Sunday, June 25, 2006

The Balanced Life, a free ebook

I just stumbled across a great resource, Clay Nelson's free ebook The Balanced Life. It contains short, inspiring articles on finding professional and personal fulfillment and having fun at the same time. Wish I read the article entitled "Vacation Time - Don't Waste It" last Sunday! Oh, well!

Download your own copy at this link before you go on vacation!

Friday, June 23, 2006

Blueprints for Plugging a Brain Drain

Lisa Belkin, whose column about the intersection of jobs and personal lives appears every other week in the New York Times, recently covered the Hidden Brain Drain Summit (Blueprints for Plugging a Brain Drain, June 18, 2006). A project of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Center for Work-Life Policy, the summit brought together representatives from major companies to discuss strategies for retaining female and minority employees and facilitating re-entry for those who left and are ready to return. The momentum for flexibility grows . . .

See this link for the article itself.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Flexible Work Arrangements Word Templates

If you're considering discussing a flexible work arrangement with your boss, you might want to prepare a written proposal, if for no other reason than to help clarify your own thoughts. The Microsoft website contains all sorts of sample documents for business, academic and personal writing, including this nifty Flexible Work Arrangement Proposal form at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC012197971033.aspx?CategoryID=CT011389841033. Note: You need Word 2003 or higher to use this template.

For more information, follow the links from the template to Microsoft's Work & Family Connection page at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/EY012075431033.aspx. You'll find links to an article, another template on work-life balance and the Work & Family Connection home page.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Work Place Flexibility

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is supporting the Workplace Flexibility 2010 campaign to support the development of a comprehensive national policy on workplace flexibility at the federal, state and local levels. Their website contains useful information about the campaign along with links to information on work and family, including webcasts of events sponsored by the campaign. There's also a handy list of laws that impact workplace flexibility. Each law is summarized and linked to legal memos, checklists and other tools prepared by the campaign to assist companies and individuals investigating flexible options for workers.

Check out their website for inspiration. Good people are making good things happen!

Workplace Flexibility 2010:
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/workplaceflexibility2010/index.cfm

Monday, June 05, 2006

Work Space Flexibility

Jenny Levine's (aka The Shifted Librarian) comments on retaining our profession's best and brightest struck a chord with me. In her post on April 10, 2006, Jenny said:

Ask yourself what your library is doing to value your top staff (all of them, not just the traditional, stereotypical functionaries), to create a collaborative environment (especially between generations and between various job roles), and to let your employees color outside the lines a little in order to draw the big picture.

Her post was in response to Rachel Singer Gordon's observation that more than a few librarians no longer actually work in libraries, yet still do library-related work. See her post Neither Fish Nor Fowl (http://www.lisjobs.com/liminal/2006/04/neither-fish-nor-fowl-nor.html) for more.

Craving order is part of our nature as librarians, but are we too wedded to organizational structure and job descriptions to nurture the work space flexibility we need to keep the creative and energetic librarians redefining their roles respected and rewarded?

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Balancing Life and Librarianship

The first thing you should know about me is that I'm the daughter of a librarian. Mary Lillian Howley Callinan is the original Callinan the Librarian. She inspires me personally and professionally - and has a fan club of former colleagues across the Northeast. Growing up as the daughter of a librarian made me pretty passionate about the profession.

My mother received her undergraduate degree in librarianship from Marywood College and had a choice of positions upon graduation, unlike many of her classmates in the late 1940s. She worked in a variety of libraries for the next 12 years as a reference librarian and a library manager. She met my father at Fort Monmouth, where he was the editor of the base paper and she was the helpful librarian who tracked down the facts he needed for articles.

On the first Friday in October in the last year of the fabulous fifties, Mary Callinan closed up the lovely public library in Red Bank, NJ, went to the beauty parlor to have her hair done on Saturday, went to mass Sunday morning and to Riverview Hospital that afternoon. The future Callinan the Librarian was born shortly after midnight, arriving exactly on her due date. My brother Denis arrived two and a half years later, a few days early - show off!

Mom did not return to librarianship until I was five and Denis was three when we moved from New Jersey to New York and found ourselves a few miles from St. John's University. St. John's needed a rare books cataloger, and thanks to her solid liberal arts education, Mom had enough knowledge of Latin, French and German, combined with her library training, to convince St. John's to hire her on a part-time basis. Callinan the Librarian was back.

Now mind you, this was 1965. The women's movement was barely beginning to percolate. Many women were at home, working women were single and, to the extent that there were some women balancing work and family, they certainly weren't talking about it! Mom was no exception. Because her work was so independent by nature, she could work flexible hours and still be around when we weren't in school. Then there were Saturdays.

Mom put in a good chunk of hours on Saturdays. Some weeks that meant Daddy was Mr. Mom for the day. Other weeks, we went to work with Mom. As much as we enjoyed adventures with Daddy, the Saturdays we went to work with Mom were my favorites. We'd head to the children's literature floor in St. John's library, where Mom would deposit us in adjoining carrels, find a nice education major studying in the stacks, ask her to keep on eye on us, and then descend to the bowels of the library to catalog rare books. She'd come back up to check on us a few times and take us to lunch. The hours I spent in those carrels or sitting on the floor between the stacks, feet up on a shelf and nose in book, remain among the fondest memories of my childhood.

I understood that what Mom was doing was unusual, and as my awareness of the world grew, I realized that she was able to be a working mother, in part, because of her career choice. Librarianship offered the kind of flexibility that supported balance.

Becoming a librarian was always in the back of my mind, but I was a good student at a women's college at a time when good students were pushed into law and medical school. The week after I submitted my law school applications, I realized that I didn't want to be a lawyer - I wanted to be a librarian. The following week, after my last final, I went to my college library, found the books and journals about librarianship and discovered that I could still go to law school, quite a relief since I didn't really have a Plan B. I'd get my MLS after law school and become an academic law librarian.

Decision made, I spent the spring trying to explain my new plan. I got a lot of flak, but the winning argument was my expectation that librarianship would allow me to balance career and family in a way seemingly impossible in the law. I pursued my plan, with a lengthy, but happy, detour into private law librarianship, and spent the last eight years at Georgetown, raising children and working flexible hours.

My personal life experience serves as evidence that librarianship can be a career in which you can balance life and work. Unfortunately, I know other librarians who have not been able to achieve this balance and have been forced to chose life over librarianship. I also know a lot of librarians who are so swamped at work, they've essentially been forced to choose librarianship over life. I started my consulting company to try to address this imbalance by redistributing work and labor virtually and am optimistic that we can make a small contribution to the problem. But this is a bigger issue than a few librarians can solve.

So I pose these questions for discussion:
  1. Does librarianship still offer opportunities for the life-work balance we need and deserve?
  2. If not, how can we as a profession cultivate that balance to retain the current generation of librarians and attract the next?
  3. If we as a profession embrace work-life balance as a principle, how can we publicize this commitment to increase our standing in the marketplace?

Let the discussion begin!