Librarians: Apparently unsatisfied “Shh!” factor
Posted by Lizzie on 03/01/05
Listen up, bookish types: Daily Gusto’s Day Job Interview reveals why, proximity to books–and, one presumes, readers–aside, being a librarian is not for you:
What’s the worst part of your job?
I didn’t see a minimum word restriction, so here goes. To any bookworm who thinks that working in a library and/or on a university campus would be their dream job – it is not. It is just like any other office job – rife with political shenanigans, organizational doublespeak and double standards, the latest management fads, sycophants, snobs, incompetents, sadists, masochists, freaks, and all the usual suspects that make all offices tick. On academic campuses, most librarians are (or are becoming) full-fledged faculty, with all the baggage that goes along with it. We are pressured to produce something that resembles scholarship – which is exactly why many academic librarians did NOT go on to be professors. Oh, yes of course – the solution to all problems vexing humanity can be solved by committees – lots and lots of committees. If you are still having problems then you simply need to form more committees. And who populates these committees? Why – you of course! The result – spending more of your time doing extraneous bullshit than you spend actually doing your job, which ultimately is a great disservice to library users. And what do these committees focus on? Navel gazing nonsense that has nothing to do with providing better service to our customers.
[takes a deep breath, then a deep drink]
Just for the record, you can subsitute “publisher/literary agent/The Paris Review” for “library” anywhere above.
Filed under: Lit-ish |
So this is what drove Elizabeth McCracken to be a novelist, I guess.
Comment by Jimmy Beck — 3/1/2005 @ 12:00 pm
I am a librarian. Every word is true.
Comment by Matt — 3/1/2005 @ 12:47 pm
My personal take on it is that library schools don’t adequately prepare their graduates to be academic librarians. People who really want to be academic librarians have often worked in academic libraries as staff before getting their MLS and are pretty well prepared for what they’re heading into, but those who take an academic library job without having worked in an academic library really aren’t prepared for it.
People who actually WANT to be academic librarians are rare; when I was in library school, the four or five of us who had that goal were vastly outnumbered by the school librarians and public librarians. They had special classes like “Issues in Public Librarianship” and of course, the courses that are required for school media certification; we had a basic research methods class, and that was about it. The next generation of librarians seems to have more of a focus on informatics, which should prepare them better for some of the things academic librarians have to do.
I was both an academic librarian and a public librarian before I changed careers, and both have their pluses and minuses. I found the constant book challenges (which often appeared as letters to the editor of the local newspaper that said things like “the perverted staff of the library system have a plan to corrupt our children and teach them how to be homosexuals and drug users”) and the sheer head-pounding stupidity of working for municipal government far more frustrating than anything I faced in an academic library, but most of my public library colleagues, who had prepared for it in library school, saw all of that as part of the territory.
Comment by MJ — 3/2/2005 @ 7:12 am