Rolling 2011 librarian/library assistant thread

Yeah, the job market sucks right now.

Interesting... What constitutes a sucky job market in this field, out of curiosity? My ex found a permanent job she loves within 7 months of graduating (and never quite seemed to e.g. be in the situation of competing with hundreds of PhDs for a one-year post halfway across the continent). The few people I knew in the music librarianship programme at UB got good permanent jobs soon after graduation...

I think I am going to stick it out a little while longer but I am intrigued by and interested in being open to this option.

I don't know if that sounded really wrong. I actually think the work sounds really satisfying and valuable (certainly no less than writing arcane papers on mathematical modelling of pitch or teaching people to write inaccessible music). Didn't mean to imply it was an easy/safe way out, if that's how it came across.

Just had to turn down a library assistant job in Woodville, TX because we moved out of the town. They still use their card catalog and that is why I wanted so badly to work there. The books were all on the Dewey system, they did their own book repair and had a stack of subject cards with a sticky that said: To Be Filed. They still typed them out. I would have loved working there. Reminded me of the work I did at the school library in the 4th grade.

I left a 13 year library assistant job at UT in Austin to travel with my boyfriend. That position was in digital journals, working with SFX, establishing access, troubleshooting. I had once worked with serials and a kardex. We were moving to from SFX to Verde but then just before I left that decision changed and they are going with another platform. I wasn't as interested as I should have been. The whole digital journal thing has so many kinks in it, at least our system did. Nothing is standardized in the least. The publishers keep creating messes and nothing ever seems efficient enough. At least the way it was done at UT.

Austin turns up a few librarian and library assistant jobs pretty regularly. Recently Austin Community College had a Librarian position open, UT did as well. The public libraries, up until I left Austin in April, had library assistant jobs again.

late response to schlump/sund4r:
i don't know where you live, but i live in chicago, which has a lot of open library jobs to apply for but also a lot of unemployed/underemployed/looking for a different job library people (ie lots of competition for jobs). in my experience, this meant that it was very hard to get a job after getting my master's, especially because i didn't really have any experience in the field. after i got my degree, i applied for full-time jobs for about 9 months, applying to at least 2-3 jobs a week, sometimes more, and getting a total of maybe two interviews in that entire time. eventually i realized i was going to need to put some library experience on my resume, started applying for part-time jobs as well. i ended up working a part-time library job for about seven months (on top of almost-full-time at my other, nonlibrary job) before landing my current full-time library gig, and i think getting that job was also due to some library-related volunteer work i had done, as well as luck.

in summary, i would say that expecting to go straight from getting your master's to getting a FT library job without previous library work experience is unrealistic in this job market - there's just too much competition, even for the entry-level jobs. if it's doable, i would try to get a PT job while you're in school, even if it means taking longer to finish your degree, and/or looking for volunteer opportunities. it sucks, but it's pretty much necessary.

as far as how i like the work etc: i like my job now. i don't feel like i'm one of those superpassionate, born to be a librarian types, and i still feel intimidated by them (think i talked about this upthread). for me, it's a chance to develop a career (vs. a job) that works with my strengths. i've also been lucky in my PT job and my current FT job in landing in situations where i've been given a fair amount of responsibility and chance to develop my own systems/policies/etc - work independently and do things my way. i don't know if this is standard, i work in a small special library and i doubt things are that way in a big academic library.

I've been a library assistant for ten years at an academic library.
My dream is to work with a recorded sound collection of any kind, really (I've been a volunteer radio dj for thirteen years). I'm doing a practicum this fall at an art college in St Louis, weeding their lp collection. I'm incredibly excited about it, I think they were a little surprised at my excitement, tbh. It's going to mean commuting four hours round trip every week, but I'll get to spend time with my sister and her kids, go record shopping in St Louis and see some old friends there, and get some record collection experience on my resume.

Took the best class of my (long, drawn out) MLS pursuit this summer. All we did was tour special libraries and talk to the librarians about their experiences and work culture and then write two page papers comparing and contrasting two or three elements between the libraries. My teacher was the head of the Missouri Library Association for ten years, she was a prison librarian for far longer. We toured a maximum security prison library (most exciting class of the summer, for sure)

thanks for all this, everyone, it is genuinely educational & i've kinda come back around amid reading & thinking everything over again. i remember your posts about super-enthusiastic librarians, n/a, & i think it slightly informed my fears of what it might be like; that really it is a career for robo-brained cataloguers, but i know that isn't necessarily true. i don't know, so much of this is swept up in just fear of jobs, right now, rather than the specifics of specific jobs.

can totally see the appeal of working with what you love, trip maker

Via the Atlantic today:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/what-people-dont-get-about-working-in-a-library/243258/

Nice JSTOR news -- obv. complementing current copyright law and all but hey:

http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-journal-content

I wonder if this is a reaction to the Gregory Maxwell thing (former Reddit owner Aaron Swartz set up a spider bulk-downloading from JSTOR on his university account, was arrested; Maxwell uploaded a bundle of pre-1923 - so technically out of copyright but still being charged for - material from JSTOR to thepiratebay with a statement in support of Swartz. arstechnica link), or if they'd been planning it for a while.

