:The Young Librarian Series

Steve Thomas is a 36 year old assistant branch manager at a public library in Georgia. He has worked in libraries for almost ten years and lives outside Atlanta with his wife, daughter, and two cats. You can follow him on Twitter @steve_librarian or contact him at steve[dot]librarian[at]gmail[dot]com. He likes cookies.

I’m a librarian because my wife told me to.

Now, this is not the way my career started. In fact, my love of books had originally led me to a career in the bookstore business, where I was able to satiate some of my OCD-tendencies (don’t all librarians have a touch of OCD?) with shelving, straightening and organizing materials. The organization system was no Dewey and certainly no LC, but it was a start. I also got to interact with the general public, connecting them with the information and goods for which they were searching. A few years into my bookstore career path, I met my wife while we were working at the same store in Florida (according to her, you can find anything in a bookstore… even a husband), and while this “acquisition” filled one void in my life, my career felt uninspired, despite the positive aspects of the work. I moved up to supervisory positions but without any real drive. Something was missing.

One day, after we’d moved to Atlanta, my wife forwarded me an email from her graduate school about an opening at the library on campus. I applied and got the job. I loved working in the library, and it felt like I was heading in the right direction in my career. I completed library school while continuing to work at the library full-time. Unlike in the bookstore, I felt pride in my progress from a position in the stacks to a position that allowed me to work in both the reference and serials acquisitions departments. I got to work hands-on with information in a more detailed way, both in depth and organizationally. My community was a wealth of students, faculty, and staff, and I relished serving them one-on-one at the reference desk and behind the scenes in Acquisitions. The reference work in particular was instructional – the whole “teach them to fish” analogy – rather than simply gathering and passing on information to a customer in need.

However, once the time came to find a professional position, I hit that same wall many library school graduates do: there weren’t nearly as many jobs as they “promised” when I was in school. This is especially an issue in academic libraries, where I was determined to work. My wife insisted I should look into public libraries, but I resisted. Why was I so determined to remain in academic libraries? Because I loved the job I had so much that I wanted to work at an institution like that forever. So instead of waiting to find the right library job for me, I took a job that, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have. It was an attractive job at an up-and-coming private college with grand promises of the future. After 18 months in the position, the administration and I could not come to agreement on how to serve the student population, and I lost my job.

At this point, I found myself adrift, wondering if I’d made the right career choice. I took a day to let myself wallow in self-pity then picked myself up, dusted myself off, and moved headlong back into the job-seeking business. I soon found myself applying for any job that I seemed vaguely qualified for: archiving video footage for television stations, reference work at community colleges, cataloging at universities far away from home, and what seemed oddest to me at the time, working at the local public library. Soon after, I scheduled an interview at the public library, and at some point before my interview, it hit me. The public library was the perfect intersection for my interests, allowing me to take the things I loved from bookstores and combine them with the things I loved from academic libraries. I could have that one-on-one time with the general public, helping people who don’t necessarily know how to find what they want and need and combine it with the more in-depth information available in the library’s collections. I could feel like I was contributing to my community while at the same time instructing patrons on how to find further information on their own.

I got the job and am the happiest I’ve been as an employee since I got to take home free pizzas while working at Pizza Hut.

Sometimes it pays to listen to your wife. (She says I should say “always”.)

Interested in submitting something to the Young Librarian Series? Check out the submissions page or send us an email at: younglibrarianseries@gmail.com. See you next week!

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Hello librarians! Leah here. I wanted to share with you a really rad idea going on over at 8bitlibrary.com! It’s called Project Brand Yourself a Librarian, a concept first launched here

http://blog.8bitlibrary.com/2010/01/13/project-brand-yourself-a-librarian/

and was initially devised from a series of Twitter conversations between @justinlibrarian and others. I’ll let Justin and his cohort JP describe the project for you themselves in their interview with ALA

So considering branding yourself at ALA Annual in DC! Also check out 8bitlibrary for some fun info on gaming and libraries. You can also follow them on twitter and become their fan on facebook!

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Laura Wimberley is a 30 year old reference librarian at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.  You can read her blog at Libri & Libertas or follow her on Twitter.

I’m beginning to wonder if we librarians, as a profession, spend too much time worrying how people perceive us.

