I worked in a college library for 14 years. Good times.
How much pressure to put the emphasis on non-print media are you feeling?
OK, a few questions I’ve long wanted to know:
- Do people really need a master’s in library sciences? I always thought that was job-requirement overkill. Is it to stave off all the Average Joes or Janes who would otherwise flood libraries with job applications?
- How fun or not-fun is the job?
- How is the pay? Good, or sucks?
Would you love to have been head librarian at the ancient Library of Alexandria during its heyday? I would.
It fills me with great sorrow to think of all the knowledge lost forever to mankind after the library’s destruction. Not till the Renaissance, did we begin to regain some of it.
Here’s a question I asked my local public librarian yesterday (in more polite form): WHY THE FUCK do you have ten copies of Mel Brooks’s recent autobiography sitting on your “NEW BOOKS” shelf for the past month or more?
I mean, I live in an area with many Jewish retirees, some of whom must be big Mel Brooks fans, and I actually am a big enough MB fan (mostly the early films–his past few decades he’s made a lot of crap) that I took the book out from this library and read it–and it was terrible. Basically 400 pp. of “I met this celebrity here, worked with this one there, and had a bowl of soup with this one’s daughter one time,” gossip, random encounters, detailed chronologies of events I don’t care about at all, just self-indulgent, boring AWFUL. But that’s not the point–the fact that 10 copies are sitting on the shelf is the point. If there were actually a demand for this turkey, there would be 0 copies sitting on the shelf, right? I mean, case closed. If people wanted to read it, there would be a long line of patrons with their names on a waiting list, and the library would rapidly be reordering extra copies, right? I mean, this is a cockup of the greatest proportions in the book-ordering process, right?
I believe that if lending libraries were invented today, they’d be outlawed. We are lucky they have been grandfathered into our law.
I have been very happy with the selection of ebooks at the two local library systems i can use. I gather they can only “buy” a copy for a limited time, simulating the wear and tear on physical books, or something. But honestly, I’m borrowing ebooks because i don’t like the way digital licenses are handled for consumers, either, so i guess I’m outsourcing that. (I’m just borrowing the book, i have no expectation it will still be there next year.)
I am curious how the library decides how much to buy in paper and how much digitally, and what the considerations are. So you have any insight into that?
Does your user name have anything to do with the library sciences? I searched it and found this on libraryThing.com. What’s that series about?
Yep. Current department head in a large academic library.
Granted, a good bit of that would be my mother going though all her kids’ and siblings’ names (one is Marian) before getting to mine.
- yes and no. I have hired people into librarian positions who don’t have the mlis. There’s roles that are just hard to fill! (Science librarian comes to mind). The degree has become a hoop you jump though to get the title and I wish we as a profession could pull together a decent apprenticeship system. And even when we require it, we still get to applications from people who don’t have it - but as a state institution, a required qualification is absolutely required
There’s a lot of on the job learning that happen in librarianship, things that degree programs don’t/can’t teach you. And there’s gatekeeping that happens too, and the degree requirements tend to keep it a largely white, middle class, female profession (except when you get to the upper levels of academic libraries, which tend to be a lot more male than other positions.
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some days awesome, some days not so much. But mostly I get to work with great people and students, so that’s the best part.
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pay is not great, and varies tremendously on type of library, geographic location, union status, etc.
I’m married to an ex-academic librarian. One of her best stories is about the time she was working in her university library’s archives section, and a journalism major came over to ask her which war it was that was going on in 1942.
Have you got any more good ones like that?
Your basic e-book is essentially a file containing text and possibly images. Digital licenses are (in my quite possibly biased opinion, but I have experience both writing/publishing and reading content) a corporate add-on designed to screw legitimate readers, not anything intrinsic to the content, as confirmed by our professional librarian. It seems purely a headache for librarians, with organizations such as the Internet Archive getting sued (despite, or possibly because of, access controls implemented at their expense where you have to log in and “borrow” an e-book for a limited period of time rather than downloading it normally) and organizations like Sci-Hub and Library Genesis simply moving all their servers to countries where U.S. copyright law does not apply (and getting sued anyway).
Yes, I’m aware that DRM is a corporate add-on designed to protect the copyright holder with little regard for the rights of the reader. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been borrowing e-books instead of buying them. But I’m not sure what that has to do with my question, or even with libraries.
It has to do with libraries because now they have to work with or implement a DRM system (which does not seem like it is in the scope of traditional library science), or else they will not be able to offer their patrons those books. (Or have I misunderstood the situation?)
I have heard stories about libraries having to negotiate with large publishers to get non-astronomical prices for print+digital subscriptions to all the journals, but would also like to hear professional insight.
ETA I just checked and e.g. a 1 year subscription to Nature is currently 200 euros, which does not seem that astronomical, but I don’t know if that is also the institutional price. DRM would just be via the magazine’s own website in that case.
I got my MLS in 1981. I failed the card filing module of my cataloging and classification course. Library school gave me the foundation of librarianship and like most professions, most knowledge came from on the job. However, I see a difference in those with an MLS and those who don’t have one. Graduate school taught me how to think, how to reason, and (this sounds really dorky), shaped my mind. I’ve worked with a handful of paraprofessionals and they just didn’t have the mindset to dig.
I worked as a medical librarian. Fun? Yes, the thrill of finding answers is fun. It’s not fun when a surgeon calls you at home on a Sunday night begging you to find something on the surgery he’s doing in the morning. But the pay was good. I retired making $80k a year.
