Invisible Labor, Emotional Burnout, and the Work Between the Work

Technology failures in libraries don’t just interrupt services.
They generate sustained, invisible labor.

In small academic institutions with minimal staffing, every glitch, delay, or stalled integration becomes another responsibility quietly added to an already full plate. And the more a system is marketed as “self-service,” the more likely librarians become the everything else: tech support, implementation managers, translators, expectation-setters, and emotional buffers.

This work rarely shows up in job descriptions, workload analyses, or project timelines. But it is foundational. Whether a technology succeeds—or quietly collapses—often depends on how much invisible labor librarians can absorb.

When Vendor Silence Becomes Library Labor

Vendor support is often framed as a shared responsibility. In practice, it rarely feels that way.

In our experience, responsiveness varied widely. Some vendors were present but inconsistent, offering partial fixes that addressed symptoms rather than root causes. Others went quiet for months at a time, despite promised integrations and timelines. In those cases, every follow-up, every status check, every attempt to move the project forward fell to library staff.

The result wasn’t just operational friction—it was emotional strain.

Librarians became the public face of stalled systems, explaining delays to users, absorbing frustration, and attempting to maintain trust in tools they did not control. We were expected to provide reassurance without authority, timelines without information, and accountability without leverage.

That disconnect isn’t just about individual vendors. It reflects a broader institutional assumption that technology “just works”—and that when it doesn’t, libraries will quietly make it work anyway.

Invisible Labor Isn’t Extra. It’s Infrastructure.

This kind of labor is often dismissed as anecdotal or situational. It isn’t.

Across academic libraries, staff routinely spend significant time troubleshooting systems, coordinating across departments, and managing the emotional fallout of technical failures. In small teams, this work isn’t supplemental—it is the infrastructure that keeps services running.

And much of it can’t be delegated.

Institutional permissions, security protocols, and access controls often prevent interns or student workers from assisting with tasks like testing or configuration. What might otherwise be shared work becomes concentrated in the hands of one or two professional staff members. When only one person holds the keys, progress depends entirely on their availability—and their endurance.

Emotional Labor Beyond the Service Desk

Emotional labor in libraries is often framed as front-line service work. But increasingly, it shows up behind the scenes.

Managing technology failures required more than technical problem-solving. It meant translating vendor delays into language faculty could understand. It meant explaining to IT why a system mattered even when it wasn’t functioning. It meant preparing leadership for consequences no one anticipated when the contract was signed.

Sometimes, those consequences extended far beyond the library.

A failed self-checkout system didn’t just affect daily workflows—it impacted circulation statistics reported to IPEDS and reviewed during accreditation processes. Librarians had to proactively contextualize the data to ensure technical failures weren’t misread as declining engagement or diminished library value.

That translation work—shaping how breakdowns are interpreted across institutional audiences—is invisible, strategic, and emotionally demanding.

The Work Between the Work

This is the labor that rarely gets named:

• Preparing for vendor calls before the vendor shows up

• Teaching yourself systems no one trained you to use

• Crafting careful messages to faculty when tools don’t perform as promised

• Translating vague vendor timelines into realistic campus expectations

• Framing service disruptions for reports, reviews, and audits

It’s cognitive. It’s emotional. It’s relational. And it never really stops.

Survival Shouldn’t Be the Operating Model

Collaboration works best when it’s intentional—when roles are clear, authority is shared, and support is built into the structure. But too often, coordination across IT, vendors, faculty, and administration is informal and invisible. It isn’t assigned; it’s assumed.

That’s not collaboration. It’s survival.

And survival becomes exhausting when it’s uncredited.

Institutions that assume librarians will “just handle it” without redistributing authority, accountability, or care systems create conditions for burnout. Over time, the costs show up not only in staff exhaustion, but in broken trust, failed implementations, and systems that quietly fall apart because no one formally owns them.

What Supporting Library Technology Actually Requires

If institutions want library technology to succeed, support has to go beyond purchasing software. It means:

• Acknowledging invisible labor as essential work, not extra effort

• Building realistic staffing models that account for maintenance, not just launch

• Investing in documentation and cross-training, not heroics

• Designing permissions-aware workflows so work can be shared safely

• Holding vendors accountable through shared timelines and escalation paths

Most importantly, it means treating care, coordination, and maintenance as part of the system—not as personal resilience tests for library staff.

Until that shift happens, the real costs of library technology will remain hidden. They’ll surface instead as burnout, broken systems, and the quiet erosion of trust in tools everyone depends on—but no one fully supports.