librarian – Page 9 – Dumpling in a Hanky

Thing 22 – volunteering

For Thing 22, we’re being asked to discuss the idea of volunteering, and whether we have ever done this in a professional capacity.

I have to admit that, since qualifying, I’ve not actually done anything in the way of volunteering in libraries, but it was probably my volunteering in a library that got me onto my library course in the first place.

After realising during my uni course that science was not going to be the career for me, and locating a postgrad course that looked interesting, and local (Scotland is not exactly swamped with universities that run library postgrad courses), I bumbled my way through my undergrad, and got ready to apply for a course that I had heard had far more applications than available places. So I needed to convince the organisers that I was committed to the idea of being a librarian, and that they should let me on the course. Due to the “interesting” approach of my uni and personal advisor (i.e. they didn’t manage or advise in any way, and I foolishly trusted them as trained advisors to know what I needed to do better than me), nobody pointed out I’d be half a credit short to graduate after 3 years, so I ended up doing an extra semester in order to make up that half credit. I decided to make good use of this time, and volunteer in a library, to get myself some experience before applying for the postgrad course. My friend was a trainee teacher, and had recently had a placement in a local secondary school, and she put me in touch with the librarian there, who was lovely, and very happy to have some help for a day or so every week.

So, I ended up volunteering in the school for a good few months, continuing to come in and help even when I moved an hour away: it just meant that I had to sleep on my friends floor (alternating between 2 friends) for one or two nights a week. I got to do the things that the very busy librarian just didn’t have time to do, like compiling the card catalogue records that came into the library with the books purchased and catalogued by an external service into a proper card catalogue, a task which the kids who liked to help out in the library also enjoyed helping with, under my supervision! Or fitting plastic-film jackets to the books, in order to get them out onto the shelves and useable, as cutting the film to size and fitting it was time consuming and would always be pushed down the to-do list by more urgent tasks. I was shelving the books that churned through the library, and helping to weed material that was obviously dated. And teaching pupils how to analyse the entry requirements and aims of a national poster display competition, encouraging them to consider what sort of material the commercial sponsor behind it would be interested in them creating, and showing them how to use paper and electronic resources in an appropriate way (it all paid off – their entry came 4th!). Staffing the library during lunchtime and breaks, to allow the Librarian a proper time away from her desk/in her office, while still allowing the pupils to access the library during their break time….and also maintaining discipline with the pupils during those breaks…I perfected a great Librarian Stare, which took a few kids who hadn’t spotted me by surprise, when they were running around, thinking they were getting away with being rowdy and I materialised silently behind them (or in one case, when they’d thrown themselves on the ground, above them). Staring. Silently. With the Dead Face. It’s very satisfying 🙂

It was a great experience, and I firmly believe that my commitment to volunteering in that school library, and the enthusiasm I left with for a possible career in school libraries, was a big element in securing me a place on that postgrad course. Who knows where I might have ended up working, if it hadn’t been for a first part-time job in a legal library?

So yes, for me, volunteering has been a great way to further my career. Would I volunteer again? Yes, if I was thinking of changing sectors, I think volunteering is a great way to get some current, hands-on experience of tasks and duties I would be unlikely to have knowledge of from my current role.

Thing 20 – getting back to my roots

For this Thing, I’m meant to be blogging or thinking about my Library Route/Root, or the path that brought me to librarianship, back in the Good Old Days. However, I was involved in the discussions that kicked off the creation of the wiki, and have blogged both my library route, and my root previously, so if anyone was particularly excited to find out, they can have a look at those – there’s been no major changes since I wrote them.

I haven’t however had a look at many of the other entries since the wiki was established in 2009, so I went over to poke about in some of the newer entries. From reading a good few of those, it seems that librarian career paths can mostly be summed up as:

I didn’t ever consciously think of libraries as a career, but ended up in them by accident, and it was a happy accident.
I started off as/qualified in something else, but I realised eventually that libraries were for me.
I always knew I wanted to be a librarian.

It seems that “I always wanted to be a librarian” posts are hugely outnumbered by the “I never knew it was a career, but now I’m in it, I love it” ones. Perhaps the always-wanted posts are so few because of the problems the profession has with negative and outdated stereotypes – I can’t imagine that if you asked a kid “do you want to be a librarian?” that they’d say “yes: where so I sign up?!?!”. Mainly because “librarian” to kids are the Frumpy Stereotype (well, for the younger ones anyway – give them a few years, then they’ll move onto the Repressed Sex Beast stereotype), and that’s a long established one. It’s not really something that’s likely to change soon (unless anyone has developed mind bleach for an entire population), but it would be nice if librarian/researcher/information retrieval specialist was a bit more of a visible careers option. I’m not involved in the academic sector, so I’m not sure how the Careers Service ties in, but how well informed are careers advisors on the information profession?

Hopefully, a bit better than my one in the early 1990s, who cheerfully advised me not to go into working in libraries (despite it being an equal first on my careers choices, tied with science, and…erm…landscape gardening or something similar in close second!), as “it’ll all be done by computers in the future”.

Well done, careers advisor. I AM that computer who’s doing it in the future: I’m a librarian.

It’s not about the speed, it’s about the skill

Recently, I was regaling my partner with exciting tales of what thrilling things I’d got up to at work that day, while he listened with eager attention. Well, actually, what he was doing was trying to go to sleep, and I was babbling at him about research problems, but…

I was explaining that I was frustrated that I was busy when a research enquiry that had come in, and that when I actually got a chance to do it, I found the answer within a few minutes. “I could have had that result back to the enquirer in minutes, rather than hours, and looked really efficient, since it was so straightforward to find.” I was pouting.

“Yes, but your enquirer has no idea of the level of skill it took you to find that answer. They asked you because they didn’t know how to find it, and you are the expert. Just because you could find it easily doesn’t mean it would be as easy for anyone else. And answering too quickly could make it appear that it was an simpler task than it was. To them, and probably others, it wasn’t an easy task: don’t make the hard things too simple, because they’re not.” he mumbled, and rolled over.

You know, he’s quite wise sometimes, that boy – the pressure to get things done and passed over to enquirers as soon as possible can make even the person doing the requested research work forget that the job they’re doing is more skilled than you might expect. Just because you can do it easily, it doesn’t mean others would.

And, it’s not about how fast you can do it, but the skill you use to do it.

And…the rest

Following the Good and the Bad, this is the WTF category. The contents are…interesting.
Some are fun and cool.
Some are twee-as-Hell, and play on the dowdy/boring/cat-loving old woman librarian theme.
Some have gone for the shushing harridan stereotype.
Some are unusual and interesting.

And some, quite frankly, are terrifying.

I leave it up to you to decide which is which. And whether some of them would find a better home on Regretsy.