Call for Proposals: Cultivating Personal Meaning: Reframing Success and Thriving in Academic Librarianship Edited collection
Editors:
Russell Michalak & Trevor A. Dawes
About the Volume
In academic libraries, we frequently define student success and institutional success, but far less often examine what professional success means for academic librarians and library workers themselves. Traditional markers of achievement, such as titles, promotions, prestige, and compensation, remain important and meaningful, yet they do not fully capture the diverse ways professional impact, contribution, and thriving are enacted across roles, institutions, and career stages.
This edited collection explores how success is defined, pursued, and sustained in academic libraries under real-world conditions shaped by structural constraints, material realities, and evolving professional expectations. Rather than framing success as a singular endpoint or linear trajectory, the volume approaches success as an active practice, contextual, relational, and shaped by institutional structures as well as individual agency.
The volume is organized around three interrelated themes:
I. Reconsidering Success in Academic Librarianship
This section interrogates dominant definitions of professional success and rearticulates success as contribution, influence, expertise, and institutional impact. Chapters may examine tensions between purpose-driven work and status-based achievement; critique systems of evaluation, advancement, and recognition; or propose alternative frameworks for understanding leadership, impact, and professional legitimacy.
II. Professional Lives Across Roles and Career Paths
This section addresses success across the full career arc, including early-career precarity, mid-career plateaus and immobility, late-career and post-pinnacle roles, and transitions out of academic librarianship. Leadership is understood as practice rather than position, enacted through collaboration, care, mentoring, technical expertise, advocacy, assessment, and implementation. Narratives of leaving the profession are welcomed and treated as legitimate rearticulations of success rather than failure.
Chapters may also examine specialist or technical roles whose contributions are essential yet undervalued, as well as professional associations and communities of practice as sites of learning, leadership, and recognition beyond one’s home institution.
III. Sustainability, Well-Being, and Collective Contexts
This section explores how thriving is cultivated, not only individually but collectively within institutional environments. Contributors are encouraged to examine sustainability, workload realities, burnout, immobility, equity structures, and shared leadership models. Drawing on scholarship such as Jon E. Cawthorne’s work on distributed leadership, this section highlights the “middle” as a critical site of implementation, accountability, and change.
We particularly encourage proposals that integrate equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) throughout their analysis and examine how systems of recognition and advancement shape professional well-being and long-term sustainability.
Types of Contributions
This collection places no restrictions on genre, methodology, or epistemological approach. We welcome chapters that are reflective, analytical, empirical, experimental, or creative in scope, provided they are grounded in professional practice and clearly connected to questions of contribution, success, and institutional impact within one or more of the three thematic sections above.
Submissions may include, but are not limited to:
- Personal narratives or reflective essays
- Autoethnographies
- Qualitative research studies
- Quantitative research studies
- Mixed-methods research
- Case studies
- Program or project assessments
- Theoretical or conceptual analyses
- Creative or experimental formats
- Hybrid approaches that blend multiple forms
ContributorsWe use the term contributors to emphasize that institutional impact is not limited by title, rank, degree status, or methodology. We welcome submissions from librarians, paraprofessionals, technologists, administrators, students, and collaborative partners across roles, career stages, and institutional contexts.
We recognize that professional success is not experienced uniformly. For non-degreed and paraprofessional library workers—those in roles that do not require an advanced degree—success is often shaped by material constraints, including limited advancement pathways, wage compression, and educational debt. These challenges may be compounded by toxic workplace dynamics such as chronic understaffing, inequitable workloads, exclusion from decision-making, and cultures of silence.
Contributors are encouraged to move beyond description to demonstrate how their work supports organizational health, equity, sustainability, and meaningful institutional change, offering adaptable insights for diverse professional settings.
Each chapter should offer readers adaptable insights, practices, frameworks, or approaches that can be implemented within their own institutional contexts--the chapter should be solution-based.
Chapter Length and Format
Proposed chapters are expected to range from approximately 1,000 to 4,000 words, though longer empirical or programmatic chapters are encouraged.
Submission Guidelines
Proposals should include:
Empirical proposals should note the status of data collection and IRB approval, if applicable.Purpose and Contribution
This volume seeks to shift the conversation from diagnosing challenges to examining how success and thriving are cultivated in practice. By expanding what counts as professional success and making diverse forms of contribution visible and legible, Cultivating Personal Meaning offers a grounded, solutions-oriented exploration of what it means to do meaningful, sustainable, and valued work in academic libraries today.
Each section will conclude with editorial reflections that synthesize key insights and highlight practical, adaptable takeaways for readers.
Timeline
- February 2026 – Call for Proposals released
- March 30, 2026 – Proposal submission deadline
- April 2026 – Acceptance notifications sent
- September 1, 2026 – First full draft due
- January 1, 2027 – Second draft due
- March 31, 2027 – Final edited manuscript due to ACRL
Submission
Proposals can be submitted via this form.
Questions
Please direct questions to either Russell Michalak (michalr@gbc.edu) or Trevor A. Dawes
