Box of delight

[This content was originally published on November 6, 2017 at The Ink On The Page.]

A few days ago, my latest article – “The low morale experience of academic librarians: A phenomenological study” – was assigned to its Journal of Library Administration (JLA) issue after being in pre-print for a bit over seven weeks. During the pre-print window, the article garnered over 6,600 views, over 100 tweets, and it’s also been added to a few Mendeley libraries. Currently, it’s also the most read article of 2017 in the Libary and Information Science (LIS) discipline at Taylor & Francis, the publishers of JLA.

If you’d like to read it, it will be available open access until December 2017.

While there are countless numbers of books, articles, webinars, forums, and courses that provide helpful tips, tricks and strategies to successfully navigate the academic job search and interview process, they may only slightly improve a candidate’s chance of successfully landing a job. This article, based on the author’s experiences, focuses on five factors that can make a significant difference in improving an LIS student or recent LIS graduate’s odds of success in landing a job in a research library. A study found that factors such as prior academic library experience (including practicums), professional service/committee work, and a record of publications can significantly increase or decrease the odds of getting a job after graduation. Brian Kenney suggests that LIS candidates can significantly increase their chances of landing a job by being willing to relocate and by effectively marketing themselves.

(After 7 years of kind of non-stop research and writing I decided that it would be a useful exercise to prepare a narrative of my research journey to draw together the threads of my various projects. I share it here not only for its insights into how research interests can inform and build upon one another, but in the hope of illustrating for other librarians considering developing their own research agendas the unexpected and serendipitous but exciting ways in which they can progress and evolve, as well as the opportunities they can afford! — MD).