As part of the annual evaluation process at my university, we each draft a self-evaluation describing our major accomplishments over the past year in the three big areas of librarianship, service, and professional growth and development. Every year I tell myself that this is the year I’m going to get organized and track major work as I go. Every year I find myself spending time in January going through my calendar and starred messages folder in my inbox to remind myself of my big accomplishments of the past year. And every year I’m amazed at how much I’ve done in the past year. The ongoing pandemic, and all the extra stress from that, is just amplifying that feeling this year.
In the professional growth and development section, I co-edited a whole mf book in 2021! We had put out the call for chapter proposals and notified those who were accepted in 2020, with full chapter drafts due in March 2021. We’re still in a pandemic and life happens, so some chapters were a little late, and we were kind to ourselves in our reviewing timeline. We identified a couple of chapters that needed more work than others, so we staggered final deadlines to enable a second round of revisions on those. And we still somehow managed to get the full manuscript off to the publisher in the end of September. My co-editor and I also co-authored an introductory chapter.
I also wrote a chapter for another book in the midst of all that.
In the realm of service to the institution, I was still a Faculty Senator a year ago. My term just ended last summer. It feels like 3 years ago already!
I also co-chair the campus General Education Redesign Committee. A few years ago, the university system Board of Regents announced they would be redesigning the structure of the Gen Ed / Core curriculum for the whole system, so each campus would need to then figure out how to implement those changes locally. I still officially hold this title, but I’ve been feeling really just demoralized for months now. I was really engaged for a while, but then reached a point of feeling like just a handful of people were the only ones doing much, signing up for subcommittees, etc, and that’s not sustainable. Plus, we’re in a really bad space right now for this – the project was put on hold at the BOR due to covid, and since then the chancellor AND the person who had been leading this initiative at the system level have both left, who who knows what will become of this. Plus, things are really bad across campus because of the current campus administration. All of that is all that comes to mind when I think of this committee.
But when I look back through my calendar, that has only been since August! It was just last spring that I was super gung-ho, on the subcommittee that put together a survey to get input from students AND on the subcommittee that planned a 2 day “Summer Institute” in July, inviting faculty from across campus to dream big and discuss what they would like students to get out of the core curriculum.
In the “librarianship” category, I did my regular job – led my small department, coordinated the liaison program, met expectations for support to my liaison areas, and contributed as a member of the library leadership team. I put in a good bit of time on a small working group reviewing promotion and tenure documents from other libraries where librarians are tenure-eligible faculty and compiling a draft of a full revision of our documentation, with plans for input / suggestions / revisions from all library faculty.
And I led a small committee in fully revising our library website. Like, throw it all out and start fresh. We did review the old site to make sure there wasn’t any important content we had forgotten to include somewhere, but we did that after mapping out the bulk of the site. Our top priority was to focus on usability, without getting trapped into copying past bad design because it was familiar. We started sometime in the fall, and had everything ready to go before we all left for winter break in December. The campus unit that controls the whole campus website ran a few checks when they came back in January, and then made the new site live on Jan 5.
And, in the midst of all that, the library dean asked me to lead a comprehensive review of library programs. I did delegate some of the work that comes with leading the department to members of my department in order to create space for this in my workload. I started work on that in October.
I did a lot of really cool shit in 2021 that already feels like ancient history. The time warp feels a little more pronounced this year, due to covid, but every year that I’ve worked here has been like this. Writing my annual evaluation, being forced to reflect on what I’ve accomplished in just the past year, is such an ego boost.