UC Libraries Forum 2021: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

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.”

We decided to examine that gap in the research. In exploring the landscape of library staff morale, we hypothesized that the nature of the academic library’s hierarchies, and staff roles within them, would be major factors in levels of morale. We also sought to investigate questions of organizational culture, opportunities for professional development, and management style.

Our research team, including library staff, former library staff, a recent MLS grad and MLIS student, and librarians, conducted 34 structured interviews with academic library staff nationwide (purposefully excluding UC staff). The interviews took place during a three-week period in May-June 2020, and provide perhaps the final snapshot of library staff life in the pre-COVID era. Interviews were transcribed by a student who was trained by a member of our team, and de-identified transcripts were analyzed using the qualitative data analysis software MAXDQA.

In this talk, we present our findings, some of which surprised us. Among other things, the findings establish that efforts to address equity in compensation, provide professional growth opportunities, and create more collegial work environments, in particular addressing the librarian-staff divide and the need for manager advocacy, can all improve staff morale. In addition, we suggest concrete ways to make changes in libraries in order to assess and improve morale across staff hierarchies, and we offer resources for workplace development and support for staff.