Mastodawn

As an #earlycareer oder #midcareer scholar, you need to realize fast that rejections are part of the game we play in our academic worlds, but every one you know, and maybe look up to, surely had his or her failures too along the way. There is no academic without a #ShadowCV.

IndieAuthors.Social News Apr 8, 2025

Do Writers Go Through a Mid-Career Slump?

Where do we go from here? Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/do-writers-go-through-a-mid-career-slump-df68299a402

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Hiring Librarians Sep 10, 2024

Welcome back to Author’s Corner! This series features excerpts or guest posts from authors of books about LIS careers.

In this installment, we hear from Brandon K. West and Elizabeth Galoozis. Their edited volume contains a diverse variety of mid-career voices. I was particularly interested to hear discussion about what it means to be mid-career when you are not interested in management or leadership positions – a quandary mentioned somewhat frequently in the most recent job hunter’s survey here on Hiring Librarians.

If you’re interested in reading beyond this post, the citation for the book is:

West, K. and Galoozis, E. (Eds.). (2023). Thriving as a mid-career librarian: identity, advocacy, and pathways. Association of College and Research Libraries.

We have each been professional academic librarians for more than a decade. We have often felt like we were running on a hamster wheel, rarely pausing to catch our breath as we moved from one project to the next, or through the processes of tenure and promotion. Before long, we had achieved many of our early career goals and began asking new types of questions including, How do we continue to grow professionally if we don’t want to move upward? How do we make decisions about whether to stay at an institution (or in the profession) or go? What strategies do we use to sustain ourselves amidst burnout, constant change, wage compression, or even boredom? How do we navigate cultures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and hierarchy?

This led us to exploring the concept of what it means to be an academic librarian in mid-career. We explored the literature and were disappointed by leadership and management dominating the conversation. Leadership can be a natural part of career progression, but being a library director or administrator is not a high priority for either of us. Brandon had already been promoted to a mid-level manager position of his library’s reference and instruction services and was comfortable in the position, while Elizabeth moved her career from a large R1 system where she was a faculty member and supervised no one, to a liberal arts college consortium where she is a staff member and supervises two people. Because we were not finding resources that spoke to our personal questions about entering the mid-career phase of our respective careers, we decided to create one–an edited volume, Thriving as a Mid-Career Librarian, published by ACRL Publications in 2023. We are both at similar points in our careers and wanted to see what other mid-career librarians were doing, which resulted in 26 chapters that range a variety of topics such as advocating for yourself, engaging in informal leadership, dealing with boredom and much more.

One of the first things we needed to do as we conceptualized our book was to define mid-career, which turned out to be trickier than expected. In the literature, mid-career is often correlated with age. However, many librarians or information professionals enter the profession as a second career, while others start working in libraries as teenagers. Are you still early career if you have 10 years of experience by the time you are in your late 20s? There is a high level of subjectivity to this which is further complicated by factors such as if you are tenure-track, or part-time, or on temporary contracts. For these reasons, we decided to reject a standard definition of mid-career. It’s an amorphously-defined time period that could be shared by people of varying ages, positions, and identities. Given our experience, we view mid-career as a mindset: Your priorities have shifted from when you first began your career, some of the excitement of working in a library has waned or changed, and/or you are learning that pushing through burnout is not sustainable.

When we were talking about mid-career, it become clear that we, along with people in our peer networks, had a lot to say about it–although conversations were often turned to complaints. With that in mind, we decided to make a conscious effort to frame our book more positively. This is why we decided to use the word “thriving” in the title.

Thriving can mean to prosper, to flourish, to progress toward or realizing a goal despite of circumstances. If something thrives, it sustains itself. To us, a good analogy of thriving is growth cycle of a flower: There is a period of growth that results in a flower blooming. The flower will last for a few weeks, before it wilts and retreats back underground to re-energize and sustain itself until it is ready to bloom the next spring. Our careers can be like this over time as well—we can have highs, but we cannot sustain that forever (that’s when we burn out); we need to retreat in order to re-energize and figure out the next thing. Therefore, thriving doesn’t always look like the concept of “success” that many of us envision or are given during our early careers.

With this in mind, our book covers many different aspects of navigating your mid-career. We organized the book into four sections: Staying Engaged, The Role of Identity, Advocating for Yourself, and To Lead or Not to Lead? Through the combination of theses themes, we feel that our authors have better described the complexities of being in one’s mid-career. Throughout the book, the authors share their personal feelings about being mid-career and how they are managing to thrive. Some examples from of stories shared in section one–Staying Engaged–include:

Developing a research community to fill a gap in association and institutional support
Staying engaged in reference and instruction despite burnout, through setting boundaries, taking time off, and supporting
Sharing knowledge and advice through informal mentoring relationships
Reflecting every few years on what is most important and what is no longer important – both in life and in work
Periodically evaluating the impact of your work and improving your productivity
Pursuing a doctorate

The longer you work in libraries, it can feel like everything gets harder, more political, and further under-resourced with each passing year. It is easier to become cynical than remain positive when you have been in your career for a long time and have witnessed the revolving door of administrators, colleagues, and dreams that go unfulfilled. Nevertheless, we think it is possible that through the strategies of community, support, and advocacy detailed in our book, it is possible for us to take more control of our career narratives. Our hope is that our book will help librarians think more strategically and sustainably about their careers. At mid-career, some of our enthusiasm may have waned, but we have other things: the contributions we make to our communities, and the wealth of experience we have built up since we began.

Brandon K. West (he/him)is the Head of Research Instruction Services at the State University of New York at Geneseo’s Milne Library. He has a M.Ed. in Educational Technology from Grand Valley State University, a M.L.S. from Texas Woman’s University, and a M.S. in Curriculum Development from the University at Albany. He was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship in 2019. He has edited three volumes through ACRL Publications, including Creative Instructional Design: Practical Applications for Librarians (2017), Reflections on Practitioner Research: A Practical Guide for Information Professionals (2020), and Thriving as a Mid-Career Librarian: Identity, Advocacy, and Pathways (2023).

Elizabeth Galoozis is DEIA Strategies Librarian at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include critical and feminist pedagogy, and identity in library workplaces. She was educated at Simmons University and Amherst College, and has presented and published widely, most recently Thriving as a Mid-Career Librarian: Identity, Advocacy, and Pathways (ACRL, co-edited with Brandon K. West).

https://hiringlibrarians.com/2024/09/10/authors-corner-navigating-the-mid-career-phase/

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