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.
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.
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.
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.
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.