Another topic I’ve been thinking about lately is professional identity. I know a lot of people who are happy to come in to work eight hours a day, but don’t plan to continue their work at home. I know others who seem to spend every waking minute on some aspect of their professional life. I fall closer to the second end of that spectrum.
I think that is because I view professional identity as something bigger than a job. It’s tied up in conferences, writing, presentations, committee work, consulting, and lord knows what other areas in addition to the day-to-day job. And though when you’re involved in all these areas it takes more time, it also gives you a bigger area of impact. For me, as one who gets a lot of self worth from my professional involvement, I think it’s actually a bit healthier. All my eggs aren’t in the work basket. If nothing too exciting is happening at my library, maybe I have a presentation coming up. If I don’t have a piece of writing in the works, there’s probably something good going on at work. You see that ebb and flow here. There are times when work, committees, etc. are keeping me so busy I don’t have time to check in. There are other times that the blog is a life line to professional involvement.
And in the end, everything enriches everything else. Every presentation I give helps me learn something new that I can take back to work. Every interesting project at work is potential fodder for an article or talk. That interconnectedness is my professional involvement, and I’m thankful for it.
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I understand completely! It seems like, even when I am not “at work,” I constantly encounter ideas that I think might be good to incorporate into my work-life, and vice versa.
Perhaps it is a sign that we truly enjoy our jobs. I remember having jobs that completely drained me, instead of energizing me, as my current one (usually) does. In those past positions, I tried not to think about work while at home.
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 9:26 am ¶I find this particularly interesting as librarians seem to go one way or the other with almost no grey area in the middle. The bulk of my friends from library science school are the kind of people who are “all in.” They read library journals at home, they browse library related websites, they attend conferences, etc. However, there’s an entire compliment of librarians that I’ve met in the years since graduation who see their career as a nine-to-five thing (many are public librarians, by the way, though I’m not attempting to draw a conclusion by saying that).
For me, the entire discussion gets even murkier when you begin considering subject librarians (which I’m one of) who work in very specialized fields (which I do), because it’s like having two distinct jobs – I’m viewed as a librarian and a genocide expert. This means that even if we are fully immersed (as I think I am), it might not be library science as such, but possibly a subject area that we cultivate in order to become even better experts at shepherding information.
The conferences I attend, the presentations I give, the articles I write, and even the blogs I read, wind up being a fairly mixed lot of the two. On the surface, you’d think that everything I’m writing, attending, and presenting was simply Holocaust/genocide related – The Origins of Violence in Darfur, Finding Primary Sources for Holocaust Research, Following the Paper Trail of Modern Genocide — but in truth, they straddle that line between information and subject specialization.
At the same time, you could just as easily find me at an Intellectual Freedom Committee meeting (state or national), which, now that I think about it, kind of bridges the gap as much as any of subject specific things I do.
Posted 12 Feb 2008 at 1:41 pm ¶Thanks for your comments! Michelle, I know what you mean– I feel my work energizes me, too. I like that about library work. So much of it resonates with my larger world view that it just makes sense to have integrated some of it into my personal life.
Tim, I think you make interesting points! I hadn’t thought of the potential to be a leading expert in a subject area (mine in Women’s and Gender Studies), but I can see how that could be the case, particularly in a field like yours. It sounds like you have very interesting work!
Posted 14 Feb 2008 at 12:07 am ¶I’m active in my day job as well as on a national professional level, but for most nights and weekends, I spend my time on other things. I have a wide array of interests that keep me busy outside of my working hours, and just like your professional activities, they can inform my work as well. These are not mutually exclusive lifestyle choices.
Posted 14 Feb 2008 at 4:30 pm ¶Hey, Anna. I didn’t mean that everyone has to spend ever waking minute of the day on library-related work. And I think we’re saying close to the same thing, just coming from different perspectives. For me, a lot of the involvement is a hobby and a diversion from the day-to-day library work. Broad involvement (being diverse hobbies or more focused in one area) means that there are more opportunities for interesting activity at any time. And, really, we can sometimes learn the most from things outside of the field. Everything enriches everything else. Thanks for your thoughts.
Posted 16 Feb 2008 at 3:19 pm ¶Post a Comment