So you want to be a librarian?

Last week a YouGov poll claimed that the three jobs Brits most like the sound of are author, academic and librarian. When I tell people what I do for a living, I usually find they don’t actually have a clue what it is that I actually do; stereotypes and misconceptions abound! So is being a librarian really all about books and silence? Here’s my experience of working as an academic librarian for five years thus far.

So what do I need to become a librarian then?

You’ll need some work experience of some kind in a library environment. Excellent communication skills, self-organisational skills, initiative and problem-solving skills, and a good manner with people are also vital. You’ll also need to do a CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) – accredited undergraduate degree or postgraduate qualification in Librarianship/Information Studies/Information Management. 

Blimey! I need all of that just to sit and read books all day?

Good luck with finding space in your workload to read books! Your duties and tasks will vary depending on what sector and role you’re working in. As an Academic Liaison Librarian in a university library, I teach research skills to classes of various sizes, help students with finding material for and referencing their assignments, work with academic colleagues to decide what books and journals to purchase and how to ensure they meet student needs, manage and contribute to projects to improve library services, investigate new developments and technologies which could help our work, check reading lists and add them to the online system, create material for our webpages, and attend departmental and Faculty meetings, amongst other things. Other librarians in universities might be managing the systems or online resources, or the enquiry desk. There are all sorts of librarian roles; you might be managing a school library, or working in a public library, prison library or corporate library, in a law firm or media organisation, for example. You might not even have “librarian” in your job title; you might be an information manager, information architect, knowledge manager, information officer, media manager, information consultant to name just a few. I can’t possibly list all of the different potential jobs you could do as a librarian here…but I can guarantee you won’t be reading books all day!

OK…but a library is a quiet and relaxing place to work, right?

Come into my library the day before a big assignment deadline date and see how quiet and relaxed it is! Libraries are not quiet any more. Students in universities and schools need spaces to work together. Public libraries host baby and toddler Storytimes and other meetings and events. You might have silent study spaces in your library, for example, but generally there is activity all around you. As for relaxing…librarianship is like most other jobs – you will be busy, sometimes things will go wrong, and sometimes you’ll feel pressured and stressed. You’ll face similar challenges to anyone working with the public; sometimes you’ll be dealing with upset, angry, intoxicated, or just unpleasant people. I’ve been shouted at more times than I can count, personally blamed for all sorts of things, including impeding the access of the general public to scientific knowledge and thereby the progress of society, and had stuff thrown at me. It comes with the job.

Yikes. I hope the salary is good?

This varies quite dramatically between roles and sectors. It’s difficult to generalise, but corporate and academic library roles tend to pay more than public and school libraries. Whatever job you’re doing, you won’t be in it for the money though.

Hmm. So why do I want to be a librarian then?

My job is challenging, interesting and rewarding. I love teaching and working with the students, and I get opportunities to get involved in all sorts of projects and to follow things which interest me. In my experience, libraries are open-minded and welcoming places to work, and my colleagues have been generally lovely and funny. There are so many routes that you could take in librarianship; you’re bound to find something that interests you.

How do I find out more?

Have a look through the CILIP webpages, sign up to the LIS New Professionals Network, get chatting to some librarians on Twitter, or check out some blog posts on how people got started in libraries.

Meetup.com – a social calendar for our times

I’ve had it in the back of my mind for several years now to write a blog post on surviving relocation. I’m a bit of an expert. I don’t stay anywhere for much longer than a couple of years, moving around the country in the name of my career.  And it can be hard. Until you actually do it, you don’t realise what a massive thing it is that you’re doing. It’s not like going to university, where everyone’s in the same boat, constantly on the look-out for opportunities to make friends and get a social life going. You’re dropping yourself into an existing situation; the people around you are living and working there already; some are settled with partners and families; others are in their own routine. Yet there are lots of us doing this; not just librarians, but young and not-so-young people everywhere – we tell ourselves that it’s all about the next promotion, or we get itchy feet, or an opportunity comes up that’s too good to miss (or sometimes, in these times of austerity, the only opportunity we’re going to get right now).  And so we load our belongings into a van and start a new life somewhere else, some of us multiple times. 

