Sister Professions: Tips for Social Workers To Build a Thriving Partnership With Your Community Library

by Amy Ward, DSW, LCSW, and Calantha Tillotson, MLIS

     Take a moment and picture your local library. Perhaps it is the one you visited as a child. There are shelves upon shelves of books. People are typing away at computers in one corner. Children are playing in the children’s literature section, and an older couple might be sitting in overstuffed chairs reading the local newspaper. You might even see a librarian quietly reshelving books or answering questions from behind a tall desk. This seems like just another tranquil day in the library. However, did you notice the man lying in the doorway surrounded by all his worldly possessions or the unsupervised, unkempt children who look afraid? What about the angry woman at one of the computers yelling at the library staff for the computer freezing and losing her job application?

Sister Professions

     As with most individuals, you may have a misapprehension of what librarians experience on a daily basis and the skills necessary to confront these challenges. Libraries are the center of each local community, and as one of the few remaining free services, they represent a much-needed space for the most vulnerable members of those communities—the people who may benefit most from interactions with a social worker.

     Whether or not you may recognize it, social workers and librarians serve the same populations, focus on the same overarching goal of helping people, require the same resources, and share similar struggles. For example, both social workers and librarians need to be able to build rapport, engage with clients, navigate bias, build self-awareness, and develop healthy boundaries.

     These overlaps are why social work and librarianship are considered sister professions and present the opportunity for effective collaborative partnerships. For more information on the overlap between social work and librarianship, check out Whole Person Librarianship by Mary C. Nienow and Sara K. Zettervall.

Shared Values

     Thriving partnerships require give and take, and the distinctions between these sister professions provide a rich wealth of knowledge and applicable skills to be shared with the other. For example, librarians are information professionals and skilled researchers, which pairs well with social workers’ emphasis on acquiring and applying evidence-based research in their field. In addition, librarians are the hub of the community where they are embedded, which includes freely accessible physical space, technology, and professional networks. These resources are especially helpful to social workers as they accomplish their grassroots organizing.

     Librarians exist to serve the people in their community, and built into the fabric of the profession is the understanding that they cannot do so in isolation. This means they are always seeking new community partnerships to remain relevant to their user base. Social workers are also seeking to improve outcomes for their clients and communities at large, so these partnerships are imperative to achieving that goal.

Ideas for Collaboration

     As the specialization of library social work grows, it is vital to dispel the myth that social workers or librarians must be fully embedded in the same organization to accomplish the desired positive outcomes for their clients. Although this is a viable choice for both professions, much can be done through project-specific collaboration.

     For example, we (a social worker and a librarian) developed and conducted a series of de-escalation workshops for library staff using a social work simulation lab. This collaboration also resulted in the creation of asynchronous training modules and the revision of library safety policies to reflect a more patron-centered approach to library service. This collaboration initiated positive results at our library’s public help desks, as library staff felt empowered to move from punitive reactions toward referring patrons in crisis to the applicable social services. Instead of immediately notifying law enforcement when a nonviolent patron is clearly in distress, library staff are equipped to assess the situation and make appropriate referrals.

     For more information on our specific collaboration, check out our 2021 article entitled “Building Partnerships by Infusing Kindness: A Social Worker and Librarian’s Shared Journey to Meaningful Cross Discipline Collaboration” in The Journal of New Librarianship. We believe that this positive result can be replicable across the library profession and additional public institutions.

     We encourage you to consider how you might want to get involved with your local library, and to get you started, here is a list of possibilities. You could help:

• coordinate a community social services fair,
• update the library’s safety procedures and policies,
• orchestrate training workshops for library staff (such as de-escalation or self-care),
• teach library staff how to report child/elder abuse,
• create informational flyers or displays (such as a crisis management infographic),
• build instructional tutorials (such as debriefing or trauma-informed best practices),
• plan and oversee a library patron psychosocial needs assessment,
• guest lecture or co-teach a library social work course for a Library and Information Science degree program, or
• develop programming for patrons in crisis (such as a peer support network for teenagers experiencing mental health issues or college students struggling with food insecurity).

Moving Forward

     If any of the above projects interest you, here are some tips we found useful throughout our collaboration on who to contact, how to contact, and how to meet collaborative project goals. For who to contact, some librarian titles to look for are “Community Engagement,” “Public Services,” “Outreach,” and “Programming.” When in doubt, you can always contact the Library Director, who can refer you to the right person on the staff. As to how to contact, academic libraries should have a directory, which just requires scanning to find the particular title of the person you are seeking. However, keep in mind that public libraries tend not to provide a list of staff, so you might need to use their general reference or help desk contact information, usually located fairly prominently in a “contact us” or “ask a librarian” box on their website.

     Librarians, like social workers, are overworked and underpaid, which means in this initial contact, you will want to clearly state what type of collaboration you are seeking and emphasize how it will benefit them and their patrons. Also helpful to us in meeting our project goals were such things as building a relationship around transparency and trust, stating expectations and objectives at the very beginning of the planning stage, recognizing the intersectionality of our professions, and clarifying for each other the communication styles and jargon present within both fields.

Conclusion

     We challenge you to use our collaboration as an inspiration for you to reach out to your local library and make a connection. We assure you that this will not only have a positive impact on members of your community but will also help you to create collaborative partnerships that will last a lifetime!

Amy Ward, DSW, LCSW, is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Social Work at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma.

Formerly the Instructional Services Librarian and Liaison to the Social Work Program at East Central University, Calantha Tillotson is now Assistant Professor and Social Sciences Librarian at The University of Tennessee Knoxville. She received her BA in English Literature from Friends University and her Master's in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the University of Oklahoma.