex, highly technical, 100% infallible method.  It just means you have to be able to show that you started out over here and ended up over there. 

Hello, librarians!  I’m so glad you’re here listening. In fact, it humbles me that to know that some of you are listening every week and that you value what I have to say.  

Thank you for that. It’s a honor to be of service to all of you. 

And this brings me to the topic of today’s episode – Librarians, Make Imposter Syndrome Work For You!  You can find complete show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-15.

My guess is that all of you have heard of Imposter Syndrome.  But just in case you haven’t, Wikipedia defines it as “a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". 

Can you relate to that at all?  I certainly can.  

In fact, I still struggle with this at times when I’m working in my coaching practice or when I’m creating this podcast.  My sinister mind gets in there and starts asking me who I think I am acting like I know anything about libraries or how to be a better librarian.

Well, the truth is, I am a professional librarian with over 30 years of experience in a wide variety of library settings and job roles, so I do have a lot to offer other members of the profession. 

I have to remind myself of that.

If you struggle with imposter syndrome, too, know that we’re not alone.  Even people known for great mastery of their work or craft can experience it.  

Tom Hanks, for instance, has openly acknowledged that he has Imposter Syndrome and he still fears that he’ll show up on a set one day and everyone will realize he has no clue what he’s doing.  Tom Hanks, of all people!  A consummate actor.

So if you have moments of doubting your abilities, that’s just fine. Apparently, it’s pretty common.

And it doesn’t have to be all bad.

Now I’m not minimizing the excruciating feelings of inadequacy and fear that Imposter Syndrome can cause.  Those feelings are real and they’re not comfortable.

But what if you took those feelings and leveraged them to perform better than ever? 

What if you made Imposter Syndrome work for you?

I’m talking about turning your feelings of fear into what Zen Buddhist’s call Beginner’s Mind.

For complete show notes, visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-15.

Hey there, librarians!  Welcome to today’s show.  In this episode, I’m going to be talking about your money. You can find show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-14.

Do you know where your library money comes from? Are you aware of your various funding streams, what rules govern those, and how to ask and justify increases? 

If not, I want you to change that.

My first job out of graduate school was as a hospital library director for a small hospital in Colorado. Not far into my first week, my supervisor, the Director of Nursing, told me I would need to submit my budget for the coming year and get it to her by a certain date.

My budget.  Hmm.  

No one ever taught me a single thing about creating a budget in my MLS program. I knew what a budget was, but I had no idea how to create one for a library – especially from scratch.

I told her that and she, being a really wonderful boss, taught me. 

Best thing that could have happened. 

I had to learn a lot of things quickly to do that budget and that only got me up to speed faster. Sadly, the hospital was sold and turned into a clinic about a year after I arrived and I had to leave. 

So in my next job, I was working for what was then called the National Library of Medicine’s Regional Medical Library program – and I had to not only prepare a budget, I had to write grants.  Grants for hospital library collections, but also grants to fund my position.

I had never written a grant in my life – at that time, I hardly even knew what they were.

So, I told my supervisor and, since I was still fairly new in my career, she was happy to teach me. 

Best thing ever. 

By the time I left that position, I could write a budget to create a library from the ground up and write the grant to get it funded. All this in my first three years on the job. 

What did this teach me and why am I talking about it now?  

It taught me that, in order to be really effective in your library job, you have to know where your money comes from and how to ask for it.

You have to understand your budget and your funding streams.

For complete show notes, visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-14.

Hey Librarians!  Thank you for tuning in for this episode of the podcast. It means so much to me that you’re listening. You can find complete show notes for today’s episode at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-13.

In my episode, Eight Proven Ways to Motivate and Inspire Your Library Team, I talked about asking your employees for their ideas and really listening to them.  If you haven’t listened to that episode, you can find it and download it at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-9. You can also find the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

But I know many of you are saying to yourselves something like “I ask my staff for input all the time, but almost no one volunteers ideas.” Or you might be thinking that your staff has given lots of feedback about what needed to be changed or made better, but you’ve gotten nowhere with solutions. 

Today, I have a solution for you – ask better questions.

If you’ve ever been involved with a strategic planning process, and I’m sure you have,  you know that you frequently begin with a SWOT analysis.  If you’re not familiar with that acronym, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles, and Threats. In this process, you assess these four aspects of your library or organization.

But here’s the problem with that tool – you probably already all have a really good idea of what those things are. Especially the obstacles and threats.  You and your staff are very familiar with your challenges and may talk and think about them a lot. And I’m willing to guess that many, if not most, of them haven’t been overcome or neutralized.

The solution – ask more powerful questions.

Powerful framing questions don’t have straight forward answers.  They’re open-ended and meaningful. They could be called adaptive questions because they evolve and change and grow as you discuss them. 

They can’t be answered with a simple solution.  They require creativity and insight. 

Asking these powerful framing questions is called Appreciative Inquiry. The process was developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, two professors at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980’s. 

Cooperrider recognized that “people move in the direction of their conversations”.  

What that means for you is that problem-centered questions, such as “Why aren’t more teens attending our programs?”  or “Why won’t the Language Arts teachers collaborate with library staff?” keep a group stuck in the problem.  They don’t invite fresh viewpoints and creative thinking.

What Appreciate Inquiry – and appreciative questions do – is to lead us into considering opportunities. 

In their book, Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership, Ed Morrison and his co-authors from the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab say that “If we focus on opportunities, we make sure that we do not fall into the every deepening chasm fo problem analysis.  We have the opportunity to think instead about possible alternatives.”

When engaging your staff in an effort to address library challenges and develop innovative and engaging strategies, powerful open-ended framing, or appreciative, questions are your most effective tool.

For complete show notes, visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-13

Hello Librarians. Welcome back to the podcast.  I so appreciate you listening in. If you’ve been enjoying the show, I invite you to sign up for my email list at masterfullibrarian.com, so you can receive notification each time I release an episode. I don’t want you to miss anything!

This episode is the second in my series called Librarian Career Pivot.  The first was called Leaving the Profession and can be found at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-7. Today I’m here to assure you that’s it’s perfectly ok to leave your current job, if it no longer fits you.

 Why am I talking about this?  There are three reasons. 

One is that it you, my listener, seem to have an interest in this topic.  My most popular episodes, by far, have been related to either leaving libraries or about librarian appreciation.  Those statistics tell me that many of you are struggling in your current positions and may feel unmotivated or demoralized.

The second reason is that two of my most recent clients have been struggling with this very issue – wondering if they should stay put in the jobs they have now or if it’s time to move on. Where there are two, there are more!

 My final reason is that two librarians that I know well and respect tremendously have recently left their jobs.  One to move into a new field and the other to seek a new library position. I applaud both of these individuals and feel they’re both making positive choices. 

And again, where there are two there are more, so I feel this is a timely topic.

Do you find yourself often wondering if it’s time to find a new job, or feeling stressed every morning when you wake up and realize it’s a work day, or daydreaming about what it would be like to work in a different career or library?

If you said yes to any of those questions, it’s probably time to take some action.

And I want to encourage you to do that. 

For complete show notes, go to masterfullibrarian.com/ep-12.