The first time I did it, moving to Bristol after library school in Sheffield, it took me about six months to make friends. I didn’t really know where to start. I tried a socialising website; you were allowed one free event, then you had to pay an extortionate fee to keep attending. We all met in a city centre pub; the host ticked our names off on his sheet, starred the non-attendees for the blacklist, then went off to claim his free drinks, leaving the rest of us to mingle. Because it was so expensive to attend again, we all tried to make our new best friends in the space of a few hours. I exchanged numbers with another young woman, and we started meeting up. She liked spending the whole of Sunday shopping. I definitely did not. After a few evenings of stilted conversation over dinner in a chain restaurant, we silently, mutually conceded that we were not compatible, and that was that. Eventually I started meeting other local librarians at events, and began to build myself a small social life there. 

When I moved to Bedford, I was determined to try harder. I felt I hadn’t made the most of Bristol. Despite my previous experience of a socialising website, I decided to search online for social groups, and I found one for people in their 20s and 30s, hosted on the site Meetup.com, which was new to me. It had a very small annual fee (£2) to join and seemed much less formal. There was a meet-up in a pub about 10 minutes walk from my flat the first weekend I was living here; I thought it would be worth a go, and I could always make my excuses if it was awful. 

It turned out to be a really welcoming group. In the past almost two years we’ve run the Race for Life together, gone wine-tasting and cocktail-making, taken a day trip on the train to Paris, gone to the theatre and cinema, and done a lot of dancing and drinking (oh god, so much drinking). I was able to explore the nightlife in the safe company of others, and made some genuine friends, not ones of convenience. This group has impacted profoundly and positively on my life in Bedford (a town which, I’m sorry to admit, I still don’t like) and I can’t imagine what I would have done with myself without it.

The reason I’m finally writing this post now is because today that group has ceased to exist. After a few changes of leadership, the final lead organiser has stepped down, and no one has pressed the button in the 15-day grace period to rescue it. The URL leads to a message that the page cannot be found. Just like that, it’s gone. I expected to feel sad…but actually, it’s OK. Because this is the nature of Meetup. It’s transient. Groups disappear once they’ve run their time, and every day new groups appear; people meeting up around an interest or commonality, or simply to make friends. And this reflects the transient nature of the lifestyles that so many of us lead; moving on every so often when we need to, with minimal looking back. Last year our group was in its hey-day, with so many events on the calendar I couldn’t possibly keep up, and nearly burnt out when I tried to; now it’s gone, but other local groups flourish. I have contact with the friends I’ve made through other means, and I can join other groups to make more. The nature of all of the Meetup groups I’m familiar with is that most members can and do dip in and out of the activity; making the group fit our schedules rather than the other way round. All the time, people leave, and new people join, just as people ebb in and out of the towns and cities, on their way throughout their life.

It’s often said now that there “is no such thing as a job for life any more”. I think this is true, and with that comes all of the other elements of our lives; for those of us moving frequently, nothing is stable. Meetup.com reflects that and gives us a means of trying to fit in, to make a life for ourselves, however temporary, wherever we go.

My next Big Adventure

When I started this blog, two months after beginning my first professional role, I called it “Rachel’s Big Adventure” because that was what my professional life felt like; the start of my journey into the career that I had been working towards for a couple of years, actually getting into the position that I had been looking forward to for so long, embarking on a massive learning curve and everything that came with it. It’s two years later now and actually, I don’t think it’s ever stopped feeling like a journey or an adventure of sorts; what with new challenges, responsibilities and opportunities at work almost constantly, organising, attending and speaking at events and conferences, meeting lots of lovely LIS people, achieving Chartership, and my fixed-term role being extended and then made permanent.

