Book Reviews

Susanne Markgren and Linda Miles. How to Thrive as a Library Professional: Achieving Success and Satisfaction. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2020. 134p. Paper, $45.00 (ISBN 978-1-4408-6711-8). LC 2019031263.

Everyone deserves the opportunity to thrive at work and throughout our careers. In these lean economic times, many of us in the library field are struggling to find and keep positions, to remain optimistic about the future of the profession and our place within it, and to stem the tide of burnout. We cannot control our circumstances, yet there are steps we can take to better situate ourselves for professional success and fulfillment. Reading and engaging with the exercises in How to Thrive as a Library Professional: Achieving Success and Satisfaction can help you develop the mindset of a reflective practitioner with a sense of ownership over your professional path. The authors, Susanne Markgren and Linda Miles, have more than 30 years of combined experience in academic libraries and professional associations, and both have written and presented previously on career guidance topics. Together, they have constructed a slim but impactful volume that can be returned to again and again as we navigate and try to move forward in our professional lives.

The book consists of seven chapters that can be read as stand-alone chapters, allowing for reading what matters most to where you are at any given moment. That said, the chapters seem to flow in a natural order, starting from the more concrete chapter 1, “Forging a Path: Career Vision” to expansive chapter 7, “Discovering Your True Purpose: Reflective Practice.” It is worth noting that chapter 7 relies heavily on Michelle Reale’s Becoming a Reflective Librarian and Teacher: Strategies for Mindful Academic Practice (2017), a book that pairs well with this title and that I recommend for those who want to further explore the themes and exercises presented in this chapter. Each chapter has its own list of references, but of more value are the exercises offered throughout the book. These range from the Eisenhower Matrix for strategic time management (62–63) to brainstorming how to tell your professional story to different audiences and for different purposes (86–87), as well as getting started with mindfulness meditation (106) and how to create a collaborative reflective practice in groups (127–129). Many of these exercises are adapted from or inspired by the writings of others, and the index points helpfully to the pages where these publications are discussed as well as keywords and topics. 

Although both authors are academic librarians, the book is meant to encompass the wide variety of environments in which library professionals can work. We are introduced to five personas representing public, school, special, and academic librarianship as well as archives who make appearances throughout the book to demonstrate the wide variety of situations and challenges we may face and how we might approach them throughout our careers. While this is an especially helpful tool to have at the start of your career or even while you are in graduate school, the value and revitalization you can gain from this book does not diminish the further along you are in your professional journey. Ideally, it would be reread multiple times as you find yourself in different stages throughout your career. As the authors highlight in the introduction, librarianship is a professional practice, and practices by their nature are never quite finished; instead, “it evolves and develops as well—it unfolds” (1). Some readers may find this kind of language and the promotion of self-compassion, gratitude, and mindfulness off-putting, but the authors skillfully balance reflection and action, big-picture thinking with specific examples of what professionals will encounter in their day-to-day lives and practical skills for successfully building a career. For example, the second chapter, “Gathering and Lending Support: Relationships,” is explicit about the role of relationship building in getting ahead professionally and includes exercises on network mapping (30) and networking behaviors (37). There is something for everyone in this book, and something different each time it is revisited.

Many books begin with an introduction that outlines what will come in the following chapters. Markgren and Miles do this as well, although they also lay a solid foundation for how to approach the book as well as your career. They immediately address what may have been for many a valid criticism of this work, which is that the successful outcome of any individual’s career does not depend solely on that individual alone and that it can be more harmful than helpful to believe it does. They acknowledge that professional development literature can all too often look like self-help and that in our “supremely individualistic economy, each person is responsible for their own growth and development—not to mention success and failure” while “scant attention is given to the constraining role of the structures within which we all live and toil” (3). Nonetheless, as they also acknowledge, there is a lot we can learn from each other and from those who have gone before us. We should continue to share and lift each other up as best we can, and this book is their way of offering us a hand to the next step and to finding a sense of “autonomy and direction over one’s practice” (5) despite our circumstances. As they conclude in their introduction: “Purpose, passion, and self-reflection play key roles in determining direction, but actively taking ownership, responsibility, or agency may be what truly defines professional level work” (5). In a professional practice, it’s not so much the outcomes that matter. Let’s all practice and thrive along the way together.—Kristen Cardoso, University of California, Santa Cruz