The resilient public library: Understand and reflect on own practice

Abstract

This article describes, discusses, and evaluates an educational program aimed at building resilience in public libraries. The program focuses on personal and organizational resilience and builds upon four themes: trust, stress and uncertainty, group identity, and character strenghts. Eighty-seven Swedish public library professionals participated in it. A mixed-method approach was used to study how the program supported employees in discussing and reflecting on resilience, as well as how they experienced what the program had given them in terms of knowledge and insights. Two main results are addressed; (i) the value of an educational program lies both in its power to make employees jointly discuss and reflect on their own roles and situations and in library-management using this information to change the organization, and (ii) staff gaining new insight and knowledge from the program experienced improvements in a number of outcomes related to the content of the program. Overall, this study implies that locally designed educational programs facilitate both personal and organizational resilience at public libraries.