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

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Surely that is some kind of oxymoron.

― adam. (nordicskilla), Thursday, 16 September 2004 21:55 (nineteen years ago) link

why?

― Symplistic (shmuel), Thursday, 16 September 2004 22:02 (nineteen years ago) link

My Aunt is a elementary school librarian. She sent me a Harry Potter book for Xmas a few years back.

― AaronHz (AaronHz), Thursday, 16 September 2004 22:07 (nineteen years ago) link

adam you need to come work in my library i think theres an opening coming up cos my coworker is determined to fuck up so bad they will fire him and he will get a pay out.. at present i am multitasking: trying to rip a copy protected beenie man cd, warming up the laminating machine and posting to ilx. i have just been mean and stern to a journalist.

― gaz (gaz), Thursday, 16 September 2004 22:18 (nineteen years ago) link

I'm a library assistant now, not a shelver and it's really nontiring! I don't think I'll ever bother getting another job, this'll do. I've always wanted one of those jobs where you go on the internet.

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:13 (nineteen years ago) link

Still happily a library assistant. I have achieved a sane kind of balance.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:16 (nineteen years ago) link

I think I wanna become a librarian too! Since we're apparently SOL cause we live in the US, me and adam should stick it to the man and open up an independent library. It'd start with a cart of books on the street, but just you wait and see.
I don't know how we'd actually make money, but we'll let our accountants worry about that.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:17 (nineteen years ago) link

I get so many free withdrawn books.

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:20 (nineteen years ago) link

haha! do you get to choose what gets withdrawn?

― gaz (gaz), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:29 (nineteen years ago) link

i might go and withdraw something right now.

― gaz (gaz), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:31 (nineteen years ago) link

from the stuff that hasn't been accessioned yet

― gaz (gaz), Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:37 (nineteen years ago) link

I don't get to choose :( but I do recommend they withdraw stuff and sometimes they listen! I really like sitting down with a whole pile of books and withdrawing them and crossing out the barcode and stamping them with WITHDRAWN, I like it even more than stack transfer.

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:06 (nineteen years ago) link

What did you withdraw?

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:07 (nineteen years ago) link

o god yes withdraw is better than stack transfer. but visiting the stack is nice. in the days before computers i used to have to amend all the added entries cards in the card cat when items were sent to stack...or just rip them out when withdrawn!

i withdrew a cd called africa never stand still.

― gaz (gaz), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:09 (nineteen years ago) link

I never thought about library work. How hard would it be to get into here in Aust without any specific training? My mum was a librarians assistant at my high school and she never had any certs or degrees. I should ask her how she got into it. Working in a school library would be kinda cool.

― Trayce (trayce), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:13 (nineteen years ago) link

lib ass work you don't need quals but its pretty frustrating i think (ie lib work is very heirarchical and you can't move up too far) although i know some lib ass's who practically run the library they still have bosses who treat them like shit.

― gaz (gaz), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:16 (nineteen years ago) link

Yeah that seems to be common, the boss being an asshole. Mum had a minor freakout/breakdown and quit her librarian asst job due to her rather insane witch-woman boss who totally had it in for her for no reason. I couldnt handle a job with one person to answer to who rode my back like that. I've *had* such a job and it killed me.

― Trayce (trayce), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:25 (nineteen years ago) link

I could see myself going to school to be a librarian.
It seems like the perfect "day-job".
Are there any well-known musicians who are librarians during the day?
Would it be hard to get vacation time for touring, etc?
I think it would look rad on a press release bio.
"Aaron, lead guitar, is a librarian by day..."

― AaronHz (AaronHz), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:28 (nineteen years ago) link

weren't the tuggers on librarian?

― gaz (gaz), Friday, 17 September 2004 00:33 (nineteen years ago) link

I work at a big library (I'm not a librarian, though--I won't front); one of the best things about the job is watching the parade of eccentrics who pass by and deciding which one I'm going to end up as.

― Stephen X (Stephen X), Friday, 17 September 2004 01:11 (nineteen years ago) link

i had an interview at my uni library last week. cheeky buggers said they'd get back to me within the week and they haven't! i reckon i'm a shoo in though.

― gem (trisk), Friday, 17 September 2004 01:41 (nineteen years ago) link

I buy stuff - books and films and CDs. I like it quite a bit, and there are no crazies here. I'm much relieved to find that, because the last two libraries were full of lunatics.

