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Let me just say I graduated with my MLS from Simmons College (one of the top MLS programs) in May '08....and I'm still looking for a full-time job. I'd eagerly look for a job in another field if I didn't feel like that would mean my $36,000 student loan debt was for nothing. 
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Feb 25, 2010 01:25
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I have a question about a job I'm applying to. It's a para-professional job as a cataloging assistant at an academic library, and the ad says the salary starts at $28k and requires only a BA/BS and 1 year of experience. I have an MLS with 2 years of experience (basically, I had this exact job, but at another university), plus 4-5 additional years working in two other jobs in the library science field -- do you think I could bring up my MLS and negotiate for a higher starting salary? I've never been in this position before (overqualified) and don't know what to do with myself. 
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Sep 1, 2010 21:22
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Insane Totoro posted:Negotiate for a higher starting salary? I would KILL (hyperbole) for that kind of position.  I really want the job, though! Everything about the job and the location, the commute, the benefits, etc. are perfect for me -- it's just the salary that's making me sad.
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Sep 2, 2010 22:11
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How different is RDA from AACR2? I was under the impression that the changes to the rules themselves were minimal, and it was mostly the reorganization of the rules that was the major difference. I was still using AACR2 at my last cataloging job last year (at a mid-size university) and have yet to learn RDA, so I hope this won't hurt my job prospects... 
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Sep 10, 2010 18:23
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Ah what the hell... I'm on tenterhooks waiting to hear about the cataloging assistant position I applied for. I never thought I'd be interested in cataloging, but when I took that first class in grad school it was like a whole new world opened up for me. I enjoy the secret-code aspect of MARC records, and debating where to classify a multi-subject book, and contemplating aboutness. This is my idea of fun.
Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Sep 19, 2010 |
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Sep 19, 2010 05:45
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I had a job interview for a position as a cataloging assistant yesterday, and the people who interviewed me were the most socially inept people I've ever met, and that's including goons. One interviewer didn't say hello or goodbye or introduce herself to me and never once looked me in the face, but just read questions off of a piece of paper and didn't acknowledge my response. At the end of the interview, she just walked off. This is someone I would have to work closely with if I get the job. I'm thinking either, gently caress, these people are social retards, or that they already had someone in mind for the job and were just going through the motions with my interview. I don't know whether I should take the job if offered to me because of this. If you can't make the barest effort to be polite at the job interview, what are you going to be like to work with? I understand being shy -- I'm very shy myself, but you make an effort, especially at an interview! Christ.
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Oct 7, 2010 13:29
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VideoTapir posted:Third possiblity: They've been lawyered into a one-way, impersonal, rigid interview process. This doesn't make the organization look any better, IMO.  I'm 95% sure I won't accept the job if it's offered to me. I'd rather temp again than work somewhere that awkward and depressing. It does have good benefits, though... RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This is pretty true. I'm in cataloging and it has inspired me to go to grad school for anything but a library science degree. They're not even entertaining crazy either, just banal and sad. Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jan 19, 2011 |
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Oct 8, 2010 15:47
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Rabbit Hill posted:I had a job interview for a position as a cataloging assistant yesterday, and the people who interviewed me were the most socially inept people I've ever met, and that's including goons. One interviewer didn't say hello or goodbye or introduce herself to me and never once looked me in the face, but just read questions off of a piece of paper and didn't acknowledge my response. At the end of the interview, she just walked off. This is someone I would have to work closely with if I get the job.  What can I say, unemployment sucks. Maybe I will "be the change you want to see in the  E: Taking more than 3 graduate classes at a time is like masochism without the pleasure. The only panic attack I've ever had, I had due to the stress of my courseload in my third semester of grad school, and that was with 3 classes. Don't do it, man. Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Oct 15, 2010 |
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Oct 15, 2010 22:43
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Congratulations! I started my first day at work as a cataloging assistant today. I think it will be the low-key, stress-free job I've been wanting to have for a while now. Well, stress-free once I learn this new ILS, new local practices, new procedures, switch my brain to DDC from LCC, and get my own key to the building.
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Oct 26, 2010 01:20
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VideoTapir posted:Look directly at libraries and other institutions you think might be hiring for ANYTHING relevant.
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Oct 27, 2010 23:18
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Out of curiosity, does anyone here know the history of the Cutter-Sanborn table? I work with it all day and can't help wondering how the creators knew how to assign which letter combinations to which numbers. Did they work with the current (i.e., 1969) LC catalog, or with census data, or what? Like, in the Ts...Tulloch is split into two numbers: "Tulloch" is 919 and "Tulloch M" is 921. Where did the creators get the data to tell them that there were so many Tullochs that two numbers were needed? Why does "Theveni" have its own number (417) and "Theveno" have its own number (418), while at the same time the table jumps from "Tro" (843) to "Trog" (844)? How did they know there weren't enough "Trob"s, "Trod"s, etc. to warrant their own numbers? These are the questions that nag at me while I catalog. 
