At CMLE Headquarters, our mission is to serve our members. One of the biggest issues our members have talked about with us is the problem of being alone in their libraries, or feeling unconnected from the work other library people are doing.
We are on the job for you!
We have a variety of opportunities for all of us to gather in person to chat about libraries (or other topics – we are fascinating people after all!), and to visit libraries.
If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a library fan. And of course, you would be entirely correct to be so – libraries are fantastic!!
At CMLE, we feel we have both lovely libraries and wonderful library people. As we seem to all agree on this across our system – it would be great to visit each other and to have the chance to admire each other’s libraries!
We are organizing monthly trips to libraries across the system, so we can all have a chance to visit libraries that are new to us, different types, and approach the same challenges in maybe a new way. Plus, going as a group gives people the chance to meet up in person! (We are not restricting this to just CMLE members; if you are reading this, you are invited!) Continue reading Group Visits to CMLE Libraries: Let’s Go!→
Members have requested that we move this around, to be sure everyone gets a chance to easily attend and enjoy dinner together. So we are setting up a vote, to let people give their ideas on a place you would like to visit for our March gathering. This will be the week of March 13, maybe Wednesday night (depending on the reservations available).
We have picked out a few places, all with good Yelp ratings and comments. Vote for the one that sounds tastiest to you, or that you have been meaning to try, or that you already love, or just sounds like a fun place to chat with your colleagues! (In some smaller places, now and in the future, we might have to spread our group out. No problem for us! We can have fun chatting in smaller groups, and get to know each other in person as well as online!)
And if you have other thoughts, share them in the comment section, add them to the contact form, or email them to us at Headquarters.
Purpose: CMLE members gathering for food, fun, and library talk
Verdict: Complete success!!
Yes indeed, we had a good time at the first in a series of CMLE gatherings! One of the most frequent member requests is for more opportunities to gather together informally, to share ideas, ask questions, and just have time to talk together. And this happy group was the result!
We all feel it, and the end of year can bring all kinds of extra stress for us with the semester winding down and holiday celebrations winding up. Working in libraries is no protection against workplace stressors; in fact, working with patrons – which is generally rewarding – can provide a significant amount of stress in our daily work.
I have spent a lot of time talking with library people across the country about workplace stress, and it was pretty depressing. Most of us are here because we enjoy our jobs, they provide us with a lot of professional satisfaction, and despite the problems we face libraries are still great places to work!
But minimizing discussion of workplace stress just minimizes the real problems we face. It is better to face the issue, and to help ourselves and our staff to resolve problems that can be fixed and to get some training to handle problems that cannot. Stress causes all kinds of problems, from an uncomfortable workplace to workers suffering from burnout and never able to return to their jobs. Employee health is an important part of providing good service, and stress can just torpedo that.
Everywhere I went to conferences to talk about stress, people would come up to me and whisper that they were glad someone was talking about this. They thought they were alone in it, that they were doing something wrong because they were feeling stress.
Ignoring stress does not make it go away!
Thinking that “real” librarians wouldn’t get stressed is incorrect!
Acknowledging this is an issue in our profession is important – and the best way to help us all to overcome it. We need to think about ways to manage workplace stress on the individual level, in our library organizations, and across the profession.
So this is our December Monthly Topic: Stress Management. We can’t fix everything in your workplace, but we hope we can give you some tools to work with and some ideas to think about in your library. Continue reading Stress Management: Why Bother??→
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