I could tell you a few stories about bad, bad managers in big libraries. Like the dept. head who chewed out my boss for 'spending too much money on her kitchen floor tiles' - this was supposed to be indicative of her lack of fiscal prudence.

Once people get out of big academic libraries, they tell a lot of horror stories about the politics therein. In one case, the place was violating every employment law on the books.

We have a lot of artists, writers and musicians working here.

― Kerry (dymaxia), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:08 (nineteen years ago) link

Blimey! My library was busy today, I was trying to listen to big and rich but I kept having to hlep people out!

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:20 (nineteen years ago) link

is there a lot of sexing in the dumbwaiters?

― mookieproof (mookieproof), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:29 (nineteen years ago) link

I've never been sure, but what is a dumbwaiter?

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:30 (nineteen years ago) link

I would like to join Oops and Adam's independent library, please.

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:53 (nineteen years ago) link

(Librarianism actually makes a lot of sense for me. The parts of my job now that I enjoy the most are the fact-checking/research, and I'd get to do that without all of the annoying deadlines and publishing constraints!)

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:55 (nineteen years ago) link

dumbwaiters are the little elevators that help you move your carts of reshelves from floor to floor.

i was a part-time library assistant in university at the biology-forestry library. reshelving the bound periodicals (enormous half-year volumes of 'nature' etc) was okay, but the regular books were awful because the whole library only used a couple tens-digits of the dewey and there were lots of unpleasant digits to the right of the decimal...

― mookieproof (mookieproof), Friday, 17 September 2004 16:58 (nineteen years ago) link

I just started working on my masters to be an Archivist. Hurrah! I'll see you lot in two years, then.

― Michael F Gill (Michael F Gill), Friday, 17 September 2004 17:02 (nineteen years ago) link

Oops and Adam I would like to join your library too. I can go back to being Archive girl, who spent most of my time downstairs reading weird Masonic charts and Latin texts and flirting with Cataloguing boy.
Michael are you at Ann Arbor? My friend just starting Archiving MA there.

― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Friday, 17 September 2004 17:33 (nineteen years ago) link

Jocelyn - I am at Simmons in Boston.

I figure going into archives is one of the most practical paths a person obsessed with collecting/organizing/researching music can take. If I ever got to work for a Music Archive, I'd be on cloud 9.

― Michael F Gill (Michael F Gill), Friday, 17 September 2004 17:40 (nineteen years ago) link

i miss tracking down obscure documents

― kephm, Friday, 17 September 2004 17:44 (nineteen years ago) link

My library has dumbwaiters right next to the pneumatic tubes, which are next to the analog intercoms; mmm....lo-fi networking infrastructure......

― Stephen X (Stephen X), Saturday, 18 September 2004 03:20 (nineteen years ago) link

wow--sounds like Brazil

― mookieproof (mookieproof), Saturday, 18 September 2004 03:20 (nineteen years ago) link

If we only had those tiny monitors with the gy-normous plastic screen enlargers. Instead we just have the tiny monitors.

Don't call me "Buttle"....

― Stephen X (Stephen X), Saturday, 18 September 2004 15:27 (nineteen years ago) link

I just wanted to add to this thread that I once had my photo taken for the paper at story hour when I was 4 years old sitting on a librarians lap, and I now work with that same librarian.

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 10:04 (nineteen years ago) link

I am a SENIOR INFORMATION ASSISTANT. Which means you're like a library assistant, but you get an extra 20p an hour and an extra bucketload of stress. Don't do it, kids. Sell ice-creams instead.

Then again, the free internet access is nice.

― hobart paving (hobart paving), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 10:55 (nineteen years ago) link

That is kind of freaky Elisabeth!

I am a librarian-in-waiting. I don't know if I'll be one properly even when I can though. As long as I can leave THIS job, that's the main thing.

― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 11:15 (nineteen years ago) link

Does a librarian-in-waiting get to carry a large fan to whisper behind, and wear a big frock?

― hobart paving (hobart paving), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 11:28 (nineteen years ago) link

If a certain recently-married ILXor is anything to go by, being an archivist means the fast track to wealth and power! I am very envious of her.

