Personal reflection points

• ■ What do I think defines a successful academic teaching librarian?

• ■ Do I think I am suited or unsuited to an academic teaching librarian role? Why is this?

• ■ How do I feel about my current teaching role (if I have one) – if I find it unfulfilling, what is the source of this, and how can I resolve it?

• ■ What actions can I take to get started, or to develop and enhance my role further as an academic teaching librarian?

• ■ How can I demonstrate or showcase the value I contribute as an academic teaching librarian?

Introduction: choosing the academic teaching librarian pathway

Choosing a career in academic librarianship means choosing a professional pathway that will almost certainly involve some form of teaching or learning support role to a greater or lesser extent. As the previous chapters showed, the critical issues shaping scholarship and research, evolving conceptions of literacy, new learning environments and pedagogical practices, socio-political and cultural trends, the demands of the workplace, institutional priorities and the shifting digital landscape have reshaped and revitalised the academic librarian's role, pushing instruction and learner support further forward as a core service, intertwined with other emerging services such as research data management, research impact support, bibliometrics and Open Access (Vassilakaki and Moniarou-Papaconstantinou, 2015; Pinfield, Cox and Rutter, 2017). According to Tait, Martzoukou and Reid, (2016, 8) ‘within the fast changing environment of academia, there are not only new emerging roles for academic library staff (for example, research and data management), but also traditional roles (for example, information literacy instruction) that have evolved with greater demands placed on technological, interpersonal, IT and transferable skills’. We also saw how specific competences relating to teaching, and information or digital literacy are now embedded in profes - sional competence or accreditation frameworks for librarians across all sectors (CILIP, ALA), although this is inconsistent across jurisdictions.

Writing about careers in academic libraries, Dority (2016, 54) stated that ‘academic librarians working within the public or user services arena will find themselves in a strong teaching and coaching role with students (and occasionally faculty)’. She also observed that the changing learning environ - ment and move towards digital learning has resulted in ‘many reference librarians developing a new set of collaborative skills around theories of learning styles, lesson plan development and instructional design’.