I’ve had a brilliant couple of years; developing and learning all the time, gaining new skills, knowledge and lots of confidence, and enjoying it along the way, and now I feel that the time has come to move on to my next Big Adventure. At the end of March I will be leaving my current role and moving on to the University of Bedfordshire, to become their Academic Liaison Librarian for Sport and Exercise Science. I am really excited; it seems like a fantastic place to work and I can’t wait to get stuck in. The role is going to be a real step up for me so I suspect it will mean another steep learning curve, but I feel like I’m ready to take on more responsibility and to develop myself further in an academic liaison role.

I will be sad to leave my current role. It has been just a brilliant opportunity to get lots of experience in different aspects of academic librarianship, and I have learnt and developed so much that I can’t even put it down into words. I feel immensely grateful for the opportunities I’ve had and I know I have been incredibly lucky to have had this job as my first professional role. Then of course there are all the wonderful colleagues I have had at UWE, both in my team at St Matthias and at the other campuses. They have been so supportive and welcoming throughout, and many of them have become friends. I will really miss my close-knit team, and I will miss the other lovely friends I have made in Bristol and the South West too, both librarian-y folk, and a few non-librarians too! I arrived in Bristol knowing absolutely no-one, and in the two and a bit years since, I have built up a life for myself here, which will be very sad to leave I think.

Now this post is straying into dangerously sentimental territory (!), so I shall end it here by looking again towards the future. I can’t wait to get to Bedfordshire and get started on my new role, and all of the challenges and opportunities that will come with it. I fully intend to continue blogging, so (if you want to!) I’m sure you will be hearing all about what I’m getting up to there. There’s another aspect to my moving on too; in my new role, I don’t feel that I will be a “new professional” any more, even though it’s been less than five years (the generally presumed marker of being “new”) since I started my MA or first role. This prospect used to make me a bit sad, as so much of my professional identity so far has involved my being “new”, but now I feel ready to move on from my “newness” and to embrace whatever it is that comes next; I’m not sure that I could describe myself as “established”, but there must be something in the middle (perhaps this is something for another blogpost!)!

I have a really good feeling about the future and feel like I’ve definitely made the right decision. Now for the less fun part; house-hunting and packing…

Library Day in the Life, round seven: Monday

I’m sure those of you reading this are familiar with the Library Day in the Life project, but if not, then you can find out more here. Basically, twice a year library staff and students blog and tweet about their day or their week, to provide an insight into the many different roles that we have. I began participating during the last round, in January of this year. Last time, I wrote very detailed, realist accounts of my days over the week, hoping to bring the reader into my day as far as possible, to give them a sense of my workplace life. I think this was a good approach, but I don’t think I need to repeat it each time, so for this round I am going to write short blog posts of each day, highlighting the main things that I have been doing. If you want to know more about anything, please feel free to ask in the comment section!

I am an Assistant Librarian working in a small campus library. My role covers several aspects; I have responsibility for management of journals at this campus, some acquisitions functions, classifying and maintaining the AV collection, and subject liaison for media and cultural studies. I also line-manage two members of staff, and contribute to the overall management of the library. I don’t tend to do a bit of everything in one day; usually I’ll be concentrating mostly on something within one of my roles.

Because of the different parts to my job, I don’t have a typical day, so I will blog each day for the rest of this week; a week should be much more representative of what I do.

Some of the things that I did today are

• Line management admin. I didn’t realise before I started my role how much time line management can take up. As well as meeting with the staff you line manage, you need to write up notes from your meetings, carry out appraisals, and other one-off things. It’s really important to make the time to do the writing-up as well as the actual contact time. We’re in the middle of appraisal season at the moment, and it’s really helpful to look back at what the two of you have discussed in the past, what their achievements throughout the year have been, etc.

