Meditate in the Library

By the very nature of our profession, librarians must harness the chaos of information and transform it into manageable, tangible data. Whether it is through a conversation at the reference desk or through the wilderness of metadata, it is part of our job description.

Ameet Doshi writes “The fact that librarians, perhaps by nature, constantly seek to create order out of chaos can also lead to feeling of being overwhelmed by a geyser of information that is simply too difficult to keep up with. Sometimes this can lead to frustration and, ultimately, anger.” The key is maintaining internal focus while multitasking.

Devin Zimmerman suggests that librarians take a few minutes to “Take time, even for only a few minutes in your office, to just sit and breathe, counting your breaths to ten and starting over.” So instead of checking your email one more time, reconnect to your breath for a few minutes. I often do this, not in the office, but outside in the park next door. Feeling a little natural light on my face is so much more rejuvenating than that magical iced coffee from down the street.

Cultivating mindfulness with constant interruptions is the really hard part. It is easy to look at my entire workday as one long series of interruptions as I am constantly pulled from my wandering interior monologue to a student’s question about our catalog. Even if I am not actively waiting for a student to ask me questions I am still splintered between various tasks or distractions online. One friend of mine recently described Facebook as “the monkey mind of websites”.

Speaking of Facebook, I am brought to my second point. This is the degree to which technology offers even more distraction than in previous eras and thus more stress. Constantly checking the internet for constant updates is one symptom of how addictive technology can be. Each click of the refresh button brings with it a false sense of security that we are perfectly in control of our lives (false!).

Modern life in general can generate many feelings of isolation in general. We all work long hours away from our loved ones. I often doubt whether or not social networking actually fosters real connection between people or whether or not it just subtracts the amount of focus one has invested in any given interaction. Don’t get me wrong, there are a myriad of ways that these applications are beneficial, especially in the arena of publishing, but social interactions online are certainly less taxing than face-to-face ones.

John Kupersmith writes that “Technostress is another word for computer-related stress.” Personally, I do not find myself worrying about how well I will adapt to new computer programs but often feel limited by the capabilities of certain programs supplied by vendors. It is a source of frustration that I have an answer to a question but am consequently stripped of my solution due to outside operability issues. For example, a student inquires about whether or not GroveArt is available from home on their student portal and I answer “yes” only to discover the entire database is not functioning. The best method of dealing with this is to simply remain flexible.

Good web design should take into account how stressful its presentation appears to users. Kupersmith states that “One of the prime goals of usability testing is to identify points of stress” and thus eliminate them. Similar to how one must achieve a clear vision of any goal, a website must offer a clean and simple user interface that is intuitive to a user’s needs. Just as a website should reduce cognitive dissonance, a librarian should strive to accomplish the same goals for library patrons.