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.