Some random questions. I have enjoyed your responses, do not feel obliged to answer all of these questions…
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Do you often get bored? Some of the work seems repetitive, though this is true of many jobs.
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What are your pet peeves with regard to clientèle, administrators, perceptions, funding, etc.?
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Could an MLS basically work in any library - law, medical, corporate, etc. and basically be comfortable from the get-go? Do they differ that much?
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If Masters’ are expensive, is the eventual pay sufficient to cover its costs? Do libraries subsidize education? Is there formal continuing education?
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With books sometimes devalued (not by me, personally, who owns more than needed), are you generally treated respectfully? Do you get to choose which items are purchased? Multimedia? Movies and TV shows? What do you enjoy buying the most? What is most obscenely overpriced?
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Why do I always feel the need to urinate when I go into a library or bookstore?
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What will libraries be like in ten years?
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Comment on how you order your spice rack, if applicable.
Absolutely. Right now there’s little I can even do at my library because I don’t have a budget and the changes I want to make are contingent on the availability of other staff. At my old library, much less so. The public tends to keep you on your toes.
There’s lots of annoyances. In a public library, you got your bathroom-drug-users and screaming children and grumpy patrons, all the typical customer-service stuff and then entitlement and mental illness to boot. But that doesn’t really get under my skin, personally? What does is really just people who want to dictate what others can and can’t read. Book banners coming out of the woodwork these days. It’s scary.
No, you need more specialized training for law or medical libraries. Ditto for archives. Corporate library you’re probably fine at, but I don’t have firsthand experience with that. I also know that some academic libraries will want you to have another Master’s in another area, at least for more senior positions.
Whether a given library helps pay for an MLIS depends entirely on the library system. My old public library was a part of a city gov’t, and the city did offer some tuition reimbursement for employees doing any higher ed. Unfortunately I was never able to take advantage. Most public librarians make about what a public school teacher does, maybe a little more. Higher salaries come with more senior or administrative positions. Whether it’s worth it or not… Ask me again in a few years, I guess? There’s lots of continuing education opportunities available in a number of different places. The ALA is of course a good resource for that kind of thing.
Most folks respect librarians! At least until they decide we’re peddlers of porn to children, as is the current fad. Choosing what gets bought is called “collection development.” We purchase or license the materials that we perceive demand for among our patrons, and we determine that in a number of ways. I think I talked more about collection development in an earlier answer.
Children’s picture books! I love children’s lit, and I especially love picture books. I have a good few myself despite having no kiddos of my own.
Uh. Not a clue.
See above. Ideally, much the same as they are now!
My spices are in a cupboard on a shelf, and they’re just kinda in there? Stuff I use more at the front, stuff I use less at the back, I guess.
See? Rock Star status!
Does it bother you that many libraries have been co-opted as living spaces for homeless people?
It bothers me that my nation is a willful plutocracy that blithely abandons people to the cold mercies of the street. I believe that homelessness is an economic phenomenon perpetuated by economic and political systems, systems that treat basic human necessities like food and shelter as trading cards to be bartered and hoarded, that treat human beings as disposable, interchangeable mechanisms to be used and discarded as profits those who stand at the controls. (And I do not use the word “systems” so as to abstract and absolve individual humans from their monstrous complicity with and contribution to those systems.)
It bothers me that there is no functioning social safety net. It bothers me that the public library is the only safe and welcoming place many of my fellow citizens have to go. But since that is the role that has been thrust upon us, I am fiercely proud to serve it to the very best of my ability.
The proudest moments of my life have been when I was serving my homeless patrons, whether attempting to secure for them such services and resources as I was able, or simply treating them with kindness and dignity. At those moments I knew with utter certainty that I was doing justly and improving the lot of my fellow human beings, a cause which I believe to be the only worthwhile business of living.
Here’s a really ignorant question, but you asked: What is it that librarians do exactly? My experience with them. was that they were the ladies who checked out books for you and told you to whisper. My dad clarified that they’re not mere clerks and I gather they do what Google does now, at least with the collection on hand. Not exactly sure how they do that, if that’s in fact what they do.
Well, I think a lot of librarianship aspects have been covered in the thread so far. To summarize, though…
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Programming: Librarians develop and produce programs for the community. This might be the archetypal “storytime” for children, it might be a book club for teens or adults where the librarian produces discussion questions and moderates the discussion, it might be a talk from a visiting author where the librarian serves as host or emcee… And those are just the most common, obvious programs. Library programming is usually focused on literacy, but really what programs are offered depends entirely on the needs of the community.