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Jan 19, 2011 16:31
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For any current college students on work/study, if you think you may ever have an inclination to work in a library in the future, see if you can get a student position at your college library, even if it's just for a semester. That's one easy(ish) way to get your foot in the door. Also think about working in related jobs and fields, like literacy programs, book vendors, education, data management, etc. I worked for LexisNexis for a few years after college, and then I was a reading clinician in an elementary school before going for my MLS. So even though I didn't have 10 solid years of library experience before getting my current job, my employer could see that I had experience working with librarians, working with a library, etc. Definitely volunteer if you have the time. You might start doing shelving and then ask if they have any special projects you could work on. Also consider volunteering in a place with an archival collection, like your local historical society or local museums.
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Feb 28, 2011 20:01
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I have an MLS and am in a paraprofessional position (got my degree in '08). I had to convince the interviewer that I knew I was overqualified but wanted the position to get experience, and that I wasn't looking for any old entry-level position but this exact one because it was in the department I wanted to be in. It's an academic library, but I got the job within two months of applying (applied in early September, interviewed early October, started working late October). My university system is having massive budget cuts, though, and as I'm the most recently hired, and am still within the six-month standard probation period, and I have a colleague who keeps sending me job listings for neighboring libraries....I'm kind of nervous.
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Apr 12, 2011 14:38
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Leospeare posted:Thanks, you as well. I lurk this thread pretty regularly if you do think of anything else.  ). (Edit: Like ShaneB says, except for that one guy, nobody in this library's technical services department has anything to do with coding at all.)The most important qualification you can have to be a cataloging librarian is experience cataloging.* I'm planning to stay a library assistant for at least a couple more years to get the experience necessary for a professional position. *I just had a performance review today, coincidentally, and my supervisor said she wants to help me get experience doing derived and original cataloging, to help my career. I'm also going to be taking Russian this semester -- spoken (non-computer) languages are a big plus for a cataloger, especially ones that use a different writing system or alphabet from the Roman alphabet. Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Aug 5, 2011 |
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Aug 5, 2011 19:30
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jeeves1215 posted:
What courses didn't you like?
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Aug 12, 2011 13:15
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I had the same crisis myself a few years ago. My job right after grad school was working as a cataloging assistant at a university library on a special reclassification project. My supervisor was ridiculously anal -- I mean, I know catalogers on the whole are super anal, but this woman took that to new heights. After working there for over a year, if I made an error that was quite obviously a typo, like forgetting to leave a space after a semicolon or something, she wouldn't just hand the book back to me and say, "Whoops, typo in field 245," or something. No, she would hand the book back with a printout of the record, the offending error circled, and the appropriate AACR2 rule written out on the record. This is like if I wrote a paper for a class and wrote "Mr, Smith" instead of "Mr. Smith," and the professor wrote "In America, we use a period to abbreviate Mister! [MLA page number cite]  " even though I had written "Mr." in other places in that paper, and indeed in every other paper I had ever written. I found this so insulting.Every week I would go to the basement to get new books to work on. Every week, I would go to the same shelf in the basement, where the other librarians would deposit the books to be reclassed. Every week for almost two years, same shelf. One day, she asks me to get more books from the basement and hands me a card with a shelf number on it and says, "This is the shelf you should go to." I go down there, and the shelf number she gave me was the same shelf I had been going to all year. Seriously, what the gently caress. How else can I take that except that she thought I was an idiot? And the worst part is, she wasn't condescending at all -- her attitude toward me was like I was a genuine mentally retarded person who needed every last detail spelled out for her. So then I was let go when the grant for my position ran out.....except the grant had run out the previous year, too, but they rehired me when the next fiscal year started. So when they didn't rehire me again, I became totally dejected and thought I was a total fuckup as a cataloger and would never get another library job again and had wasted 2 years of my life in grad school and 30K in student loans for nothing and  Then I got my current job, have an amazing boss who treats me like a person of reasonable intelligence, bosslady gives me all kinds of projects to work on so that I'll have experience doing a number of different jobs across the library (not just in cataloging) to beef up my resume, I'm going to conferences and working on committees and meeting cool people across the state...and now I want to be a librarian again. I'm still a measly library assistant 2, but now I have hope for my future. Moral: Chin up! Don't let the field grind you down.
