For our school library people – I’m sharing a national survey I’m involved in, to collect anonymous information about your workplace satisfaction.

If you are interested in sharing your thoughts in this survey, you can click on the link right here. It is all anonymous – you don’t share your name, your job, or your school. (So you are kind of on the honor system here, to only answer if you are working in a school library!)

There is a list of about 20 different things you might like about your job, things that bring your satisfaction in your workplace, or even things that actively make you happy. You will quickly sort through them, in order of things you like most to things you like least. And there is a comment box where you can add anything else you like about your job.

If you are on some of the national school library listserves, you may see this survey there. The focus is not on CMLE or Minnesota – we’re looking all over the country, but are definitely hoping to find some useful results to share with everyone. And you can share your voice here too.

Workplace stress is a problem across the Library and Information Science field, and I’ve done research over the years into trying to figure out ways to help library people to make that better. So this study is the first of a series of studies, looking at different types of libraries across the country to find out what kinds of things are causing workplace satisfaction. This is building on research I did nearly a decade ago, looking at happiness in libraries.

The results can be used to help build on other studies I’ve been involved with, to help build some systems across libraries. Hopefully, even in a small way, this information can be used to make libraries even better places to work!

So, to be clear: there is no direct reward to you for participation. We will never know whether you did or not. All the data will be thrown together to see what turns up. (There is some fancy statistical analysis here, to find answers; it’s not just a random tossing of numbers!)

If you work in a school library, and would like to share your own thoughts, go head and fill it out here!

(And if you are not working in a public library, we will gradually work our way through looking at every type of library; so stay tuned!)

If you have questions, you can email me at mary @ cmle . org!