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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Library as Hub Chapter 1 Cultivating a “Mindful Medicine” Ethos — Rebecca Snyder and Robin O’Hanlon Chapter 2 Accidentally Sustainable: Building a Weekly Meditation Community — Laura Horwood-Benton Chapter 3 The Be Project: Sparking a Quiet Revolution in Rural Kentucky — Katie Scherrer Chapter 4 Providing a Space to Rest: Weaving Restorative Yoga into the Strategic Plan — Millie Jackson Part II Innovative Services Chapter 5 Mindful McQuade: Mindfulness in the Heart of a Small College Campus — Catherine Wong, Katherine LaFlamme, and Michaela Keating Chapter 6 Mindfulness Experiences: The Library Brain Booth — Katia G. Karadjova Chapter 7 Craving Quiet: A Library’s Zen Zone — Kellie Sparks and Hillary Fox Part III Personal Practice Chapter 8 Mindful and Reflective Writing as Strategy: How a Work Journal Can Help Make You Whole — Michelle Reale Chapter 9 Mindfulness Is Not a Life Hack — Elizabeth Galoozis and Caro Pinto Chapter 10 Outreach for Inreach: Using Digital Resources to Promote Mindfulness — Jenn Carson Chapter 11 Mindfully Managing Library Teams — Jenny Colvin Part IV Teaching/Research Chapter 12 Shifting the Pace: Contemplative Practices and the Research Process — Lisa Meléndez Chapter 13 A Persistent Praxis: Putting Mindfulness Scholarship into Action at Minneapolis College — Jennifer Sippel Chapter 14 Going with the Flow: Finding Flexible Functionality in Teaching and Mentoring — Anne Pemberton and Lisa Coats Chapter 15 Overcoming Research Anxiety: A Mindful Approach to Literature Review Searching — Elizabeth Galoozis and Kevin Michael Klipfel Contributors Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Writers offer ideas, anecdotes, and real-life examples ... A great resource for those interested in taking a mindful approach in their libraries."" — Library Journal