Failure to Launch: Feelings of Failure in Early Career Librarians

Abstract

This article is adapted from a lightning talk given at the New Librarian Symposium 3.0 held in Toronto, Ontario on Friday June 15th 2018. The feeling of being a failure is something that has been familiar to us at various points in our LIS careers. By exploring our personal narratives of failure, we look more critically at our understanding of failure and how it works within the broader context of our profession and professional identities. This exploration revealed that our experiences of failure are heavily influenced with systemic structures, including institutional and societal pressures, professional norms, and broader neoliberal and capitalist ideas. Failure has a tendency to be something that we regard inwardly and carry individual responsibility for; we want to encourage readers to look beyond themselves as a source of failure and instead at the structures and systems that influence our work and understanding of failure.