Steve Thomas: Elizabeth, Sarah, welcome to the podcast.
Sarah Johnson: Thank you.
Beth Wahler: Thank you so much for having us.
Steve Thomas: Before we really get into it, I was wondering how you first got interested working in the library field or with the library field?
Sarah Johnson: I’ll go. I am a librarian, although I did start out in social work and I’ve maintained my license. So I’m a licensed master social worker worked in the field for several years and then made the switch to library science. I started in public libraries and then made my way to academic libraries, where I was working with the school of social work at the university I used to be at, and I just stumbled into this research area of investigating where and if public libraries were hosting social work students to conduct their field placements. That has since broadened to look at social workers in general. So I’ve been researching and writing about that phenomenon probably since 2017 and a few years after that.
I met Beth at a conference in Denver, and we have just been working on projects together ever since. So that’s how I came to it.
Beth Wahler: And for me, I sort of fell into it by accident, but it’s been a really great accident. I’m a social worker, and my background in social work was working primarily with people who were experiencing homelessness, substance use problems, mental health problems poverty related barriers, and I have been a social work researcher and faculty member and almost nine years ago, I was working in an urban school of social work as the director of the masters of social work program, and our local public library came to us and asked for social work students. That was when social work in the library was really relatively new and it was in some areas, but not what it is now. I agreed to work with that library and do a needs assessment with their patrons and with their staff, and we piloted social work students in that library and ultimately helped them justify hiring an on-staff social worker.
As I began publishing and presenting my research about what was happening there, libraries started asking for help across the country and then ultimately also from some other countries as well. I started initially with libraries that were wanting to add social work collaborations, and then over the last few years, my work has broadened to also look at other kinds of services that help meet staff needs and how we can better support staff in libraries and reduce their stress and trauma. I now have a consulting business and much of my work focuses on staff as much as it does working on different kinds of collaborations and programs to help patrons in libraries. But that’s sort of how I came to this work.
Steve Thomas: There’s a lot of overlap between library work and social work. When the library work comes to an end and we don’t have the expertise in something, we often were already passing people off to social workers because it’s like, “I can find this resource for you and pass it off to them,” but now having this closer relationship is so much better. Librarians at best, usually public librarians are generalists, you know, we’re not going to do your taxes. We’re not going to fill out your contract either. We’re going to find you a lawyer or a tax preparer. And so many libraries, especially urban libraries, but every library has people in their community and staff that need those resources.
Beth Wahler: Yeah, over the past few years, especially, we’ve seen a pretty significant increase in poverty related needs, in people who have mental health needs, in substance use, in domestic violence. We’ve seen a lot of increasing needs in most of our communities around this country, rural, suburban and urban. And we’ve also at the same time seen a reduction in the other community services that exist. to address these needs. And so that’s part of why many libraries are just seeing increasing numbers of customers or patrons that have these kinds of needs, and you’re exactly right that library staff can try to keep up with what services exist and make referrals to community organizations, but sometimes the needs that are happening in libraries are really exceeding the kind of training that library staff have. So that is where some of these social work collaborations are coming in either on staff social workers in libraries or social work students, which Sarah and I have both worked with or sometimes they’re not onsite social workers but building collaborations with other social workers in the community to be able to do some, what we call “warm handoffs” or to help make connections and get people services that they really need.
Steve Thomas: I would think it’s a good experience for the social work students, getting in that real world experience that you want to get and everybody comes to the public library. So you kind of see everybody.
Sarah Johnson: You had mentioned that librarians are generalists. What we find in our research for a lot of the social work students that do their practicums at libraries, it also provides them with excellent generalist social work experience. As you say, the library is the hub of the community, it just allows them to address an array of needs and really get exposure to community resources and relationships. So it’s not always a perfect fit, but it tends to provide that really good generalist experience for students.
Steve Thomas: That’s great. So when it comes to the book, Creating a Person Centered Library, how did you all come to that concept of “person centered library” and what made you all want to go, “Oh, we should write a book!”, or did the publisher approach you and say, “Hey, you should write a book!”
Beth Wahler: No, we wanted to write the book. It was an idea that we had, it was really building on the Whole Person Librarianship book and concept by Zettervall and Nienow. That book, Whole Person Librarianship came out pre pandemic and certainly during the pandemic and then the kind of increasing racial strife that was happening around the same time in our country, and we are seeing these increasing needs in many different communities. Sarah and I both, we had known each other, as she mentioned, for several years and had done some research together and presented together on some other work. We started talking about how we really thought that there needed to be some additional kind of an update to some of the work that that Zettervall and Nienow had put out there to address some of these changes that had happened since that book was published.