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Reference services: Believe it or not, you can’t always get good information from Google. What a shocker. If you’re researching something obscure or if you need scholarly sources, a librarian knows where to look to find what you need. This role is especially important at academic libraries, where there may be enormous amounts of scholarly research on subjects that is simply not available to the public and which may need knowledge of controlled vocabulary (see an earlier post) to locate.
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Reader’s advisory: Public librarians often serve as “reading concierges.” I’ve had grad school courses entirely about breaking down works of fiction to determine the characteristics that make people like or dislike them - these are called “appeal factors.” Two people that both like supernatural horror stories are still likely to have very different tastes, and a librarian can help locate works that will appeal to a particular individual.
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Collection development: This is the process of deciding what stays on shelves, what gets discarded, and what new things get bought, as well as what eBook or eMedia services the library subscribes to. (This is my area of specialization.) This aspect involves data analysis, researching community demographics, budgeting, and physical facilities management. It may also include technical services and processing, basically taking care of the “health” of the collection.
There’s lots more depending on the kind of library it is and the audience it’s serving.
Were a lot of books stolen before they installed the magnetic beepers?
I don’t have any kind of stats on that, so I really don’t know how theft rates have changed. Stuff gets stolen now, people rip off the RFID tags, but it was never any kind of significant problem at my library.
That was going to be my question (I recently did a final project on RFID tags for school) - whether your library uses RFID tags or is considering their use. Evidently you do.
The followup questions: Do you use machines to help sort returns, or is it mostly you looking at the classification sticker? Have you worked with other systems? If so, or even if not, what are your thoughts on inventory management / checkout / returns with those versus say bar codes or the ancient practice of rubber-stamping date cards?
I remember when I was young - in the 2000s - our library still used rubber stamps. They upgraded to bar codes, and were still using those last time I visited. Honestly I haven’t been to my hometown library since 2020, instead most of my recent book reading has been from textbooks, books gifted to me personally, or from Project Gutenberg.
~Max
Me too. Your answer makes me proud to know you.
I spend a minimum of 90 minutes a week in my public library every week (I teach literacy classes as a volunteer, primarily to refugees and immigrants). I’ve been going to my library at least weekly since I was 7 or 8 years old, so 65 years more or less. In all those years what I’ve seen homeless people do in libraries is what I do: read, go to the bathroom if I need to, look something up, use a computer to get on online, copy documents, print documents, browse for new books or find a favorite to read again, read the newspaper that I can no longer afford to have delivered daily, talk with the staff about upcoming programs or new books coming out or our shared favorite reads or the topic of our next book club meeting, occasionally I too might doze off reading. So they are doing what I’m doing and I’m glad my library is as welcoming and inclusive as it is-I wouldn’t have it any other way.
That answer was referring to my old public library, my current one is far too small and lightly-trafficked to make such a system worthwhile.
My public library put in an AMH - automated materials handling - system about halfway through my tenure there. It was a boon! It checked materials in and sorted them into bins, removing about half of the returns process labor. During high-volume times like during the Summer reading challenge, we would be absolutely buried in returns.
At my current library, it’s all manual with barcodes. It’s fine because circulation is so very low - we’re taking an institution with fewer than 200 students. Like with the RFID tags, an AMH would be ludicrous overkill. My opinion on the merits is like my opinion on screwdrivers vs. crowbars - different tools for different use cases, neither way is inherently superior. It’s just balancing costs, space, and needs, as is the way with most library stuff.
That’s very sweet, thank you! I wish more patrons felt the way you do. I hope you make your perspective known to the decision-makers, the city council or trustees or purse-string-holders that might otherwise be inclined to listen to the whiners and make life harder for our homeless neighbors.
I would just like to praise this post.
Do you notice anything when specific books make the news because of controversy? This is something like when books get banned from school libraries.
I’m not sure what you mean, exactly! I can say that when books are controversial, we usually see increased demand. For example, when the Dr. Seuss people announced they were no longer publishing a few of his children’s books that had racist imagery, we had a sudden surge of people wanting to check them out. Some of them wanted to see what all the fuss was about, some were trying to demonstrate resistance to “wokeness” or whatever. There is also a phenomenon where people will check out books they object to so that they can “lose” them on purpose.
What do you do then? Charge ‘‘em and replace?
Yup. Joke’s on them, cuz then we have a shiny new copy.
Do you celebrate Banned Book Week by putting out displays of books that have been banned and encouraging people to take them out and read them?
– at least some of the libraries do that around here.
At my public library we absolutely did! The Banned Book Week display was traditionally the responsibility of the Teen Advisory Council, and they always did cool stuff for it.