So this quarter I decided that it was in my best interests to not take classes (at my school you have to be on for 3 out of 4, and I’m going to be on in the summer) but instead spend my days working full time in one of the school libraries, writing my next play, and generally enjoying all of the benefits of college life without having homework.
I love libraries. I’m in the grad student library, which is one of the smaller ones. A lot of the grad students are international, so there’s a lot of cute girls with accents.
I am the Spot. I go fetch things. As some of you may know, the time of college professors is the most valuable time in the world. They simply cannot come to the library and find things, so they must email us with esoteric requests. I find these journals or books or what have you and copy them. It’s like a big scavenger hunt, and even working with the microfilm is kind of amusing.
The best part is finding funny journals. “The Journal of Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems” and “The Journal of Irreproducible Results” are two of my favorites.
Between this and majoring in linguistics, I feel that I’m gaining massive geek street cred.
In my experience it’s more like the professor doesn’t know his/her ass from his/her elbow in the library and would rather e-mail the request than step foot in the library and risk having to ask a librarian for assistnace. An MLS isn’t a real degree, you know.
Oh, and enjoy your job andygirl. I started off doing the same type of work in a library. Loved it! (Yea, even the prima donna professors. They only reinforce our niche at a college. Not just for photocopying. )
I am assuming this was meant sarcastically. Unless you are a card-carrying MLS-er.
Andygirl, welcome to the ranks. I’ve been a liberrian for 20 years (ACK!!!). I love it. My slogan is: I am a wealth of useless information. Patrons may think you are nothing more than someone to fetch and photocopy, but deep down they know they couldn’t do it without you. We may not get rich, but life is interesting!
I’m jealous, of all of you. I’m dying to hear from the MLS program I applied to for next fall (it’s a state school, app deadline is July 1, all documentation is in).
Then I get to be one too. Instead, right now I’m a damn auditor.
I effing loved working in the library when I was at school. A lot of it was that my fellow employees in the ILL office were the absolute shit, but a good chunk of it was also that I got to wander around the stacks, hunting down obscure books and periodicals and discovering where they kept the books on Qabala and stuff.
I’m trying to find a job in a university library now, actually, but to no avail.
I worked in the library in college! It was the coolest job I’ve ever had, even if some of my tasks were snoozers.
I worked in the bibliography department, so I saw all the new books come through.
And the first task I had there was to put OCR stickers in all of the books that hadn’t been stuck yet. So I looked at like a 1/4 of the books in the library, mostly obscure ones, since the popular ones had already been stuck.
Why that’s fabulous that you are enjoying working at the school library, andygirl! I started out working at my university’s library also, checking in all theses and dissertations that passed our way. Many of the people I worked with were very interesting and fun, and sometimes I got to see all the new books also when I got to add the security strips and call number labels.
I’m another person considering getting an MLS, but I’m debating when I want to start applying.
I’ve always thought it would be cool to work in a library. I spent most of last semester hunting down stacks of articles for a professor. I read a lot of developmental psych articles, became even more familiar with the locations of various psych journals and developed an intense hatred of the university’s copy machines. Overall, it was a good experience.