And we also really felt like it was important to focus on staff. There’s been increasing attention on library staff stress and trauma, so it was important to us as we talked about this topic, that yes, we wanted to talk about services and collaborations and programming that libraries can do to address the needs of high needs patrons, but we wanted to put equal attention on strategies and organizational processes that libraries can use to better support their staff. And so we really wanted to, to build on the work that was put out there in whole person librarianship and to try to give some more strategies for libraries to address the way things are currently right now.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah. And I’d add to that, that Beth and I are really well connected to current library social workers, and those who are no longer in those positions, and so we conducted numerous interviews of social workers based in public libraries and really wanted to draw on the lessons that have been learned, even just in the last four years, to get a sense from these practitioners, what was working about these partnerships and what wasn’t and to share that with our readers because some partnerships that started pre pandemic didn’t pan out, and we wanted to add content about what we learned from them to this book.
Steve Thomas: What kind of factors should librarians be considering when they’re identifying their own needs and how to address them?
Beth Wahler: Yeah, I think that’s a good question. It’s one of the reasons that we started the book with the chapter on assessing your own needs. Every library is different, and Sarah and I both have worked with lots of different libraries over the years. Each one has been unique. Sometimes it’s about the structure of the library and how decisions are made or how they’re funded, sometimes it’s about the particular customer or patron population that is coming to that library, sometimes it’s about the resources or lack of specific resources that are in that community. So every library is different and every branch is different, even in a single library system.
So we do think it’s really important that libraries do take time to really assess their own unique needs and look at the resources. There are different ways to do that, and it depends on the goals and whether the goals at the time or to try to increase support for staff or address staff needs, whether the goals are to address a particular patron population’s needs, whether the goal is really to try to bring the community together, because libraries really are these central hubs in their communities. In our research and working on this book, we’ve run across many libraries that have actually been able to pull together other community organizations and partner with them to then address a need in the community that may not even be a program the library necessarily offers, but they’re at the table for the discussion to help decide what gaps there are in the community and what needs addressed.
So I think starting with what the ultimate goals are for that library at that particular point in time and really taking the time to look at the resources that are there to gather data and information to really guide the next steps because copying what another library has done doesn’t work very well. That’s part of what we’ve seen with some of the collaborations that have fallen apart.
I do want to clarify, we talk about social work collaborations in libraries, but we also talk about other kinds of collaborations that libraries might use. Even though we both happen to be social workers, there are lots of library collaborations that are with public health professionals or peer navigators or different kinds of things that aren’t social work, but one of the things that tends to happen sometimes is that libraries hear what another library is doing, and they try to copy what that library has done, and they do the exact same thing. They try to do the same program. They try to hire the same type of person. They may copy a job description, and it doesn’t work in that setting or that context. It is important to actually take time to assess that particular library’s needs to guide what the next steps might need to be.
Steve Thomas: What are some common challenges that you see libraries coming up against? They want to address their culture? Where are they hitting barriers?
Sarah Johnson: I think one challenge that comes up is unilateral decisions are made by library administrators without bringing in the staff into the discussion process and to the decision making process. This is all part of the intentional planning that Beth talked about that is so very necessary to lay the groundwork for successful partnerships if they choose to go that route. So I think rushing to a decision or not involving the necessary stakeholders is a is a common challenge. I’ll start with that one.
Beth Wahler: Yeah, we’ve also seen, of course, challenges with funding and sustainability and libraries sometimes start things based on a short term funding source that they have, like a grant, and then they’re not able to sustain it. We have a whole chapter in the book that’s focused on different challenges to change and anticipating those and overcoming those and that sustainability piece is really important. Sometimes we suggest that libraries actually start a little smaller. Don’t start with some giant program that you can’t sustain after your funding ends in 1 year or 2 years. Instead back up a little bit and start with something that may be smaller and maybe doesn’t have quite the impact that you want to have long term, but you can sustain that and then you build on that over time.
We also see libraries that, of course, have challenges from their patrons. While they may take some steps in a different direction or bring about some cultural change or start some new programming or collaborations, part of the difficulty of serving the public is that you are always going to have some people that are for what you’re doing and some people who are against what you’re doing. So we suggest some strategies to try to help get buy-in in the community before starting things. And you’re never going to get 100 percent of the community that is supportive of everything you do, but you do want as much buy-in as you can get. Sometimes that’s about educating the community or doing other kinds of programming in the library to bring diverse groups together to help everybody really understand what some of the challenges are in that community and what the library is trying to do.
