Article
Failing forward
Journal of New Librarianship
(2018)
Abstract
Libraries and the tenure process are hard to navigate and even harder to change.
Early career academic librarians often are encouraged to play it safe in our teaching,
scholarship, and service while on the tenure track. But curiosity is the driving engine of
innovation and of providing new and exciting services to your users. Curiosity frequently
demands taking risks, and failure is a natural byproduct of risks. Hopelessness stemming from
professional failures -- or even the fear of possible failure -- can be demoralizing during our
probationary periods and negatively impact our users and ourselves. Librarians need to learn
how to fail forward in order to engage in creative risk-taking and become more comfortable
sharing failures with others to expand our professional opportunities. In this column, the authors
discuss realities of failure in the academic library setting and offer solutions for coping with the
fear of failure.
Keywords
- Failure (psychology),
- academic librarians,
- failing forward,
- tenure systems
Disciplines
Publication Date
February 2, 2018
Citation Information
Elizabeth Price and Dan Moore. "Failing forward" Journal of New Librarianship Vol. 3 Iss. 1 (2018) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/elizabeth-price/30/
Creative Commons license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.