“Always at Work”: Canadian Academic Librarian Work During COVID-19

Abstract

To learn about the experiences of librarians working through COVID-19, we conducted semi-structured interviews with academic librarians from across Canada on issues such as workload, collegiality, and overall satisfaction with their working conditions during the pandemic. Themes emerged around job security, workload changes (both in terms of hours worked and the type of work being done), working from home, relationships with colleagues and administrators (including the perceived speed of the institution’s pandemic response and the state of communication from or with administration), and hopes for the future. This article focuses on the semantic elements of librarian work during COVID-19 uncovered during thematic analysis, including an in-depth discussion of how academic librarians’ workload changed; a second planned article will focus on latent themes on the caring nature of library work. This study connects isolated individual situations with the overall picture of what librarians’ work looked and felt like during the COVID-19 pandemic. For library administrators, we identify the ways in which institutional support helped or hindered librarians in doing their work.

“Relationships of Care”: Care and Meaning in Canadian Academic Librarian Work during COVID-19

“…The following description of our methodology has been taken from our previous article (McLay Paterson & Eva, 2022) with slight edits. As our goal was to explore in-depth individual experiences, we determined that semi-structured interviews would be the best method of capturing our participants' thoughts, feelings and understandings of their work during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…Semantic or surface themes related to the shape of the work and commonalities in the changes our participants experienced were identified during the coding process, as well as latent or underlying themes related to the significance of care and meaning in librarian work. A previous article (McLay Paterson & Eva, 2022) explored the semantic themes in depth, while this article will focus on the latent themes of the centrality of care in librarian work.…”

“…Each of these jobs seemed to make constant simultaneous demands on our faculties both for labour and for care. As we wrote in our previous article on this study (McLay Paterson & Eva, 2022), we felt our jobs and our relationships with coworkers and administration changing in myriad ways, occasionally inventive and inspiring but often outside of our control. In essence, our research originated as a panacea for work-related COVID struggles; to ward off worries and feelings of loneliness and isolation, we wanted to locate our experiences within the collective narrative of our profession during this time.…”

“…Privacy and anonymity of our participants was taken very seriously. In our previous paper on this study (McLay Paterson & Eva, 2022), we chose not to use pseudonyms, as the quotes in that paper contained details about participants' lives and work that could be triangulated to form clues to their identities. In this paper, as the quotes largely reflect affective experiences rather than personal or job details, we have opted to use pseudonyms.…”

“…Furthermore, there were consistent themes in how participants framed care in library work, not as self-sacrifice but as intentional choices, transparent communication, and the freedom to focus energy and resources on meaningful work rather than on traditional metrics. This article will focus on the themes surrounding librarians' focus on and framing of the role of care in their work during COVID-19; a previous article (McLay Paterson & Eva, 2022) focused on themes related to the shape of and the major changes to academic librarian work.…”