The Mindful Librarian

The Mindful Librarian: Connecting the Practice of Mindfulness to Librarianship explores mindfulness, approaching it in such a way as to relate specifically to the many roles or challenges librarians face. Coinciding with the increased need to juggle a variety of tasks, technologies, ebooks, and databases, the new Association of College & Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy, and the challenges faced by solo librarians in school libraries which have suffered cutbacks in help in recent years, the time is exactly right for this publication. The authors hope to be helpful in some small way towards improving the joy and quality of life that librarians and library science students experience in their personal lives and jobs. The loftier goal would be to create a new lens from which to view librarianship, having a transformative impact on readers, and opening a new dialog within the profession. The topic of mindfulness is not new; it has been connected to various religious traditions in a wide variety of ways for centuries, most notably Buddhism. In the latter part of the 20th century, however, a secular version was popularized largely by the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his work on MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) at the University of Massachusetts's Medical School. The medical benefits and the overall quality of life improvements from its adoption have exploded in recent years, in particular, the last two decades which have seen mindfulness traditions incorporated into education to a greater degree and with very positive results. - Presents the only current LIS book that covers this topic in a way that applies directly to librarians - Provides a topic that will be appealing to librarians, as it speaks to the pressures of budget cuts and consumer culture being felt across the academy - Seeks to improve the joy and quality of life that librarians and library science students experience in their personal lives and jobs

Richard Moniz has served as Director of Library services for Johnson & Wales University's Miami campus from 1997 - 2004 and has been the Director of Library Services at Johnson & Wales University's Charlotte campus since 2004. He has also, in the past, simultaneously served as head of information technology services for Johnson & Wales in Miami and taught classes on subjects such as computer science, world history, U.S. History and American government. Additionally, since 2006, he has taught for the MLIS program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Courses taught have included Information Sources and Services, Special Libraries, Library Administration, Information Sources in the Professions, and Online Bibliographic Information Retrieval. Dr. Moniz has published in numerous places. He is sole author of the 2010 textbook Practical and Effective Management of Libraries, co-author of Fundamentals for the Academic Liaison and co-author and co-editor of the forthcoming Personal Librarian: Enhancing the Student Experience.