Of course, there are challenges with board members or decision makers or city or county officials, whoever’s making the decisions for that library. There are a number of different potential barriers that libraries have to anticipate you know, and try to overcome them. And again, depending on the context, one may be a bigger barrier than others, which is part of what needs to be assessed in the very beginning. Like, who does that library need buy-in from and then how to best go about that in the beginning so that you can sustain something long term.
Sarah Johnson: I would say too, like, once a decision has been made or if a decision is made to partner with, I’ll use social workers as an example, is when both parties are not well educated about the other profession. Within a social workers case is really getting a baseline education about what is it that social workers actually do so librarians can have realistic expectations about what a social worker can bring to a partnership.
But there’s lots of ways to navigate. One is by laying the groundwork for what social work is, ensuring that the social worker is really embedded into that library community so they are part of the decision making process, and also recognizing that social workers are going to bring in a different viewpoint about things that might need to change in terms of library policies or any foundational changes that might need to be made to the library culture and be open to that perspective.
And there’s other things like making sure that the library social worker is not isolated, bringing them into the fold of the library, but that could also mean physical isolation, kind of sequestering them in one part of the library or not ensuring that they’re well connected with other library social workers as a support system. So I think really seeing social workers and again, whoever that is, there’s a real team player can do a lot to address any misunderstandings about roles and responsibilities for both parties can do a lot to address potential challenges and barriers.
Steve Thomas: What’s some advice you would give to librarians who read this book or get into this kind of mindset and really want to do change, but they’re hitting that resistance?
Sarah Johnson: I mean this is all part of laying the groundwork, but I would invite virtually probably library social workers to have a Q&A session with the library staff about what is it that they can bring to libraries? What is their job look like? As Beth said, it’s going to be different for every branch, but to hear directly from library social workers about what works for their partnerships, how they can manage expectations, how they can navigate certain challenges before making any solid decisions, but I think just having those conversations can go a long way towards addressing any concerns or answering questions. I would start with that.
Beth Wahler: Yeah, and I think the thing that everybody has to remember is that change is hard and change is slow. When we work with libraries that are starting new kinds of programs or new kinds of collaborations to address the needs of high needs patrons, or to better support staff or both, we tend to see that there’s sort of a honeymoon phase in the beginning when everybody’s really excited to have this new collaboration and, “Oh, it’s going to save the day! It’s going to help things so much!” Then what happens is the reality hits and anytime you’re bringing multiple people together from different professions, whether we’re talking about library staff and public health or library staff and social work or library staff and nurses, anytime you’re bringing people together that have different training, different values, different norms in their workplace, there are some bumps you hit in the road, and it’s really important to keep working through those and to communicate through those. Sometimes people throw their hands up and they’re ready to just give up, and they feel like, “Oh, you know, we tried this and it’s not working and we’re not going to do this anymore, so we’re going to end whatever this partnership is.” And it happens on both sides. We don’t want to sound today like it’s just the library side to keep these things going and, and not give up because it’s the other side as well. They really have to commit to working through the challenges, talking through the challenges. Sometimes the way they pictured the program in the beginning isn’t the way it’s really going to work well there. It’s a matter of trial and error.
So as people start down this road, I think just knowing that, yes, it’s going to be helpful when you get to the end of this, but there are bumps in the road getting there and you’ve got to expect that and also expect that change is going to be slow and it takes time. Libraries have been operating a certain way for many, many, many years, and it takes time to shift things a little bit. Sometimes we’re talking about huge organizations as well.
So I think that’s the message I want to get across is that expect some bumps in the road, expect some challenges. Don’t give up. Go into this committed to change no matter what, or committed to whatever it is you want the end result to be, and look for a partner who is going to be equally as committed. Make sure that you’re at the table together, there’s ongoing communication, and that both parties are really committed to working through things as they come up.
Steve Thomas: How can the organization as a whole support staff to provide these person centered services and be supportive of staff throughout that process?
Beth Wahler: One of the things that’s most important if we’re talking about top administration leading some sort of change process that it’s so important to keep the lines of communication open. I get frustrated sometimes I visit lots of libraries in my consulting work. I speak at lots of different libraries’ Staff Days, and often I see top administration sitting at their own table separate from everybody else in that library, even over lunch or breaks. Top administration’s talking to each other. Other people at other levels are talking to each other. And there’s not relationships between people at different levels or there’s not open communication between people at different levels, and that’s so important moving this forward because whoever’s leading the process, leading the organization, Sarah talked about this a little earlier, has to really listen to the rest of the staff and talk to the rest of the staff, and there has to be open communication to know when there are bumps coming up or when things aren’t working well, or when you’ve got a huge group of staff who haven’t bought into this and you need to listen to their concerns and hear what they’re worried about or what’s not working for them.