I realized that in my career, I was a librarian of sorts. I worked in medical device product creation, and the FDA requires documentation. One of the hats I wore was to manage our document control system. All the specifications and the objective evidence showing that the products met the intended uses were controlled by a system that I managed — an EDMS, an electronic document control system, and that EDMS worked very well to capture every document with its revision and approval history.
Upthread, someone asked what would happen if your systems went down. For us, because all our records were virtual, we’d be dead in the water until the system was restored. We had system backups, and backups of backups.
I just realized that someone in library sciences could make the leap over to the tech industry if they wanted to. In my field the job area is called Document Control.
In the Code of Federal Regulations, it’s in
- Title 21: Food and Drugs
- Chapter I: Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human Services
- Subchapter H: Medical Devices
- Part 820: Quality System Regulation
- Subpart D: Document Controls; §820.40
- § 820.40: Document controls.
My question is what do you, a “real” librarian, think of roles like that? Are such people “librarians”?
Where I live now they are well-funded. We may not stay around here long after I retire, though.
Hoo boy, lots of replies overnight! Let’s see.
Lots of different things. There’s kind of two parallel systems at a lot of libraries - there’s the Friends of the Library, a volunteer organization that typically focuses on fundraising and book sales and that kind of thing, and then there’s more boots-on-the-ground stuff like shelving books and dusting and so on, which is usually handled directly through the library staff. The former tends to attract retirees and former library staff, they tend to be very invested but also sometimes a little clannish! The latter more commonly attracts students doing volunteer work for course credit or community service or what have you. The best answer is to ask to speak to the volunteer coordinator for the library, explain what you’re interested in and what your skills are, and work together to find a good fit!
I have never shushed a patron in the library, I usually say something like “Hi! Would it be ok if I asked you to keep the noise level a little lower? Some other folks are trying to work in this area. Thanks so much!”
I 100% have shushed my Teen Council volunteers though. 
Lots from leadership, less from actual users and librarians. Leadership (who are often neither library workers nor users) seem to think that because digital media are the waaaAAAaayy of the fuuUUUUutre!!! we should be focusing there. Those of us actually involved with it are more blase? We get what there’s demand for, no more and no less.
The higher-level the work you’re doing, the more the degree comes into play. If you’re sitting at a reference desk and helping folks with research? Probably not, no, but a lot of libraries will let you do that without a degree. Those positions are usually called “library assistant” or “library specialist.” When you get to the actual Librarian level though, you are wearing a lot of hats. You need to be a skilled researcher and customer service type person, but you also need to know how to do data analysis on the collection and circulation stats, you need to be familiar with lots of copyright law stuff, you need to know how to work with the various kinds of encoding standards that go into bibliographic records (which can be pretty complicated!) - and that’s not even touching the more teacher-y stuff, the education-education needed to create and run effective library programming. Especially for children.
I love the job! But lots of folks find it very draining, especially on the front lines of public librarianship where you are also working as a de-facto social worker for those utterly abandoned by society. I miss my public library, but I came home in frustrated helpless tears on a roughly monthly basis.
Pay sucks. Think public school teacher. Gets better if you rise to administration level, or in more specialized corporate or academic roles.
Looked at the picture, and somehow didn’t register the parts of it, but now I’ve looked again, and understand it better. Is it self-designed?
Do you think students (K-12) should spend more time learning about how to locate and evaluate information resources? What role should librarians have in supporting the schools?
I think the head librarian then, as now, would probably have been more of an administrator than an actual librarian! I have very little interest in leadership roles. But yeah, what I wouldn’t give to have seen it…
Hah! I have no idea, of course, but it’s a common phenomenon with highly-anticipated new releases. Same thing happens with the newest James Patterson thriller, or any biography of a high-profile public figure. When it releases, we have dozens of people who all want it at the same time. The library usually tries to oblige. Six months later, nobody gives a crap and we’re stuck with 10 copies of the turkey. It usually takes a while for someone to get around to weeding out the excess. 
That’s a really good question. Those decisions are usually made at the administrative level, with the library supervisors and directors working to evaluate circulation data and decide where to allocate resources. Compare my new position, where I am just The Librarian, sole person working at the library and therefore Utterly Sovereign in my domain… They’re basically just taking my word for stuff! XD
My username dates back to high school, with a comic-book script I wrote about a pacifist monk who gets superpowers. The number 9 is of weird personal significance/resonance to me, so it winds up incorporated into most of my online handles.
That series looks like, uh… Like something I’d rather not dig too deeply into? Looks like the kind of “man-boy love” stuff that Alan Ginsburg and NAMBLA were all about. Yikes.
Not yet, I’m afraid! The library here was all but abandoned for over a year, I’m working on raising awareness among students that hey! We’re here now! Come ask us stuff!
Absolutely! The core of librarianship is (imo) information science. There are lots of fields where those skills would be extremely useful. There are lots of librarians in corporate roles, managing records entirely within a single institution (though that often overlaps into archivist work.)
Nope, but the design was done by an apprentice tattooist. I can 100% agree that it’s not the most brilliant piece of visual design work ever, but I love it anyway!
I absolutely think that. But I also think that’s an extension of the general critical-thinking skills that schools (and parents! and our entire culture!) have so catastrophically failed to impart.
I just remembered this, on DC Metro heading to a play. My Grandma volunteered at the library of the local VA center afte retiring as head of school libraries for the county where I grew up. During one of her visits to us she started reading my copies of Cecil’s first two books, and she was hooked. She told me she was going to get both for the library.
Librarians rock. Reference Librarians are amazing; I think they come from outer space.
Heroes and good, all-around friends, all of you.