Developing a Residency Program

Library residency programs can be a great opportunity for early-career librarians to learn on-the-job-skills, determine their interests in librarianship, and develop a valuable career network. Likewise, such programs benefit the profession, the hosting organizations, and other organizational stakeholders.

Developing a Residency Program: A Practical Guide for Librarians draws together scholarly literature, best practices, and the experiences of the authors and their contributors to provide practical advice about how to develop and manage a library residency program. The first two chapters of this book offer a brief overview of library residency programs and illustrate the benefits that such programs can provide. Chapters 3 describes strategies for building support for such a program, while Chapters 4 and 5 provide insight on best practices for structuring a residency program. Chapter 6 focuses on the recruitment and hiring process, emphasizing the need for a reasoned and objective approach to selecting a candidate. Chapters 7 and 8 offer best practices for preparing for new resident’s arrival and onboarding the resident successfully. Chapter 9 offers ideas for how to assess and evaluate multiple aspects of the residency program, while Chapter 10 focuses on supporting the resident after the residency is over. In each chapter, the authors include practical tips and tools to make each part of the planning and management process easier.

Lorelei Rutledge is a Faculty Services Librarian at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. Her research interests include recruitment, retention, and leadership in librarianship. She is also interested in best practices for outreach to underserved groups and program assessment in libraries. Her interest in professional development for early-career librarians combined with her experiences serving as the Marriott Library’s Residency Coordinator inform her writing in this book. She received her MSI from the University of Michigan, and her MA in Communication and BA degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She lives in Salt Lake City with her partner and her cranky cat.

Jay L. Colbert is the 2017-2019 Resident Librarian at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. Their research interests include the ethics of descriptive metadata, patron-centered technical services, and the dissonance between information need and information seeking behaviors. Their status as a resident combined with their (surprising) joy of documentation and policies informs their writing in this book. At the time of writing, they live in Salt Lake City with their suspicious bearded dragon named Coop, watching too many movies and reading too many books.

Anastasia Chiu is an academic librarian with special interests in digital libraries metadata and cataloging. Her research interests include workplace inclusion and diversity in library technical services, decolonizing library cataloging and metadata, and rights and copyright in digital libraries metadata. She is a former resident librarian of Temple University Libraries (2015-2017), where she worked in the areas of reference & instruction, acquisitions, cataloging, digital initiatives, and special collections. She holds a MSLIS from St. John’s University and a BA from Wesleyan University.

Jason K. Alston is a professor for the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri and a librarian for the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Alston holds a PhD in library science from the University of South Carolina, a masters in library science from North Carolina Central University, and a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Alston’s other topical interests within LIS include cultural heritage, information processing and verification habits particularly of African-Americans and those of the African Diaspora, and mass media engagement with libraries and other information resources such as museums, archives and heritage sites. Alston is originally from Soul City, North Carolina.