Conference on Academic Library Management 2026

As academic libraries sustain the brunt of ongoing reductions in campus operations, budget, and staffing, face rapid industrial disruptions, and participate in expanding organizational abandonment or industrial distancing from long-standing higher education and LIS values, library employee exposure to low-morale experiences, toxic resilience expectations, and burnout have amplified. These amplifications have sparked increased conversations about intersections of LIS worker health, industrial values, organizational performance, and the role of leadership in supporting employee well-being. While these valuable conversations help workers recognize how harmful experiences are encouraged and/or hidden by organizational and professional norms and acknowledge efforts to reduce the negative impacts of these experiences, established spaces for consistent communal reflection and recovery practice remain nascent in the field.

Building on Community of Practice (CoP) tenets, this session highlights an LIS-Mental Health practitioner collaboration focused on designing and offering harmed library workers opportunities to participate in a Community of Resonance and Experience (CoRE). An original concept that will be introduced in this session, a CoRE moves beyond a CoP by offering important sense-making information to traumatized library workers, curating conversation and learning opportunities with domain knowledge experts, and including purposeful activities for members to identify, consider, and practice self-preservation, collective care, and somatic awareness tools. CoRE goals may help employees at all levels (re-)kindle recovery from workplace harm, support incremental organizational culture improvement, and/or refine career clarity.