are you now, or have you ever been, A Librarian?

My university library had about 30 copies of Jurassic Park, and about 10 copies each of most of Anne Rice's novels. That's damn academic.

Just make sure it has ALA accreditation, and it should be fine.

My university library had about 30 copies of Jurassic Park, and about 10 copies each of most of Anne Rice's novels. That's damn academic.

Wow, that is shocking! I'm guessing that Jurassic Park may have been assigned for a class, but even so....that's way too damn many copies of this book. This library must have money to burn.

i think i should like to be librarian but it sounds like too much work to get there.

It is.

My current MLS/Archives program (Simmons in Boston) is 8 classes. If you took 4 a semester, it would only be one year.

Although a more sensible route would be taking 2 classes a semester while working. Which is what I am doing.

"What do you see as the most interesting and/or significant opportunities provided by the information field?"

Also, they want me to pick a specialization. Academic library sounds interesting to me, and having an M.A. in English might be a plus for that, but are academic libraries just mirror, bookish verisions of academia? Are the librarians up for tenure and so on?

I am also interested in the public library. I don't think I am interested in becoming an archivist. I think I am interested in a more general catch-all type of librarian, but please inform me of what the various fields are like.

The Maryland program is 30 credits--I think 2 years. That's a lot of librarianship.

as opposed to public libraries - endless new brats to annoy you and a rarely changing clientele of pensioners.

More than you might guess, I'd say. Working even as just a library assistant at one tends to wash away the dewy patina.

there is an endlessly replenished stream of hot young things as clients/patrons. i'm pretty sure thats why Ned stays where he is.

Oh dear. (To be honest, at this rate I'm not staying much longer unless there's a radical kick up in my pay rate/status.)

xpost

Two former employees at my library were caught in flagrante once. Somehow it was kept quiet. Ish.

So, do you think I should choose Public Library Services as my vague, intended specialization?

totally counts gaz!

the organisation does Mary.

but that's PRECISELY the sexy librarian look. a tigress!

b. old area lovely houses white anglo but growing vietnamese/chinese population. not much cash put into library system. horrible kids, psychos, very few "readers". staff all horrendous backstabbing women.

c. poshish area very white. lots of money invested in library. lovely collection, nice building, lots of elderly "literary" readers. really good staff (all women)

I suspect Nicole aka Leon will have much to add here tomorrow. I do know she's now got a job that she loves greatly at a business school library, though as you can sense if you read her earlier posts upthread it was a fairly miserable slog through school and job applications to get there. I'm certainly very glad that it's all turned out good for her in the end!

My sense of specifically academic library work, based on talk with her and many others, is rather like that of academic work in general -- in otherwards, tons of students and not enough jobs, and you find yourself having to scour listings like crazy and apply all over the damn place, and hope you find something somewhere, not necessarily immediately. Career tracks, conferences, equivalents of publishing or perishing -- I've seen, heard or observed it all, and I've seen all sorts of goodness and pettiness as well. It is, quite bluntly put, not a perfect world, just like academia, and I will refrain from going into detail about situations in my current workplace for obvious reasons. Suffice to say that I came over to work in the library after leaving grad school when it started to drive me nuts, and seeing the parallel world of academic libraries made me resolve never to pursue a degree -- ever. I do not have the desire to incur debt, switch to a part-time workload and more, formal schooling in my life as such has ended and good thing too.

If I do fully move out of library work later this year, I actually suspect I will not look back -- I applied for the job because the description sounded like something I could handle with my sporadic student library work earlier, I wanted to acquire formal work experience on a full-time basis, which up to then I did not have, and it had been recommended by Stripey, then and now working at UCI as well and someone who has also considered but for the moment has refused pursuing the MLS path. I have been very thankful for the job and have learned much and hope to still learn more, but if I never worked at a library again after this...I don't think I'll mind.

Newspapers have librarians too; The Village Voice has one. Also publishers: Oxford University Press had one.

It seems a bit lonely to be the sole librarian at a corporation though.

word ... after i posted that lawfirm/school librarian gigs were cushy, i suddenly realized, "you have to deal with LAWYERS (or lawyers-in-training) all day!"

p.s.: someone who went to suffolk law shouldn't be giving ANYONE attitude :-P

Well, there are various librarian groups out there like the ALA etc., so you wouldn't be fully disconnected in general -- but it's true, you might be the only one at your own job working on that while everyone else is talking marketing and golf with clients.

p.s.: someone who went to suffolk law shouldn't be giving ANYONE attitude :-P

Hey, you misread me -- he worked at the *library* there, he wasn't going there for a degree! ;-) Different things! I suspect he knew there'd be attitude going in.

I realize that I'm spending a lot of time sounding generally negative here! There is much to enjoy about my job, and most of the staff I work with are long-timers at both the library assistant and librarian level -- still, there's been general malaise in the UC in particular given pay freezes and budget problems, on top of the general institutional factors I've been describing. One school's experience isn't the world's, public and private schools can be a differing factor and so forth -- and of course, it really helps if you're extremely patient with people needing help in finding information. (Frankly I'm not, and I know this -- it's an aspect of librarianship that further explains why I don't want to be one. I have no problem in helping my friends find things, but I generally expect people to be able to figure out a lot on their own when there's procedures or links available to find the information you need to start -- which, as you can tell, is one reason why I'm so short with people when they don't use the search function here. ;-))

Instead I'm a good (if I may say) problem-solver and organizer behind the scenes -- Reserves work does mean balancing off questions from faculty, students, staff and more, and it's a much more central position in terms of an academic library's function than I think is fully appreciated (though of course we all want to assume our job is the most important ;-)). Reserves works for me as a continual process for improvement -- I made suggestions and changes after three weeks or so on the job, I actually ended up being the only staffer on the job after six months for a bit, and even today I still find new ways to improve what we can do, our procedures, our contacting of professors, our means of getting information to people, etc. That aspect I enjoy very much because, as I say, it's problem-solving, it's working on efficiency to get the job done and keep everyone happy, and indeed informed.

Now in a big organization like the UCI Libraries this isn't a librarian's job, but in a smaller place it could be and often is, and so is part and parcel of what you might end up doing. But as Mully notes there are different kinds of libraries and therefore librarians.

having said that i have never witnessed a law student being even remotely obnoxious to any 'normal' library staff either. i think that would be a silly thing to do seeing as you need the help of the reference librarians so much when you are studying law.

we have recently acquired a local looney though... he is a disgruntled ex-law student who keeps coming in and asking bizarro questions about legislation!

i agree. i was the westlaw student rep when i was in law school, and i relied heavily on the librarians. it was kinda librarian-ish, too, in its way in that i ended up coaching law students and professors not only on the westlaw database but on legal research. (and, like ned, i got impatient esp. since westlaw is a pretty user-friendly database and it gets even MORE user-friendly as they tweak it). the law librarians are perhaps the ONLY people at the school that i remember fondly :-)