Finding Peace Among the Periodicals: Reflections on working in an Academic Library

Finding Peace Among the Periodicals: Reflections on working in an Academic Library

Congratulations to Holly Meade Kennedy from Maynooth University Library, whose blog post was highly commended in the CONUL Training and Development Library Assistant Blog Awards 2025
The MU campus begins to stir as 8.30 am approaches, and the quiet is broken only by the faint click of my staff card scanning at the library entrance. Steam curls from my cup as I unlock my computer and take the first sip from the water bottle I will inevitably forget exists for the rest of the day. I answer an email from a lecturer and double-tap a post on Instagram from a fellow academic library reminding students they can’t eat in shared spaces. I laugh as I remember the delivery driver who dropped off four pizzas to waiting students one evening during exam time, and how the sight of them amenably sitting on the green across from the library sharing slices in the fading daylight was oddly heartwarming. They had found the perfect loophole – food delivered straight to campus, but technically not eaten in the library. It was a masterclass in student logic: bend the rules just enough to survive, but not quite break them.
(Image is my own) Maynooth University Library
I glance at this week’s to-do list. A meeting on Tuesday about our Athena Swan gender equality initiative. A webinar on Wednesday on ‘The Importance of Bibliodiversity’. Social media content to post about Pride Month on Friday. These are things I care about, and I feel lucky I get to engage with them as part of my professional world. My phone buzzes to tell me the New Yorker has taken their monthly fee in exchange for a digital subscription and I begin to roll my eyes until I remember how much I’ve spent on coffee this month and feel a sense of perspective.
I sip my cappuccino while it’s still hot – to get my money’s worth – and feel a sense of gratitude as I notice the peace that has fallen over my mornings since I took up my role in MU Library. Coming from a background in teaching and media, unsustainable levels of busyness became the norm. I didn’t go to work every day; I continuously existed within it. Assignment corrections late into Saturday evenings were standard and having completed three degrees along the way, I had forgotten what it meant to switch off.
(Image is my own)
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But my life came to a halt three years ago with the passing of my dad, and the anxiety that accompanied my grief caused me to reflect on the role that work and study had come to play in my life. I began to reset my view on things when one rainy Tuesday evening my counsellor said “we’re on this earth to be, not to do.” It takes the right person at the right time to say something that strikes you exactly the way you need it to, and from there I began to consciously look at the work I wanted to spend my days doing.
I adore writing, and feel passionately about its therapeutic effects a…