librarians and stress

This story has always stuck in my mind, my image of being a librarian was not a high-stress job, libraries are normally very calm and peaceful places and just how much stress and responsibility could looking after books be.

However these were opinions were not based an really detailed analysis, just my gut feelings. More careful research has found that possibly counter-intuitively that being a librarian is a very high-stress job:

Delegates at a conference of the British Psychological Society in Glasgow today will hear the results of a research project which suggests that being a librarian induces more stress than working for the emergency services, driving a 125mph express, or teaching a class of ill-behaved children.

One obvious problem is a degree of repetition and going stir-crazy:

Librarians, he found, were more significantly unhappy with their workplace than anyone else. “It seems they are sick of being stuck between the same shelves of books all day. They also found their work repetitive and unchallenging, and overall had very little job satisfaction.

One interesting idea I heard at the time was that librarian are regularly harangued by aggresive and impatient people, a key part of the problem is that they are often juggling a long list of unfinished tasks?

harangue |həˈra ng |nouna lengthy and aggressive speech.verb [ trans. ]lecture (someone) at length in an aggressive and critical manner : the kind of guy who harangued total strangers about PCB levels in whitefish.