Job Burnout and Its Relationship to Demographic Variables in Academic Librarians of Isfahan

People working in social services who are in contact with people on regular basis, spend a lot of time and energy on providing services for others. Compared to others, it’s easier for these people to suffer from job burnout, and for the quality of their services to drop as a result. Since a librarian’s job is to provide social services, the current study aims to review job burnout and its relationship with demographic variables among academic librarians. The data gathering tool is Maslach’s Job Burnout Questionnaire which measures the job burnout through its three subscales each of which measures emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and individual performance. The reliability of the Persian version of this questionnaire had been measured earlier using Cronbach's alpha, reported to be 0.86%. All in all, the studied librarians demonstrated low levels of Burnout. However, the results of the study showed that no significant relationships existed between job burnout and demographic variables of education, work experience, marital status, and age while, there appeared to be a significant relationship between job burnout and the other three variables of university in which the person works, gender and type of employment. Due to low levels of Burnout in librarians under study, one would cautiously conclude that although the nature of a librarian’s job is service based, the people working in this line of work show lower job burnout compared to the employees of other service based jobs. Also, it seems job burnout in academic librarians is affected by other variables relevant to cultural, social and psychological factors.