Either way this is a good thing, of course...

Why do members of the public like to masturbate in libraries so much?

Sorry to lower the level of discourse on this thread.

because librarians are sexy

We do rule and all. Anyway, job complaints!

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-most-annoying-thing-about-my-job-librarians-tell-all/245530/

Starting Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian this morning. Did anyone else happen to read this one?

read some interviews with him when the book came out but never read the actual book

Anyway, job complaints!

Really, if people would just stop shaving their pubes in the bathrooms I would be content.

ha

working in a "special library" i miss out on so much of the fun/problems of academic/public libraries. don't get any random weirdos.

Well, when I worked in a "special library" my clientele was all engineers so they were just as weird as any academic or public library patron -- they're just weird in different ways.

yeah i still get weirdos. i just don't get random members of the public.

we only really got those whenever we had events with free food

I'm doing a practicum at a different academic library from the one where I normally work (as an acquisitions staffer). I'm weeding their lp collection, and while it is pretty tedious, I'm in HEAVEN. All I want is to be a music librarian. I'm going to the midwest chapter meeting of the Music Librarian Association next month in Indianapolis.

In other news, some dude broke into my regular library, broke a bunch of windows, shit on someone's desk (not mine!) and started a couple of small fires. The sprinklers put the fire out before it could do any real damage. The water from the sprinklers messed up computers and then went through the floor to the state historical society below. There was some damage to their materials, but nothing vital or valuable. We have to renovate the Circulation and ILL areas now, which is actually a good thing, as they are taking the opportunity to do some asbestos removal.

The arsonist was all over the security cameras, of course, and he turned himself in less than 24 hours later. Still, wtf, dude?!

Trip Maker, you are at the University of Missouri? I read all about that on my friend Stone Cold Jane Austen's FB page.

yup.

lol I wonder who your friend is

ugh i was just contacted by a professional acquaintance to see if i was interested in being part of a chicago version of this:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/men-of-the-stacks-library-calendar.html
this is not a humblebrag, i think the dude literally contacted every male librarian he knows

I used to work in a state government library where we had to have bomb threat meetings and stuff. The comforting thing about that, though, is that you gain the confidence to tell mr pee in the stacks where to shove it.

xpost -- I have been expressly forbidden by my girlfriend from participating. Not that I was going to were it not for a couple of friends on Twitter somehow thinking me posing like Fabio by a book drop was a good idea.

That said, Loren Morrissey, who the calendar is dedicated to, was a UCI librarian for a few years -- didn't really deal with him much but he seemed a good sort, and his passing was mourned by many here.

How do I shot peer reviewed journal articles?

Possibly of interest to cataloguers and library data-wranglers (hey, that's me):

The Working Group of the Future of Bibliographic Control, as it examined technology for the future, wrote that the Library community's data carrier, MARC, is "based on forty-year-old techniques for data management and is out of step with programming styles of today." The Working Group called for a format that will "accommodate and distinguish expert-, automated-, and self-generated metadata, including annotations (reviews, comments, and usage data."

Interested to see where this goes. MARC does seem fundamentally slightly ill-suited to modern database design or vice versa. On the other hand we had to turn off all our user tagging because the data quality was, uhhh, slightly lacking, so not sure about this "self-generated metadata" business.

This is interesting, but potentially yet another metadata standard. They proliferate like anything, it seems.

Yeah, that's true. Our building is pretty much split down the middle between the people who work in MARC on the OPAC database with all its cruddy old legacy data (us) and the people at the other end who work with technologies of their own choice to set up new repositories (them), and those folks seem to have a new favourite standard every other week.

Makes me glad to work on the unglamorous old system in a way, I always feel I can't keep up with their shiny new toys and buzzwords.

(Also if you work on the old system you might actually get a permanent contract, whereas TPTB like to hand out year-long contracts for new all-singing one-developer web projects, and then look surprised when nobody has the time or understanding to maintain them after the developer leaves. Only downside is you get paid less because you're just "support" and not a developer, even if you spend all your time coding interfaces and magic data glue just like the developers. Sorry, seem to have strayed offtopic a bit here...)

Meantime, of interest:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/st_thompson_searchresults/