The management class was possibly the most useless one I was required to take. “Tell me about your theory of management.” Nothing about, you know, running the place. Or paying for it.
ETA - good library administrators are worth their weight in gold partly because they don’t teach you how to do it in library school. I don’t want a director that isn’t a librarian and doesn’t understand the point of it all (I believe somebody took over a Florida library and was shocked! shocked! that 50% of the employees weren’t even there to deal with the public at all! You know, tech services, shelves, etc…) but I also don’t want somebody who can’t bring in the money. Our director will probably be retiring soon, and I don’t know what’s going to happen - he’s been there since before I was born and every year he’s worked there he’s brought in more money from County Council. I suppose ideally you want somebody with an MLIS and an MBA. My dad suggested I go back and get a business degree, but hell no do I not want to be in administration!
I had a good management class and a good reference one. I had a horrible adult public services, cataloging and another one so bad, I cannot now recall what its topic was.
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
I’ve been in a lot of academic libraries and one thing most of them have in common is that you can’t even figure out where the books are unless you ask somebody or just give the elevator a try. At Emory I asked and somebody directed me through a hard hat zone.
Also, academic libraries do just tend to have a forbidding atmosphere. They tend to be super quiet. They tend to have special collections with funny rules that you have to ask about, and Reading Rooms, and such. Some of them have closed stacks, which is really intimidating. Most of them have total pain in the ass OPACs that give you extremely confusing information (“where’s the business library? Is it in this building? Does this mean that it’s just at the Aiken campus? What’s the annex?”) and the building you’re in can have several different “libraries” within it. What if you need to go to Gov Docs? What the hell are those call numbers? Where is Gov Docs?
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I guess I was an exceptional child, as I loved going to the big libraries and this translated to me missing the feel of wandering around a big university library on a regular basis these days. I like the feel of working in larger libraries, and wish that some day I can work in one of those six floor main branches in a library system; academic or public doesn’t matter as of yet.
Yes and no. You learn a lot about hierarchy and not doing what’s obviously going to be an ethical problem for the library, but didn’t talk a ton about things like outreach, convincing others that funding is necessary and that programs are important, or balancing budgets beyond forcing us to make up imaginary budgets. It wasn’t super useful, but it gave the handful of ignoramuses an idea of what management is supposed to be doing.
Zsofia: from what I understand, the adjacent county library system to my county is actually run by an MBA, and you can tell; it’s more like going into a store than a public library. There’s a fee for almost everything, the reciprocal borrowing policy between counties doesn’t work there beyond a select segment of the books, and the smaller branches feel more like a small multi-purpose customer service section of a Target than a library. It’s very cold and unwelcoming, IMO, and the jobs are a lot more specialized. They also have some weird hiring practices for librarians, like not telling you what type of librarian position you’re interviewing for until the second round of interviews. Seriously.
[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
I guess I was an exceptional child, as I loved going to the big libraries and this translated to me missing the feel of wandering around a big university library on a regular basis these days. I like the feel of working in larger libraries, and wish that some day I can work in one of those six floor main branches in a library system; academic or public doesn’t matter as of yet.
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We make a point of taking our kids to the UCSD and SDSU libraries fairly often. We have alumni privileges at UCSD, so we let them pick out cool art books, and references for their book reports at school, etc.
One of my most valuable experiences as an undergrad was doing lit. searches and library runs for one of my professors. (This was pre-internet, of course.) I had a much easier time with my own research papers as an undergrad and grad student as a result.
[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this one. How can a library school student be “afraid of the university library”?
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When I was in university, the stereotype of the graduating senior who had never entered the campus library had some truth to it. They may not have been scared, but rather avoided it in the sense that they avoided any studying at all.
Ah, you guys have got me to thinking back over my enforced library time. Those were some good years.
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
Cool! Say, do you guys still use card catalogues over there, or is it all computers now? The private library the wife and I belong to over here, the Neilson Hays Library, is in a beautiful 19th-century colonial building and uses the old-style card catalogues.
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The library in my hometown in Spain has both. When the librarians can’t find something in the computer and/or it’s an old book, they jump on the cards.