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Sep 29, 2011 03:03
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Lee Harvey Oswald posted:One of the jobs I applied to sent a cataloging exercise to the top candidates. I starting working on it, and finally realized cataloging is a tedious pain in the rear end. gently caress MARC. I'm going to just apply to jobs that fit my interests from now on. Great, more jobs for me! I knew I had crossed some kind of definitive line the first time I saw a badly formatted MARC record and it made me burst into laughter. Actual smug laughter at poor spacing and punctuation. I knew then that I could never look back; I was now one of Them. I really wanted to put a space in front of that semicolon.
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Feb 9, 2012 19:01
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I've got something worse! This came to me through an official mailing list.quote:Title Are you loving kidding me.
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Apr 14, 2012 06:19
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Yeah, I've had a few librarians get shirty when the library assistants were calling themselves librarians. I understand this -- it's like the difference between a TA and a professor. The TA might teach as much as or more than the professor, but the professor has a higher education level, creates and run the course, and sets the policy for the classroom. Working in a library does not make you a librarian. I'm a cataloging assistant, and I don't have the same responsibilities as our cataloging librarians: they do original cataloging, they make the decisions about the way Cataloging Is Done at our location, etc. -- I don't. I have an MLS, the same as they do, and I know how to do original cataloging and could set policy if I had to, but calling myself a cataloging librarian would not be truthful, since I don't do their level of work. This is not to say that there aren't library assistants with the same education and even more experience than the librarians, who do more work, help people more, who deserve the same level of pay, etc. It's a little galling when you see people who do next to nothing get a lot more money and professional respect than the people who are actually doing a librarian's job but lack either the education or simply the job description. Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Apr 29, 2012 |
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Apr 29, 2012 20:06
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That posting is interesting to me since my university library is going to have to deal with hiring possibly two temps when two of our reference librarians go on sabbatical in the coming year (one in the fall, one in the spring). That listed salary is just galling to me. I make that much annually (~30k) and I'm an LA2 and my position didn't even list "MLS preferred" let alone "required".
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Jun 4, 2012 19:16
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Yeah, I think I posted in this thread about the horrible interview I had (on the interviewers' parts) when I got my current job. Those people are still really weird, but since they ignore me (won't say hello back after I say hello in the morning -- that kind of weird social incompetence), I don't have to deal with them. The rest of my coworkers are great, though, really! E: Here is the post! Rabbit Hill posted:I had a job interview for a position as a cataloging assistant yesterday, and the people who interviewed me were the most socially inept people I've ever met, and that's including goons. One interviewer didn't say hello or goodbye or introduce herself to me and never once looked me in the face, but just read questions off of a piece of paper and didn't acknowledge my response. At the end of the interview, she just walked off. This is someone I would have to work closely with if I get the job.
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Jun 7, 2012 01:25
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We had a position suddenly open up here at my library in another department, and I've applied for it. Unfortunately(?), my direct supervisor is on the search committee, so she couldn't say anything to me when I asked her if I should go for it except, "Sure, you can apply on our website." It's in a department I'm not particularly passionate about, but the job combines technical and public services (which would help me in my search for a professional position later on in my career) and it pays $5,000 more than my current position. Several other co-workers encouraged me to apply, including the woman who would be my new supervisor if I got it, so here's hoping!
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Aug 24, 2012 01:35
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Have you been told you'll have to give a presentation? At my library, we ask candidates to teach a mock class on a topic relevant to the position they're interviewing for. I think they're given the topic a week before their interview. For example, we were looking for a temporary librarian to fill in for two librarians going on sabbatical this year -- the Gov Docs librarian and the Science librarian -- so the candidates had to teach a mock class on using government resources to research a topic in the sciences. One candidate did a great job using skin cancer research as an example. They present for the faculty and staff at the library, we evaluate their presentation, and at the end of it, we can ask them any question we'd like regarding their background, why they're interested in the job, etc. Edit: Forgot to mention that this is one of the reasons the interview takes all day. You meet with the hiring committee for a long interview, you go to lunch, you meet with the library director, you make your presentation, tour the campus, have other meetings/interviews I'm forgetting now, and possibly go to dinner. Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Sep 9, 2012 |
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Sep 9, 2012 16:10
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Everything VideoTapir said is spot on. "Technical services assistant" is basically what I do now and it's not IT work at all. You would be doing either copy cataloging, serials, and/or acquisitions work -- all of these involve things like downloading records, placing orders, maintaining MARC records in the catalog, editing them as needed, etc. When I was in grad school, I decided to focus my coursework on cataloging because (besides enjoying it) it seemed like cataloging was the one facet of library science which would be very difficult to pick up on the job because it was so arcane, at least to me -- I felt like I needed to learn the principles involved (like how does the Dewey Decimal System work?) in a focused class. Or four. (But that's just because I ended up loving it and wanting to take every class I could). I'm interviewing for a job in another department at my library on Monday, and one of the people on the interview panel will be my current boss.
