Happiness Research?

In my first post, I mentioned my interest in happiness research. That may not be a concept with which too many people are familiar. A few months ago I started stumbling across all of these references to happiness research or positive psychology, basically academic research that tries to explain who is happy and why. Probably the expert on positive psychology is Dr. Martin Seligman. He has a great Web site that has all sorts of questionnaires and resources about finding “authentic happiness.” This may sound new-agey to some of you, but Dr. Seligman is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and was the president of the American Psychological Association. Another Ivy League expert on the subject is Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches “Positive Psychology” at Harvard. (They, of course, both have books, which I read. Seligman’s is called Authentic Happiness and Ben-Shahar’s is Happier. I would recommend Ben-Shahar’s as a good starting place, although they are both good.)

Anyway, I started reading everything I could get my hands on about this topic of happiness, and I have become sort of obsessed with the idea.

Of course, we all want to be happy ourselves, and it turns our that there are some pretty specific things we can do (or try to do) to make that happen even if our personalities do hamper (or help) us in our quests. But what about our workplaces, and in my case, what about libraries? What can we do to make them happy places? I don’t know. But I’m willing to do a little investigation, and I hope some other people may be interested too.

Welcome to the Happy Library

I decided to start this blog to combine a personal interest with my professional interests. My personal interest is research about happiness and my professional interests are libraries, marketing, and fundraising.

It’s not always that fun to work in a library. We don’t have enough money, enough staff, enough time to keep up with the technology that threatens to overtake us. And we definitely feel unappreciated since supposedly everything can be found on Google. (I guess some people think that Google is the Internet. I guess Yahoo and Google are the Internets.) Plus, there’s that shushing, bun-wearing stereotype that we just can’t shake, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Check out the NY Times article, “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers.” http://tinyurl.com/2wk7j3

So this blog will focus on what is good about working at libraries and how we can make them happier places to work, to study, to do research, and (don’t tell anybody about this part) to have fun.

I hope some of you will join me in this endeavor. I would love to hear what other librarians and library lovers (and maybe even some non-library lovers) have to say about what makes them happy and how we can incorporate a little more happiness into our libraries.