Librarian burnout - share your story!

Maria Accardi, Coordinator of Instruction and Reference at Indiana University Southeast, has started a weblog called "Librarian Burnout" about burnout especially in academic library instruction, but also in libraries in general. Her goals: to "solicit and publish personal narratives about burnout from librarians" (real name, anonymously, confidentially), to "analyze the collected stories, identifying common themes, and situating them in the context of discussions of the literature on burnout in the profession" and to "discuss the current philosophies, practices, and professional culture of librarianship as they relate to burnout, and whether a cultural shift in the profession is necessary".

Dennis Skley: "Burnout!", 10. August 2014, Flickr, CC-BY-ND

I read about the blog in Meredith Farkas' blog post "Should the horrible first job search be seen as a rite-of-passage?". Farkas gives advice about how to make job hunting and job interviews an experience as positive as possible. She concludes that "we should advocate to decrease the number of people going into LIS programs" which is really interesting as we are discussing the same in Austria at the moment: Is it still responsible to educate that many young people when the job market is that tough? But isn't it possible that we miss the librarian of the century if we skip education for a year or some years?