I’m pleased to be able to share Neurospicy Libraries with you today. Neurospicy Libraries is a project whose aims include advocating “for the hiring, retaining and progressing of neurodivergent librarians.” This site is a resource for both neurodivergent staff and for hiring managers looking to improve their ability to hire neurodivergent folks. Run by Joanne Fitzpatrick and Andy Walsh, they describe below how the project supports and gives voice to their UK colleagues. They have also included some links you might find interesting:
- More information on Neurospicy Libraries, including a collection of our outputs, can be found at: https://neurospicylibraries.wordpress.com
- Register for our upcoming in person event here: https://lancaster-uk.libcal.com/event/4094838
- If you’re a Neurospicy Librarian yourself, it would be great to have you in our forum, available here: https://neurospicylibraries.flarum.cloud/
The citation for the report mentioned in this post is:
Joanne Fitzpatrick, & Andrew Walsh. (2023). Neurospicy Libraries: No. 3 Recruitment and Interviews Report. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8269342
The Academic Libraries North (ALN) project, Neurospicy Libraries, is nearing completion after having begun at the start of the year. Lead by myself, and my colleague Andy Walsh, we were very grateful to receive funding for our idea to establish a peer support group for neurodivergent library staff. But what we have been even more grateful for has been the endorsement and the lending of status and weight to our efforts that ALN have provided, which have been instrumental in the visibility and success of the project.
Our initial plans were to found a forum to provide an online space for members of the Neurospicy Libraries network to connect, and to collect and publish anonymised reports that can be used to both highlight the issues that neurodivergent library workers experience and showcase the most salient advice available in those areas, before finishing with a launch event that will hopefully enable the group to continue into the long term, beyond the end of the funded project. This event, scheduled for the 14th Nov 2023, is where we will spend the funding money we have been given.
We found that right from the start, librarians from beyond the north of the UK and beyond academic libraries, where ALN has it’s focus, were politely asking to be included if possible, which speaks to the urgency of need for support of this kind across the sector. At this point, we had already thought about our values, and had decided that formal diagnosis would never be required, even just a small suspicion and a need for us was enough to be able to join in. It seemed in keeping with these values to have the scope be all of the library and information sector across all of the UK right from the very start. Our connection to ALN became asserting that academic librarians in the north were the innovators and the leaders.
We began by asking the network what they would like us to focus our reports on, and their top 3 responses were used as the themes for our reports. These were, in order, the Workplace Environment, Workload and Executive Function, and finally, Recruitment and Interviews, which is where I’ll focus the rest of this summary as being particularly interesting to readers of Hiring Librarians.
The full report can be found here: Neurospicy Libraries: No. 3 Recruitment and Interviews Report DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8269342
We had 26 responses from neurodivergent staff offering full free text responses to our questions, that we read through and picked out the key themes from. Most participants said that they struggle with interviews, and with understanding feedback and coping with job rejections.
With regards to interviews, participants told us about their strong negative feelings, stating that, “I feel like I’m in the dock having every part of my speech and communication analysed and judged positively or negatively,” and, “I have great difficulty responding verbally when under pressure and being observed,” and, “I usually assume I won’t get the role because I know now that I come across badly in interviews.”
Dealing with job rejections took an equally negative toll on our respondents, who said, “I find it hard to hear feedback as anything other than more critical messages about parts of myself that I really can’t change,” and, “After so many years of having social interactions and interviews go poorly, each rejection feels like another crushing failure,” and, “I have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) so to me it feels like a personal failing and like I’m never going to be able to get anywhere.”
Most worrying of all, was the strong preference to not disclose a neurodivergence at interview and to not ask for any accommodations that might help with the above. Respondents stated this was because, “I worry about discrimination,” and, “I don’t think it would be well understood and would work against me,” and, “I have experimented with disclosure more than once and all my concerns were confirmed.”
We also asked about direct experiences with asking for accommodations, and several participants told us that they had been ignored. Direct refusal has the potential to be challenged in court, with the recent NHS case here in the UK: Autistic man to receive £20,000 from NHS after refusal of job interview adjustments, and so this provides extra insight as to why ignoring those that do step up and ask for interview accommodations seems to be the norm, as direct refusal is risky.
You can see then, how there is clear difficulty in this area, a complete lack of mitigations caused by both fear of disclosure and the seeming ‘self preservation’ culture of ignoring rather than refusing accommodations. This all severely impacts on neurodivergent librarian’s access to work and career progression.
While not a full research project, our reports function as a voice for neurodivergent library staff, and we are delighted to be able to act as ‘cover’ for our colleagues to express themselves without disclosing. We have provided relevant advice within the reports in full, to enable those who do have power and control over the recruitment and progression of individuals, to have all the information they need available, without having to click through to the additional resources.
As well as really enjoying the feeling of being a positive enabler by providing useful support to colleagues, it has been a really wonderful experience to find the others who are just like us and to bring us all together. Personally, I have found this a very emotional experience, reading accounts of colleagues who are experiencing the exact same things as me, and I have a distinct sense of both no longer being alone and being hopeful for the future as well. I’m hoping that the next steps for Neurospicy Libraries, beyond our involvement with Academic Libraries North, is to help everyone within it to have that experience too.
Joanne Fitzpatrick is Research Data Manager on the Open Research team at Lancaster University Library and the co-lead of Neurospicy Libraries. Joanne is one of the CILIP 125 list of emerging leaders in the sector, awarded for campaigning for diversity and inclusivity. Qualified with an MSc in Information Science from Northumbria University, she is also the editor of CILIP ILIG’s publication Focus, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communications. Joanne has many years experience as a public librarian and holds freelance contracts as an assessment developer and independent assessor in data literacy apprenticeships.
Andy Walsh works part-time for Academic Libraries North, recently leaving his other (university) job in the hope this gives him more spoons to spend on training, writing and other fun things, including co-leading Neurospicy Libraries with Joanne. He is a National Teaching Fellow, writes / speaks / runs workshops on teaching, information literacy, creative pedagogies, play based learning, playful leadership, and neurodiversity in the workplace. He is founding editor of the Journal of Play in Adulthood and keeps on forgetting how many books he’s written.
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