The ThriveLib 2026 digital conference focused on the elephant in the room: library workers are overworked, overstretched and operating in a system that traditionally doesn’t support the human element of the job…particularly the human at the desk. There were so many informative and eye-opening presentations over the three days, it would be difficult to encapsulate the entire conference in a single blog post, so I have chosen to talk about three of my favorites. A lot of what follows would have been very helpful when I was working in a public library, but that doesn’t mean academic librarians don’t experience the same types of challenges or can’t use the same guidance.

Opening Keynote, “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout,” Kelly Jensen

In her opening keynote, “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout,” author and speaker Kelly Jensen really set the stage for the entire conference. Her presentations shined a light on the harsh reality of library work. Using her own survey of library workers, Jensen showed that 60% of respondents experienced burnout and 40% faced chronic stress as a direct result of their jobs. The single most cited day-to-day stressor was mission creep (tell me about it!). If you don’t know what mission creep is you are very lucky, it is the gradual, unexpected expansion of roles beyond the original purpose. Libraries seem to suffer from this phenomenon across the board. This constant pressure to act as a primary social safety net is fueled by “vocational awe” (the systemic belief that libraries are inherently sacred institutions, which normalizes the expectation that library workers should self-sacrificially absorb any workload, trauma, or community crisis without complaint*) and leaves 71% of workers suffering from overwork and 60% dealing with anxiety, panic, or hypervigilance. Jensen and frontline workers from her survey emphasized that while traditional morale-building efforts like pizza parties are nice, they are not a substitute for structural reform. True workforce sustainability requires secure funding, leadership reform, and trauma-informed policies.
* Fobazi Ettarh coined this term in her paper, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” 2018.

“The Cost of Caring: Recognizing and Navigating Compassion Fatigue in Library Work,” Hollie Marble

One of the conference’s most poignant distinctions came from Hollie Marble, creator of The Cost of Caring workbook. Marble clarified the differences between burnout and compassion fatigue. Before her presentation, I would have put them together, thinking they were synonyms. But the two occupational phenomena are distinct and require equally different ways to recover. Burnout is a workload and systems problem that occurs when job demands outpace resources and is characterized by physical exhaustion and it generally responds well to rest and vacation. Compassion fatigue, on the other hand, is about the nature of the work. It a occurs when empathetic library workers absorb the trauma, grief, and crises of the community they serve. It is a form of secondary trauma and does not heal over a long weekend; a worker can sleep eight hours and still wake up emotionally numb and disconnected.
To combat this there are two actionable strategies for recovery that require tapping into the parasympathetic nervous system (essentially switching off your flight or fight mode):

• Build a Transition Ritual: Create a consistent, intentional boundary between work and home to signal to your nervous system that you are off the clock. This can be as simple as changing your clothes the moment you walk through the door, taking a specific walking route, or playing a designated song on your commute.
• Give What You Absorbed Somewhere to Go: Emotional weight has to be physically processed and not pushed down or away. To move this emotional energy through the body, use reflective journaling, screaming into the void, making art, or simply going to a place where you feel like a person rather than a job (i.e. no one expects you to be anything but you).

“More Than a Checklist: Onboarding As a Practice of Care,” DeAnn Brame, Amanda McLeod, and Emily Cranwell

Finally, presenters DeAnn Brame, Amanda McLeod, and Emily Cranwell shared a qualitative study of 361 library workers to challenge the traditional, transactional HR onboarding checklist (we are all familiar with those). They proposed shifting the focus from “What does a new hire need to start?” to “What do they need to thrive? “ By transforming onboarding into a collaborative, relational practice of care, libraries can combat early burnout and foster a deep, immediate sense of belonging.
They gave us four pillars of care-based onboarding:

• Relationality: Balance technical training with a person-centered welcome by taking time to build relationships across departments and ditching info-dumps for ongoing, relational check-ins.
• Non-Transactional Support: Prioritize employee agency and well-being over immediate, high-speed productivity. Essentially…everyone learns at their own speed and literally just respecting that over prioritizing output.
• Collaboration: Integrating a new hire is a collective organizational responsibility, and it shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of a single supervisor.
• Iterative Assessment: Real evaluation isn’t about hovering with a clipboard; it’s about regular, low-stakes check-ins to see if the system is supporting the person, not just testing the new hire. This also means giving new hires a year to find their feet.

Wow. So this has already become a longer post than intended. I hope the little snippets have helped or maybe piqued your interest. There were so many wonderful presentations that made the conference a valuable learning experience. 10/10 would recommend. I have access to slides and videos and other resources, so please email me if you want more information. Also, full disclosure: I had a little help from Gemini Notebook to sift through pages of conference transcripts and produce summaries.