So to create a person centered environment or a person centered library, it really starts with the people at the top being committed to building relationships with everybody and ensuring that they have an inclusive environment, that they’re creating a psychologically safe environment for staff at all levels to speak up about concerns without fear of retaliation or losing their job or something bad happening, and you have to have that to then be able to accurately gauge what’s going on and what’s working or not and to move things forward in a really planned an effective way. In some libraries, people at the top are really far removed from other layers of that organizational structure.
It’s difficult when there’s not communication and when there aren’t relationships between the people at the top who are driving the decisions and the people at the bottom of the structure who are so deeply impacted by the decisions that are being made.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, because you can have good formal communication without that good informal communication.
Beth Wahler: Yeah. People sort of navigate to, like you’re comfortable around the people that you work with more regularly, but it takes intention for the people at the very top of the structure to develop relationships and have open communication and mingle with people at all levels of that organization.
Sarah Johnson: Additionally to what Beth was saying about library administrators needing to have that open channel of communication in terms of change with staff is, I think that that definitely applies to addressing the needs of staff in terms of the weight that they often carry, the frontline staff, in terms of responding to the needs of patrons and so creating a healthy library culture in which staff can talk about their frustrations or their needs so that they can take care of themselves, whether that is having a debriefing process or a support process when something in particularly stressful or traumatic happens also really needs to be instigated and directed from the top down in order to create a healthy culture of that library. I think that’s absolutely essential.
Beth Wahler: You know, I was a social work professor for years, and so this happened with social work students. I see it happen in libraries with library staff. People are very committed to the work they’re doing. They’re working in a library because they believe in the mission of the library. Because of that, though, that can become really dangerous for that staff person because we see people who work through their breaks. We see people who take work home. We see people who don’t take their annual leave at all. We see people who are sick, but they don’t take their sick time because they feel so committed to doing the work that they’re doing that they don’t feel like they can step away from it.
That is very dangerous for staff and it lends itself to burnout and mental health problems and struggling with your own personal wellness. So it is important for everybody at all levels of the library organization to set an example, set boundaries around their time, take time off, make staff take breaks or time off, and don’t set that expectation that everybody’s supposed to be available 24 hours a day, every single day of the year, because every single person will burn out and fry themselves trying to work like that, because it’s very demanding work. It’s hard working with the public right now. It’s very challenging for many different reasons.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah, and I think another way to support staff in this work is ensuring that staff are receiving quality professional development and training. And so, sometimes unfortunately that can turn into an additional task that, that staff have to take on but if administrators ensure that paid time is created for all of staff to be able to attend, the trainings need to be accessible, maybe they are, certainly in some smaller libraries, they shut down the branch for a day and they’re like, “we’re doing a staff training day.” The administrators are there, and we’re all doing this together.
That can do a lot to detract from the idea that trainings are busy work, or they’re not relevant, or it’s an additional burden or task that librarians need to do on top of what they’re already doing. And also to make those times fairly regular, whether that’s twice annually, or 3 times a year, or whatever that is to ensure that staff are skill building and learning new ideas and concepts that are actually relevant to the work that they’re doing. So again, that’s tremendous modeling that I think that administrators can do to support staff to feel like they are really in a solid work environment.
Beth Wahler: And one of the things that I think is important to say as well is that this has all become a library issue because of the needs of the people who are visiting libraries, but really, many of the things we’re talking about are community issues, so it is important when we’re talking about administrators and libraries and what they can do, it is important that those people are at the table with other people in that county or in that city or in that community to try to bring about some other solutions that aren’t necessarily library based solutions. Because when we’re talking about libraries that serve large numbers of people experiencing homelessness, or libraries that have lots of overdoses happening, or libraries that have lots of people with mental health challenges that can’t access treatment, all of those things are really community barriers and community gaps and need advocacy from the library to other people in that local community to address those needs so it’s not all placed on the library.
