Faculty liaison is one of my current job responsibilities. I have been trying to reach out to the faculties here and one of my ‘strategies’ is to make them aware of my availability. “Please feel free to let me know if there is anything that I can do to help you with your teaching and research” — that’s what I keep telling them. Well, it looked like that I got what I asked for…some of them did take my words literally and ask me to do ‘ANYTHING’, like the other day, one faculty asked me to “come to see me to finalize the program’ (a library instruction session for his class). He didn’t tell me when and where, and when I emailed back asking what time, he didn’t bother to reply. I emailed him again a couple of days later but still haven’t got anything from him yet…Today I got another request from another faculty with whom I have been helping to search resources for her research. She told me she would like to be on a popular talk show and asked me to contact the talk show host about a possible program featuring her story…I was speechless when reading the email request. I was thinking “Am I losing the minimum respect from others if I keep behaving like this — a forever smiling, easygoing, friendly and helpful librarian?”
I am wondering whether any of you could share your experience working with faculty(or in the case of special library, colleagues in other departments)? I hope I could find some answers from your experience to the question I put in the title…Thanks.
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