• Desk shift. During term-time, the librarians and senior library assistants work on the enquiry desk, and the library assistants work on the service desk. However, at the moment it is vacation, so we are only running the service desk, and all of us take turns there. During my hour on the desk today, I helped a student use the photocopier, issued some Inter-Library Loans, took some fines, and emptied the book bins from the self-service machine. There aren’t many students around so there isn’t a great deal to do on the desk at this time of year; I take some other work out with me to do.

• Created a spreadsheet of journal fund codes. I spend a lot of time creating, updating and working with spreadsheets, particularly in the journals side of my role. I can’t say it’s my favourite bit of my job! It is however, very necessary – we need accurate records – and it’s quite rewarding when you get a spreadsheet finished which is going to be really useful! Today, I’m mapping old fund codes to the new ones coming in this year, in anticipation of the main renewals (the journals for which the subscription runs from January to January, which is most of them) which we will process in a couple of months. It takes a lot longer than I anticipated, partly because I have to double-check a few which are moving to a fund code within a different subject, and partly because I don’t hit on the most efficient way to do it until I’m nearly at the end – sigh!

• Attend Campus Management Group meeting. The librarians and senior library assistants – 6 of us in total – try to meet every fortnight to discuss what’s going on in the library, make decisions about priorities, iron out any problems etc. Today we start to talk about plans for the new academic year; rotas for the coming term, and how we’ll be involved in Welcome Week.

• Pricing up DVDs to purchase. I basically look up each title on my list on Amazon, Play.com and Moviemail, to find out where is cheaper, and put them all into another lovely spreadsheet! 

I arrived home to an email from my Chartership mentor, asking how it’s going. I have been rubbish with my Chartership recently – time to ‘fess up…

Why won't employers give new LIS graduates a chance?

I have just returned from my graduation ceremony at the University of Sheffield, and now officially hold an MA in Librarianship (see the following obligatory graduation garb photograph)!

I had a fantastic time being in Sheffield again and catching up with my friends and tutors. The main theme of our conversation was obviously what we were all doing now, and, sadly, despite being intelligent, creative, enthusiastic, open-minded, knowledgeable and experienced, very few had managed to find a professional post, or, indeed, even a paraprofessional one. We all know that the job market in any sector is shockingly poor at the moment, but, in the LIS sector, not only are there very few vacancies, but hardly any of them are being made open to newly-qualified librarians.  If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you will know that I have been extremely fortunate in finding a professional position; however, I had many applications rejected outright, and did not even bother applying for some positions, due to the insistence that candidates must have “post-qualification professional experience.” This little phrase headed up so many job descriptions and person specifications, shutting the door in my face.  Sometimes, I read through the full description of the role and person specification, and, realising that I could meet all of the criteria, apart from the post-qualification professional experience, through my previous work experience, particularly during my graduate traineeship, experience from my extra-curricular LIS activities, and the knowledge I had gained during my MA, decided to apply anyway. I thought that someone reading my application might think that I was worth interviewing, that I could bring something to the role despite not having held a librarian position before. But none of them called me to interview. None of them gave me a chance. And that is the problem; many employers seem totally unwilling to give new LIS graduates a chance. 

I can understand that some positions do require that professional experience; more senior roles with a large amount of managerial responsibility, or very specialist knowledge or experience, for example.  But none of the roles for which I tried to apply were at that level; they were all similar positions to the one that I eventually secured. My current employers put out an extremely demanding person specification for the role; there were about twenty-seven criteria, requiring a large amount and variety of skills, knowledge and experience. However, nowhere was there a statement that I needed to have post-qualification professional experience; so here was my chance. I met all of the criteria, from experience, knowledge and skills gained during my MA, my previous work experience and my involvement in the CILIP Career Development Group and LIS New Professionals Network.  At the interview, they asked questions that allowed me to demonstrate my suitability for the role, even without professional experience. For example, I was asked about teaching information literacy, but they did not simply want to know what teaching experience I had; they also wanted to know about what ideas I had for teaching. I do have some experience of participating in teaching from my graduate traineeship, but the way they phrased the question allowed me to give a long and enthusiastic answer about not only my experience, but also the elements of best practice that I had identified when researching information literacy teaching for a piece of coursework for my MA, meaning that I was able to give an answer as full and as good as a candidate who had been teaching information literacy in a professional role previously. Their willingness to give me a chance allowed me to demonstrate to them that I could handle this role.

