New Year's Resolution: Show Your Law Librarians Some Love

I found this article about The Benefits of a Thank-You Folder on the Hack Library School blog.

It tells the story of someone who works in inter-library loans.

One day, a client sent them a thank you note and the librarian kept it. They then started keeping other thank-yous:

"Now, almost eight years later, I have a file folder of all sorts of thank you notes! (Of course, external motivation is all well and good, but harder to quantify and no less important is the pride I feel in myself when I know I’ve done a good job (...)

"I flip through my folder every once in a while, if I’m having a tough day or realize it’s been a while since I’ve looked at it. It’s good to be reminded of the positive things I’ve accomplished at this job the last nine years I’ve been here ..."

At my place of work, we created a folder in our document management system maybe 2-3 years ago where we file away compliments and thank-yous from internal and external clients.

We've already accumulated a few dozen short e-mails with compliments.

We have received comments such as:

• never seen anything remotely like this from any other library, ever.
• dogged initiative
• shockingly quick
• kept all of the promises they made at the beginning of the year during training of new users

And then there is my favourite, when a user wrote asking if we could "please clone" a certain person.

I have used some of the thank-yous to help write performance evaluations and sometimes simply to spread good vibes. One compliment letter even led to an annual workplace award.

So keep sending some love and appreciation to your hard-working law librarians.