For librarians with faculty status, issues of burnout may be compounded by the additional pressure of balancing librarianship with the service and scholarship expectations required for tenure and promotion, without the flexible schedules afforded to teaching faculty. Workload policies may be one tool for addressing the structural causes of burnout, but little guidance exists on the creation of such policies. This case study explores these issues by tracing the development of a library faculty workload policy at a public R2 university. Following unionization of tenure-line library faculty, library administrators and faculty were tasked with creating a workload policy, in accordance with the requirements of the new collective bargaining agreement. Development of the policy involved frank and open conversation with library faculty about issues of overwork and burnout, review of workload policies from other libraries, and critical examination of librarian workloads, as well as conversion of workload measurement metrics used by teaching faculty to units more meaningful for librarian schedules. This study suggests that, while workload policies can be an important structural tool for combatting overwork and burnout, their success depends on good faith collaboration and open communication with stakeholders throughout their development, and thoughtful enforcement following their implementation.
The libraries have been a source of knowledge for years however with time the academic libraries have seen a downfall in student and faculty engagement. This study tries to understand the reasons and nuances of this disengagement. The study collects data through a semi-structured interview from 19 students and 5 faculty members of post-graduate colleges at Pune Metropolitan city at Maharashtra, India to understand the reason for gradual decline in student and faculty interaction with library and its resources. The study employs reflective thematic analysis and identifies six themes to understand the meaning, importance, reasons for low academic library engagement among students and faculty members. The study proposes practical solutions for increasing the engagement in academic library.