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Sep 14, 2012 21:04
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I just saw my dream job advertised. Too bad I just started a new job (and don't meet all the requirements...). This new job as a Gov Docs technician is a trip. My predecessor didn't leave any instructions or notes on how she handled things, but I do have the contents of her Documents folder from her computer, so I feel like an anthropologist trying to piece together clues about how she carried out a typical day. My supervisor is away all week at the FDLP conference, and this is only my second week on the job and she was out two days last week, too (and apparently she is very hands-off regarding what her tech does, so I don't know if she could help me with the details I need anyway). Good thing hardly anyone uses the Gov Docs collection! 
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Oct 17, 2012 13:21
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I'm on one for all the branches of the state universities in my state, one for the academic libraries in my tri-state region, GOVDOC-L, DocTech-L, and FDLP Listserv. The last three are mostly people offering gov docs to other libraries before they're weeded. Once in a while something cool will get posted, like this:quote:This report, which is receiving a lot of media publicity, is officially called A Study of Lunar Research Flights Vol. 1 by L. Reiffel and can be found via DTIC at http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/425380.pdf It's an unclassified document from 1959 about proposed nuclear testing on the moon. 
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Dec 19, 2012 14:19
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Is it kosher to post reference questions to this thread? (As in, a student has asked me for info and I can't figure out where to look for the answer.)
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Apr 17, 2013 19:40
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All right, well, the question is not especially exciting, but here goes: A patron is looking for a list of US state legislators (that is, state senators and state representatives -- not federal) for particular states going back to the 1960s. She needs their names, party, district, and years in office. The three states she requested data for when she spoke with me are Texas, Alabama, and Idaho. Now, Texas has a wonderful Legislative Reference Library site where you can just select the year of legislature in the drop-down menu, hit search, and the results show exactly what the patron needs. So that's one down. Alabama and Idaho, on the other hand, have nothing like that. I can't find anything for Idaho, and for Alabama (since their state legislature's website is under construction, and the patron has emailed the guy running it with no response) all I have found are digitized volumes of the Alabama Official and Statistical Register, but the editions stop at 1979, and she needs 1963-2000s. (I've also suggested the patron email this archives and see if they have more recent editions that she can get through ILL or have them photocopy the pertinent info for a fee.) I'm a Gov Docs technician and unfortunately my boss, the Gov Docs librarian, is on sabbatical and not reachable by email for another month. I've only been in this position for a few months and I am not familiar with the wealth of government resources out there, but I'm thinking surely there has to be some sort of almanac or reference list compiled somewhere! My library subscribes to the print version of the Statesman's Yearbook, going back to the 1920s, but unfortunately the entries in each volume will tell you how many state legislators there are per state for any given year, but there's no list of names, etc. Even Wikipedia has this info for federal senators/representatives, but not state-level. What other sources of state legislature info are out there? I've suggested to the patron that she contact the offices of the state legislatures directly to see if they can either provide her with the data directly or send her to another resource. She also needs data for three other states (which she's already selected), but she didn't tell me which ones, so if there is a source that compiles this data for all 50 states, that would be a godsend. And if you're thinking, "Yeah...no idea," that's cool.
Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Apr 19, 2013 |
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Apr 19, 2013 13:07
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Thanks for your help, guys.Mary Annette posted:How about contacting the state law libraries or gov docs departments of the big public universities? Some librarian's gonna end up doing the legwork anyway, might as well be one a hell of a lot closer to the info. This is a great idea -- I'll follow up with the patron and suggest this to her.
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Apr 23, 2013 13:14
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nesbit37 posted:Besides, there are tons of library positions where you can wear jeans and a nice shirt and I pity anyone who interviews in that attire even if it is ok for the day to day work day. Dress up for the interview/assessment, worry about what to worry to the job later. Don't wear heels if you can't walk in them. If the rest of your outfit is professional and smart, you can wear nice flats and still look dressy enough.
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May 3, 2013 13:04
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I would wear it with the jacket (buttoned or unbuttoned -- whatever feels comfortable), with a scarf or necklace with some color in it (pink or red go well with gray, IMO), hair up or back, and get thin trouser socks in black or dark gray.
