Recipes for Mindfulness in Your Library: Supporting Resilience and Community Engagement

Mindfulness not only offers the possibility of a healthy life/career balance for librarians themselves, but in challenging times of rapid social change and uncertainty, it also represents a powerful way to build community resilience. In fact, mindfulness experiences can be structured to nurture the kind of civic engagement and discourse essential for library support. This collection explores a wide range of approaches that demonstrate how librarians have integrated mindfulness into their teaching, collections, services, programming, spaces, partnerships, and professional development. An inspirational idea generator for library administrators, marketers, and outreach staff, in this book the contributors delve into such mindful activities as

• using a work journal to practice reflective writing;
• mindful strategies for leading library teams;
• yoga and meditation groups at public libraries;
• helping students destress with a library Zen Zone;
• deploying digital resources to promote mindfulness;
• mindful scholarship at Minneapolis College; and
• overcoming research anxiety using a mindful approach.

As more librarians commit to individual and sustained reflection and practices in their own lives, those approaches can expand to include the communities they serve. This collection offers more than a dozen in-depth examples of mindfulness in action.

Madeleine Charney is a research services librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an active member of the Contemplative Pedagogy Working Group on her campus and helps facilitate a new campus initiative, Mindfulness for All. She is in the process of becoming a certified instructor of Koru, an evidence-based mindfulness program for emerging adults.

Jenny Colvin, MLS, is the assistant director for Outreach Services at Furman University Libraries, encompassing library instruction, research assistance, the branch libraries, and the library liaison program. She is the liaison to the departments of mathematics, computer science, education, and religion. During the May Experience term, Jenny teaches classes in storytelling and reading. She is a cofounder of the Contemplative Pedagogy Interest Group in the ACRL.

Richard Moniz, EdD, is Head Librarian at Horry Georgetown Technical College. He served as Director of Library Services for Johnson & Wales University's Miami campus from 1997 2004 and was the Director of Library Services at Johnson & Wales University's Charlotte campus from 2004-2018. He has also, in the past, simultaneously served as Head of Information Technology Services for Johnson & Wales in Miami and taught classes on subjects such as computer science, world history, US history, and American government. Additionally, since 2006, he has taught for the MLIS program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Courses taught have included Information Sources and Services, Special Libraries, Library Administration, Information Sources in the Professions, and Online Bibliographic Information Retrieval. Dr. Moniz has published in numerous places. He is sole author of the 2010 textbook Practical and Effective Management of Libraries, coauthor of Fundamentals for the Academic Liaison, and coauthor and coeditor of The Personal Librarian: Enhancing the Student Experience. He is actively engaged in the profession and has held a number of committee and board responsibilities within the ALA, LLAMA (Library Leadership and Management Association), ACRL, CLS (College Libraries), and Metrolina Library Association (including serving as President of this organization) in addition to other nonprofit organizations such as Carolina Raptor Center, Charlotte Museum of History, and Charlotte's Arts and Science Council.