Yes, I know that the shhhhing bunhead image keeps people away, but the sexy librarian means we’re not taken seriously, yadda yadda yadda. But there were two pop culture moments last week that made me think we might be blowing this out of proportion.

September isn’t just the start of the school year. It’s also (just as importantly for some people) the start of a new television season. And the first episodes of two different shows highlighted how two different comparable professions react to mainstream media depictions of themselves.

First, the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother shows our protagonist Ted Mosby on his first day as an adjunct professor. (They never use the word adjunct or discuss the working conditions, but that’s another post.) Ted spends most of the episode anxious about how to present himself to the class, as an authoritarian or cool guy, and winds up rapidly and awkwardly alternating between the two. (”I’m Professor Mosby. Call me Ted. Professor Mosby. T-Dogg. DON’T call me T-Dogg.”) It’s the same set-up as an episode on the sixth season of Friends where Ross is so nervous on his first day of adjuncting that he fakes an English accent.

These issues of self-presentation and authority in the classroom are important, live concerns for faculty, and are often discussed in the faculty blogosphere, but this show has not, and, I confidently predict, will not make a dent. (In fact, the only mention I could find of the show on a faculty blog or website was on the CV of a theater professor who actually appeared on it.)

Why not? Public university and community college faculty are, like librarians, also dependent on public perception (although, as states slash their support, increasingly less so.)

I think there are a few reasons. One, faculty won’t admit to watching sitcoms (Buffy or Big Love, maybe, but not something this truly mainstream). We, on the other hand, are responsible for disseminating all media, so it’s less detrimental to our credibility to notice schlock. Two, faculty don’t see themselves as a larger collective – they see themselves as historians, or mathematicians, or anthropologists first, and professors en masse second; librarians see ourselves as librarians first and as academic, public, special, or school librarians second. This minimizes the number of portrayals a professor will identify with and bother to critique, versus the number a librarian might. Finally, though – and here’s the part we should consider emulating – I think faculty let their work speak for itself. If you have conviction that your teaching and research make a difference, it doesn’t much matter if people think you’re absent-minded or effete or stodgy or any of the other professor stereotypes. When people attack the work itself, then yes, faculty will stand their ground. But the pop culture caricatures? Who cares?

Case in point – contrast How I Met Your Mother with the series premier of Community, a new show set at a community college. Community doesn’t depict any librarians (yet), but nearly the whole episode takes place inside a library. It’s an homage to The Breakfast Club (and a very funny one at that), but in that movie, the kids were locked in the library as punishment. Here, a diverse group of adults chooses to come to the library to study and accomplish their goals.

Check out the clip “Sharks, Pencils, and Ben Affleck.”

Who wouldn’t want that happening in their library?

This is a great depiction of library as place. And that, in the end, is what matters – what people think of the library as an experience. How they think of librarians in general is something we can let go.

Interested in submitting something to the Young Librarian Series? Check out the submissions page or send us an email at: younglibrarianseries@gmail.com. See you next week!

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Hello everyone!

Leah here and I wanted to let you know that we will post book club details on the site, so you can keep up to date. This way those of you who don’t live in the Chicago area can keep up to date with what we are reading and those of us who are in the Chicago area can participate remotely if need be. I have created a category called The Book Club, which can be accessed by the clicking on the pull down menu on the right hand side of you screen. In case you missed it, here is Carrie’s posting about the creation of the Young Librarians Book Club.

http://blogs.tametheweb.com/younglibrarian/2009/12/07/young-librarians-book-club/

The next meeting is this Sunday, January 10th at 6PM at the Schaumburg Township District Library. The book we are reading is Perfection by Julie Metz.

If you plan on showing up or have any questions please contact Carrie at: ca_straka[the at sign]yahoo[the dot sign]com. Otherwise feel free to post your thoughts below on the book! And happy reading!

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Anthony Molaro is a 30 year old Head of Tech Services and Automation at the Messenger Public Library in Illinois and a Doctoral student at Dominican University, Graduate School of Information and Library Science. He blogs at http://informationactivist.wordpress.com/ or you can follow him on twitter.

Young Librarian Series from roland coniglio on Vimeo.

Would you like to be interviewed for the Young Librarian Series? Or do you know someone you think should be featured? Send an email to: younglibrarianseries@gmail.com or visit the SUBMISSIONS page for more details! If you aren’t in the Chicago area, don’t worry! All you need is access to a camera and a computer. Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next week!

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