I do find that in many communities, that city or that county will gladly hand off everything to the library if they can. There are people that say, “Oh, well just go to the library with that, they’ll help you with that,” or “Go to the library and they’ll be the warming shelter for everybody that’s unhoused in our community in the winter.” But really, there need to be other solutions. So it does take advocating. Yes, it takes trying to protect the staff within the organization and support the staff within the organization and adding programming or services or collaborations to address the patron needs as much as you can, but it also really has to have this piece of advocating out as well.
I know Sarah and I both see part of our role in our work is advocating for libraries so that people know what library work really is like. The public still has such a misconception about what library work is. People minimize what’s happening in libraries because of that, and even in my world, interacting with social workers, there are social workers that still think people in libraries are just having book groups and, reading books while they’re working. And that’s not what the work really is.
So this does take just this larger advocacy piece and raising awareness of what really is happening in libraries everywhere and what the work really looks like and what kind of resources really need to be put into libraries to best support everybody in that organization.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah, and to piggyback off that, we’re finding that and Steve, perhaps you’ve thought this yourself or experienced this yourself is, students coming out of library school sometimes do not have a good sense of the work that they are entering. I teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I teach a class on library social work, and one of my goals is to do my best to prepare them as best I can for the realities of public librarianship today. Now, I can’t do that in a full semester. But that is something that Beth and I also address in this book is exploring library curricula across the country and the benefits of at least introducing students to social work concepts and themes. We’re not trying to turn them into social workers, but to have some real serious discussions about what the challenges are involved today in working in public libraries. Some of that may be also introducing them to kind of “De-escalation 101” concepts and techniques and various social work approaches, such as trauma informed approaches or what we call a person centered approach, so we’re really preparing future librarians or those who are already working in libraries and are now getting their MLS about the current challenges.
I do get some solid feedback from the students that it was incredibly helpful and they want these kinds of skills to be taught, and even the research that’s coming out now. There’s a recent article by Melissa Gross and Don Latham about the need for this kind of skills and approaches to be taught at some level in library schools across the country.
Beth Wahler: And I would say just briefly that much of the focus of our book is on public libraries and public librarianship, but in my consulting work, I see the same challenges with people who are working in school libraries and academic libraries and even some special libraries. Most of the research that’s out there is really focused on the public library world, but these same challenges exist in other areas of librarianship as well.
Steve Thomas: Especially the staff side of it. In other types of libraries, you’re a little more controlled as to who’s coming in, but the staff stress is worse for some things, like with school libraries, you’re the only person there.
With the changing nature of community needs, what are some future trends and current emerging trends that you see coming in person centered library services?
Beth Wahler: Well, I think definitely increasing collaborations. People who work in libraries are already very collaborative, and many libraries are well connected in their communities to other organizations, but we are seeing more and more libraries add programming and services focused on wellness, and different areas of wellness again, depending on the gaps in that community. So sometimes it’s focused on physical wellness, sometimes mental health and wellness, different areas of wellness. But I would expect as we move into the future that we would continue to see a. growing emphasis on how libraries can really be key in addressing community and individual wellness, and we’d see more and more of those kinds of collaborations. Again, library staff can’t be expected to be all things to all people so it really is about building this network and these collaborations to bring in people who are experts in those areas, just using the library as that connection place or that hub.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah, I would also say that it seems to be a growing trend for libraries to designate a certain role for a librarian, so outreach librarians or community engagement librarian, someone who is dedicated to making community connections. Sometimes that’s in conjunction with a social worker or a non-library professional, but sometimes libraries invest more in a particular role for a librarian that is more outreach focused. That to me is a really neat trend. I think.
Beth Wahler: Yeah, and I would just add one more that in my own consulting work, I’m seeing more and more libraries that are trying to develop strategies to improve their staff well-being and support. So some of my recent jobs have been needs assessments of staff to try to reduce staff stress and trauma. So I think as this awareness has increased in the past few years on the impact of this work on staff, more and more libraries are taking notice and trying to change things and trying to better support their staff, which is a really positive direction for things to go in.
Libraries really were created initially to meet the needs of communities and to organize and circulate collections and they really weren’t created with the internal focus or looking at how to support the people working in them and so there are some revisions needed sometimes to policies and practices to best support staff while also trying to address the mission of the library, and I do see that as a trend that I hope continues to increase, but I’m seeing that right now.
Steve Thomas: Well, Beth and Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. The book again is Creating a Person Centered Library and that’s from Bloomsbury so pick up a copy of that. It’s got lots more stuff in there, lots of good concrete, practical examples of libraries that have done stuff like this so you can learn from them. Thank you again for talking to me about this important topic and hope you all have a great day.
Beth Wahler: Thanks for having us.
Circulating Ideas 