For too long failure in libraries has been considered a huge negative, a word you don’t want connected to your work, and an end. We think it is time for us to reclaim failure, normalize it, and redefine the word for what it is: something that happens to everyone, how we learn to become better at our library jobs, and just another stage in our and our library’s journeys.
For the Instructor College Steering End of the Year event we are hoping to do just this by gathering anonymous library failure stories. They can be short, they can be long, they can be text, they can be an image, they can be about a failure in instruction, they can be about a failed committee, they can be about they can be about a really awkward patron interaction, they can be whatever you want as long as they are library failures. All you have to do is go to https://libfails.com/submission to add your failure story.
If you are having a hard time figuring out what to submit please feel free to check out the first ever submitted fail for inspiration. And if you want to make a Meme Image as your fail, or to accompany it, you can do so easily at https://addtext.com/
This is a safe place to let these failures out. We do not collect any information from anyone who submits and we believe we should all relish in our failures. They are what help us learn and grow and become better library professionals. We all fail, all the time in little, medium, and big ways and that is totally OK! Please join us in normalizing failure and the sharing of failure stories by submitting your own and maybe, just maybe, someone else can also learn from your failure as you learn from theirs. And if at any point you want your failure taken down we totally understand, all you have to do is email libfails@acmescience.com with a link to the post asking it to be taken down.