Makeshift mentoring for atypical academic librarians

Mentoring has been a part of every career in the modern era. It has been practiced so that a seasoned veteran in a career will give guidance to a protégé or a person new at a job. A typical example would be that a senior associate in the field would be guiding and advising a novice in the field. For academia this would usually mean a higher-ranked professor working with a novice professor to give guidance for the mentee’s professional career. However, what happens when a mentoring system is not in place at an institution, or if there are not enough tenured mentors available? In this article, two academic librarians tackled teaming up to work towards promotion, creating an informal peer-to-peer mentoring partnership. It became relevant at our institution because of this exact scenario. Suddenly, a lack of tenure, or as it is called at the university, University Librarians, caused a loss for traditional mentoring. Therefore, peer-to-peer mentoring was the best option as seen by the two librarians. It is recognized that at times it may seem strange for two associate librarians working side by side to work towards promotion. It was the option that would work best in this case. This article will discuss what informal peer-to-peer mentoring is, how two academic librarians have used it at a university to benefit their careers, and some of the challenges involved as they embarked on their mentoring journey.