― Markelby (Mark C), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 12:07 (nineteen years ago) link

hmm, being in the right place at the right time has meant I've done very well for myself so far, but there's not much of the ladder left to climb, at least salary wise! (I hope that doesn't sound conceited)

Apparently I drunkenly belittled librarians to a librarian who has posted on this thread when I was in New York, for which I apologise. I had drunkenly worked myself into a state about the fact that ordinary members of the public didn't understand what archives where, which meant that my addled brain thought I was pitting libraries against archives.

― Vicky (Vicky), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 12:22 (nineteen years ago) link

I am currently reading a guide to classification which hilariously employs an extended anecdote about Harrison Ford's carpentry career and how he was good at it because he kept his tools in separate bags or something. Diddlydee, a librarian's life for me...

― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 12:25 (nineteen years ago) link

Ah, someone from the Undergrad Library just breathlessly showed up here needing to pick up an urgent patron request. I had seen the book on the desk earlier, I had no idea Hunter S. Thompson books were that U & K for academic classes.

― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 12:29 (nineteen years ago) link

My parents were Librarians too.

― jel -- (jel), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 16:21 (nineteen years ago) link

Oh god, that's nothing, jocelyn. One woman here teaches a course on 'exploring the goddess', and she uses all of this new age crap in her class. A film teacher wants every vampire movie in existence(I think he is just too cheap to buy this stuff for himself). Then there are the rich private.edu ph.d.'s who assume that all of their students are illiterate and who therefore use videotapes to teach Plato etc.

― logged out, Tuesday, 21 September 2004 17:15 (nineteen years ago) link

I'm a professional librarian. I've got an MSc in Information and Library Studies. Not quite persuaded myself to complete the chartership process though.
What you actually do day to day as a librarian really depends on the kind of library you work in and the role you've got.
I've worked in a few different kinds of library. I've worked behind the service desk in various public libraries, and also with the management team that ran those public libraries. I did a stint working in a newspaper library. My first proper professional post was as a school librarian and now I work in the systems team of a large university library.
I suppose it's always been interesting.
I found that if you were at a main branch, working behind a service desk was so busy that it was both very stressful and a quick working day. At a small branch, it was slower paced, but you generally had a more involved role and you weren't doing the same thing for the whole day.
Working with the management team gave you a different perspective on the process, very political - driven by a desperate search for funding and a need to justify the existence of the library service as a whole.
The newspaper library was both fascinating and incredibly dull. You'd spend the morning archiving the quark files of the paper into free text files to go in a database, which was so boring (though you did end up knowing a tremendous amount about current affairs). Then as the paper geared up in the afternoon and early evening you could be searching for information on anything at all and there would be time pressure - really quite a lot of fun.
Being a school librarian was a rapid learning experience for me and it took me about six months to really understand what I was doing. After that it became about finding things to do to keep it interesting for me because once the basics were in place the library practically ran itself (especially with the tiny budget I had). So I ended up inventing information skills courses and training student library assistants and I also became the unofficial school internet guy. The best and worst bit of the job was dealing with the kids. I really had a positive impact on some lives, I made some good friends, and I also had to deal with people that I would have done anything to avoid.
In my current job I finally got to tackle the things I specialized in with my library degree, techy stuff, databases, web design, programming, software evaluation, server admin. That kind of thing.
The thing with a big university library is the politics and people get so caught up in this artificial soap opera they create around status and money within the organisation. Thankfully most of the time I can just get on with my job and ignore it.
This has turned kinda long hasn't it?
Anyway, yes, I am a Librarian.

― Greig (treefell), Tuesday, 21 September 2004 21:21 (nineteen years ago) link

This is looking attractive to me all of a sudden. Does it matter where you go to school to get your MLS? My nearby options are Pratt or Queens College. Or, I could go home and live with mom and commute to Maryland. For those of you who did the program, how long did it take you?

― Mary (Mary), Wednesday, 22 September 2004 10:02 (nineteen years ago) link

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.

― caitlin (caitlin), Wednesday, 22 September 2004 10:29 (nineteen years ago) link

Anything and everything can have academic value (I once spent an entire summer processing Nazi pamphlets), but that is way too many copies of Jurassic Park, unless you have 80,000 people at your university, and there is a whole course devoted to Jurassic Park.

― Kerry (dymaxia), Wednesday, 22 September 2004 10:49 (nineteen years ago) link

I didn't actually count them, but they filled most of a shelf; by our normal space-filling estimates, it was about 30. I think the university had about 20,000 people all together.

― caitlin (caitlin), Wednesday, 22 September 2004 10:53 (nineteen years ago) link

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