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May 3, 2013 15:26
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No joke, weeding is my very favorite thing to do in the library. Books should not be fetish objects: they exist to serve a utilitarian purpose, and if they're no longer useful, they're taking up space and preventing the library from acquiring other, actually useful, books. Get rid of them. And then let me rummage in the recycling bins and take the cool ones home.
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May 6, 2013 13:36
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Wow, that interview sounds insane, but it seems you handled yourself really well! Congratulations on making it to the next step! Re: clothes, I think it would be fine if you wore the same suit with a different blouse underneath.
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May 8, 2013 13:08
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I have a general question for anyone working in the academic field: What do you do about fellow librarians who hold your patron (student) body as a whole in contempt? I work for a university whose students are by and large seen as basically a bunch of idiots. Having taken a few undergraduate courses at the university as part of my staff development courses, I can tell you for certain that this is not an accurate picture -- there are a significant number of bright, motivated students on our campus (along with a few that just make you shake your head). But I have a real problem getting anything changed or improved at my library because the general attitude is that the students are dum-dums who won't give a poo poo. Now, this is with the awareness that our library is well-used by students, the student study spaces are always packed, attendance and circulation stats go up year after year, etc. I have a lot of ideas of ways we could improve patron services, but no one ever wants to act on them because they see the patrons as hopeless. Just....what a terrible attitude to have! When I do things like put on library exhibits, I do them with the understanding that 90 out of 100 patrons might walk right by, but 10 will stop and look, and 2 will get engaged/inspired/think it's cool/etc. So I put a ton of effort into those displays for the benefit of those 2 people. Basic professional and personal pride keeps me from focusing on the 90 who will ignore it and subsequently half-assing the display. I have a few great coworkers who have the same values I have, but the rest of them are frustrating and I don't know what to do about it.
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Jun 27, 2013 20:29
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Grave $avings posted:I don't know what to tell you, I currently work in an academic subject library and everyone --- grad students, undergrads, and especially the student workers --- are treated in utter contempt by some of the staff (including our director). YOU UNDERSTAND ME. I'm at a state university where the undergrad pop is something like 15,000 and a couple thousand more grads. I ask because I just came from a 4-day leadership conference for young librarians, and I left feeling like I could change the world, but literally the moment I opened my mouth to share with my coworkers all the great marketing/outreach/patron involvement/improvement ideas I had learned at the conference, my spirits were crushed by my coworkers' pessimism. At the very least, we should be asking for more student involvement in the goings on at the library, even if it's simple stuff like having a liaison with the student government and asking them for input when we plan events at the library. This is the population we serve and we never ask them for their input on anything! Look, I know the general caliber of scholarship at our institution is shamefully low and many of them can barely read and write. THAT'S WHY THEY NEED US. What better population to serve than those who can benefit most from our services! I MEAN  E: The good news is that this spring we put together a marketing committee (which, oh ho, not coincidentally is populated by the youngest people at the library), so I can bring these ideas to them when the semester starts and we can start engaging our students more. Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 27, 2013 21:35
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I don't know, I found my grad school experience to be a pain in the rear end if only for the sheer amount of work. Like, the work itself wasn't difficult, there was just SO MUCH of it. My Abstracting & Indexing class alone almost did me in.
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Jul 3, 2013 21:52
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I'm serving on a hiring committee looking to fill a library technician position at a university library. Public service announcement: If you are thinking of applying for one of these jobs, don't put your salary requirements in your application, especially if you have no library experience, unless you want to make somebody laugh really hard. Guess what one guy who has zero library experience and clearly no clue at all about this industry thinks he can ask for as a library tech. Just guess: $55-60,000
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Aug 6, 2013 20:44
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Hmph, no one ever told me that. Maybe it's because I skipped the graduation ceremony.
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Feb 27, 2014 19:31
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Uh, I may be exposing some shameful ignorance here**, but I don't understand -- what is the problem with that? What difference could it make that you wrote about a document you found outside rather than in a government document depository? **I was ridiculed today when I referred to our library homepage as the OPAC, when (oh, excuse me) the homepage is merely a gateway to the actual OPAC. Which has multiple search boxes on it. It was totally irrelevant to the conversation I was having, but holy poo poo did I get genuine scorn heaped on me by one prickly librarian. So I'm feeling stupid today.
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May 14, 2014 02:03
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:47 |
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Insane Totoro posted:This is a day and age where paraprofessional positions are filled my MLS graduates. Yep, at my library, there are seven (out of 15) staff people with their MLS -- including me -- plus one more who is starting an online program in the fall. poo poo is rough, yo.
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May 20, 2014 22:56
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