Academic Librarian Burnout: Causes and Responses. Christina Holm, Ana Guimaraes, and Nashieli Marcano, eds. Chicago, IL: ACRL, 2022. 370p. Paper, $98 (ISBN: 978-0-8389-4856-9).

Like other “helping” professions at this time in history, librarians live and work in a context of diminishing resources, vanishing support systems, challenges to our profession’s values, perpetual violence, and a lingering sense of doom due to continuous catastrophes and political instability. We are expected to continue to work and maintain normalcy while all of this happens around us, with a frequency sufficient to produce exhaustion and stress. Add to these factors ever-increasing workloads, constant role ambiguity, financial precarity, and the emotional labor required of professions like ours, and librarians are particularly prone to burnout. Are academic librarians unique in this regard? Not necessarily. That we have plenty of company should contribute to a greater sense of solidarity with all who are fatigued and overloaded by sagging systems. What we learn as we are responding to our own crises and strengthening our own networks is that we do have the power to empathize with and work toward improving conditions for all. Academic Librarian Burnout investigates the potential causes of the problem and works to identify strategies for interventions in this process.

Editors Christina Holm, Ana Guimaraes, and Nashieli Marcano have thoughtfully compiled a volume that examines the conditions that create, magnify, and potentially ease burnout among academic librarians. They call on those working in this field to challenge assumptions about our workload and levels of support, and to interrogate the systems that fail us. In highly personal testimonies, the editors encourage library workers to move past individual behaviors that uphold existing working conditions and lead to burnout. These include doing more with less and maintaining a culture that defers to teaching faculty. However, there is enough evidence to prove that the systems built around workers enable these issues--the budget cuts, the shrinking staff directories, and the ever-increasing number of services we aim to provide.

The phenomenon of burnout in academic libraries began appearing in library literature in the 1970s and 1980s as these institutions started experiencing economic scarcity and technological changes that sped up and expanded library work, factors that will be deeply familiar to contemporary academic library workers. In addition, libraries are continuously asked to offer additional functions to patrons without receiving support, financial or otherwise, to do so. This book builds on the existing literature and research and offers updated information addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, intensifying funding cuts, and the challenges posed to BIPOC library workers in academic libraries that are steeped in whiteness.

Multiple chapters discuss the inadequacy of individual solutions and the need for structural and systemic changes. Courtney Dean and Angel Diaz discuss the reliance on contingent labor in archives. Lora Del Rio, Juliet Kerico Gray, and Lis Pankl connect absent leadership, poor management, and continual downsizing to a culture of overwork. Courtney Stine and Sarah K. Kantor describe the additional expectations of scholarship and service for many academic librarians, adding fuel to the burnout fire.

Burnout is compounded by discriminatory treatment of people with conditions and identities that are already marginalized. Vivian Bynoe and Kay Coates write about the experiences of Black women librarians, particularly during pandemic-induced lockdown and simultaneous protests against police brutality, and the need to address inclusivity when mediating workplace stress. In her chapter about chronic illness and disability, Mary Snyder Broussard sheds light on ableism in workplaces and the ways that changes in environment can add to workplace stress, which can also cause flare-ups or worsen symptoms. Other chapters address challenges faced by academic librarians who are also parents and administrators attempting to hold on to feminist values in patriarchal institutions.

The second half of the book focuses on both individual and organizational solutions to create better working conditions. Carolyn M. Caffrey and Joanna Messer Kimmitt’s chapter on their organizing efforts breathes new life into the reader and spreads hope with their description of collective action. Sarah Fancher provides practical advice for acting relationally when looking to improve conditions for all employees using radical empathy as a touchstone. Better onboarding and building transformational leadership models are also discussed.

Academic Librarian Burnout offers varying perspectives on burnout, but overwhelmingly these chapters speak of shared struggle and exhaustion. Academic librarians will likely recognize the experiences of workers on the brink in the unsustainable systems described in these pages, and they may find inspiration in the proposed individual and organizational responses to burnout. Though this book is specifically focused on academic libraries, it could benefit from additional context regarding the burnout that other professionals are also experiencing, and how they are responding to it. —Joanna Gadsby, University of Maryland, Baltimore County