Obviously, new LIS graduates do have a part to play in all of this; they need to keep applying for roles even when they are sick and tired of the whole soul-destroying process, they need to keep emphasising in applications how they can “fill in the gaps” left by a lack of post-qualification professional experience (for example, at Sheffield we studied a year-long LIS Management module, meaning that, even if we have not managed people at work before, we know a lot about it and are more than capable of putting what we have learnt into practice), and they need to keep up with what is happening in the LIS world. It is not enough to expect that a LIS Masters and a graduate traineeship or other work experience will be sufficient to get that first professional job. But my friends from the Sheffield course are doing all of these things, and they are really good candidates for jobs. Yet employers are just not interested, which I find baffling and frustrating.

New LIS graduates can bring so much to libraries and organisations. They are enthusiastic, and full of ideas for improving and promoting services. They are dedicated to the profession; when I and my friends started the MA, we were in a recession and, even though the job market was not in such a sorry state as it is now, we were well aware that there may not be jobs for us at the end of the course. Current students have started the MA knowing exactly how bad things are, and I’m sure that there will be a full cohort for September 2011, even with the state of the job market and the looming cuts to public libraries and HE institutions.  Things are bad, yet we have stuck with the LIS profession. New LIS graduates are intelligent, and are fast learners – many of us went into the MA from totally unrelated academic backgrounds, and had to very quickly learn how to carry out social science research for our dissertations.  They are willing and able to learn quickly on the job too.

They are malleable; when I spoke during a session on the new professionals’ view on the future of academic libraries at the SCONUL Conference 2010 (We are the next generation, so do not mess things up), one of the delegates explained that they were interested in recruiting new LIS graduates, but found that none of them had any experience of, or had learnt about on the course, working in the very specialist type of academic library from which the delegate came. We explained that LIS courses cannot cover everything, that new graduates cannot be expected to have gained such specialist experience prior to the course, and that new graduates are very malleable and adaptable; they are willing and able to apply what they do know to new situations, and that, as such, they should be treated as a kind of blank canvas. The delegate went away saying that they should perhaps look at whether their job specifications were too rigid; hopefully this means that one day another position may come up for which new LIS graduates have a chance. 

Many LIS graduates completed the course whilst juggling other commitments; they are excellent time managers and self-organisers. Many can be flexible about relocation and working patterns. Many are willing to take on roles in a different LIS sector to the one in which they have previously worked. They keep up to date with what is happening in the LIS world, and they are keen networkers, using Twitter and LISNPN to make contact with others in the profession. 

In short, I do not believe that a lack of post-qualification professional experience makes new LIS graduates unsuitable for the number of roles which seem to deem them so. I also fail to understand how employers can be so strict with this; how do they expect their candidates to gain this experience – do they expect other employers to take new graduates on, when they will not? Again, I will reiterate how lucky I was, to find an employer who was willing to take me on in a professional role. I will also say that I feel I perform my role well. It was a very steep learning curve on which I am still travelling, but I have applied myself thoroughly to that learning, and I work hard to prove that they did not make a mistake in employing me. There must be many other roles similar to mine in academic libraries across the country, for which new LIS graduates are not being considered, when there is no reason to exclude them. I haven’t been able to answer the question that I posed in the title of this blog post, because I just do not understand what the problem is. What are employers worried about? So I put the question to anyone reading this: why won’t employers give new LIS graduates a chance? If someone can give me an answer, I would be interested to hear it.  

I don’t expect any employers to read this and change their minds about excluding new graduates from their vacancies, but I hope that perhaps I can encourage other new LIS graduates not to give up in their pursuit of that first professional post.