UL Professional Development

If you are a member of ACRL, you can join the Instruction Section for a small extra fee. Not only do you get the newsletter (a place for possible publication?), you can also sign up to be either a mentor or a mentee. Applications are being accepted for the next academic year now; check out this site: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/about/sections/is/projpubs/mentoring/index.cfm

I missed the sign up round my first year as an Instruction Librarian, and the window of applying was about 10 days last year, I think. At any rate, it was small, and you do want to share information about yourself so you get matched up with an awesome mentor. I sure did. The IS mentor committee set me up with a mentor who is a few years ahead of me in a faculty position. I had actually seen her present at LOEX and was putting some of her projects in action here, which made the match even more exciting. Since our conference attendance didn’t overlap this year, we communicate by email and cheer each other on electronically. The experience has been pretty great; she provides an outside viewpoint and set of experiences that are not a match with anyone else’s here. I feel like I can contact her any time to say hello, what do you think about this, or how did you get started in that? She is active in other organizations than the ones our library has ties too, so has been able to give me a push in a few different areas, or tell me more about expectations of service at different levels of the profession.

If you are already a member of this section and would like to be matched up, jump on it! The committee membership has changed, which may be a good thing, since the monthly discussion questions that were promised to mentors and mentees didn’t seem to ever appear, so we fumbled around a bit before we got our groove. It looks like this year will be more organized.