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Rabbit Hill posted: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. It must be one of those things that depends heavily on the college in question. My MLS was a joke - even as a full-time student, I had maybe five or six hours of work per week, and worked part time in a public library at the same time with no trouble. The only time I had to reschedule any work due to class demands was during the comprehensive final to graduate.
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Jul 10, 2013 17:50
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Depends on what kind of librarianship you go into, honestly. In my [fairly limited] professional experience, much more important is being able to quickly learn new systems. I've worked at five libraries - two as staff, three as an intern - and none of them used the same programs for anything. However, they did have similar programs that did similar things. You have to be quick to learn the particularities of whatever program the job uses, and to transfer the skills you have from one system to another.
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Jul 14, 2013 02:11
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Insane Totoro posted:Online only is the trend anyway. The lack of networking is the concern. And it's not like you put "online degree" on your resume. I finished my master's in library science last year. Had a few hybrid courses, but the rest were purely online. I found that group projects where the group could join on a skype video conference chat went a long way to connecting with fellow students.
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Feb 12, 2014 17:55
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apdear posted:Also, i'd like to know how much you could handle during your program- were you full time students? did you work at the same time and also look for an internship? Did you find that you were overly worked or is the home-work load pretty light? I was a full time student for about half my program while volunteering at a local public library, then was a full-time student while also interning at another local library and continuing my volunteering. I personally found the course load pretty light, certainly easier than the upper level part of my bachelor's degree in history. The courses on research methods and information policy, and an elective I took on digital libraries were heavier than the norm, but I found it all pretty easy to manage. If your program has a supervised fieldwork program like mine did, I strongly recommend looking into it - it amounts to doing an internship, only it also counts for a grade.
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Feb 13, 2014 17:42
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apdear posted:If you did an internship, how many hours total did you work and was it all at once in the summers or piece-meal throughout your studies? I started out in a blurry line between an internship and volunteering for 8 hours a week year-round, then upped to 12 hours a week in the supervised fieldwork program at my university - 8 in the university-cooperative internship, 4 in volunteering at another local library.
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Feb 14, 2014 22:47
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Insane Totoro posted:What if I just really really like wearing sweaters to work??? Then what Most of the library staff where I work routinely wear jackets or sweaters to work. The library is kept really goddamn cold.
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Apr 4, 2014 14:16
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U-DO Burger posted:Seriously, if you know of a forum for librarians that is full of active members who discuss things beyond newspaper comics and cats, please let me know. Let me know if you find a library that doesn't fit this description. The university library I work at has unofficial break times for everyone to share coffee and cat pictures.
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May 15, 2014 01:43
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Insane Totoro posted:This is a day and age where paraprofessional positions are filled my MLS graduates. *raises hand* This is me. I started applying for library jobs after I got my bachelor's in history, and was flat-out told by a couple of interviews that competition for jobs is so fierce that I need either a year or two of library experience or an MLS to realistically have a chance of landing even a paraprofessional job.
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May 21, 2014 14:52
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Personally, I think it's also the library field's own iteration of degree inflation. I count myself lucky in that between volunteer experience at a local public library and an unpaid internship with my county's central public library I was able to get a full-time job at a university library within a month or so of getting my MLS. I have friends with masters in other fields who haven't been so fortunate.
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May 21, 2014 18:38
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Funny thing about the ALA. Throughout working on my MLS, almost every professor said I needed to join the ALA and that it was expected of virtually every respectable professional librarian. When I got hired at a university library, I asked my boss if I needed to register for the ALA. She laughed in my face and told me that no one in the library has an ALA membership.
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Jul 1, 2014 20:58
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There's a particular strain of academic that hates change of any kind for any reason. There are some complaints, and some complainers, you learn to ignore.
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Oct 25, 2014 15:23
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Insane Totoro posted:What about academic librarians? You think that doesn't happen to us?  Also, add waiting lists of a dozen people for one textbook two weeks before finals and people breaking down crying at the circulation desk or screaming at you because they're going to fail without that book and it's your fault.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:53
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Insane Totoro posted:*has circ desk flashbacks* Also, I'm a Florida university librarian. We had a three hour meeting today on what to do if we have a school shooter in the library. 
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Nov 21, 2014 20:07
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Insane Totoro posted:Oh please, as if academic librarians wouldn't use an actual absinthe water dispenser My university library does have a communal booze stash in the history librarian's office. Finals start week after next, so we've all been chipping in to restocking it.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:12
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gipskrampf posted:I have some colleagues who currently have to read the RDA rulebook from start to finish in order to school the rest of our catalogers. I sometimes fear for their mental health. I did original cataloging work in an unpaid internship during my last semester of library school. Then got hired at an academic library and the only people here allowed to do original cataloging work are paid literally double what I am.
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Dec 9, 2014 00:38
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My library has embarked upon a peculiar project. Our previous dean, six or seven years ago, insisted that we store all book covers for items we add to the collection, but remove and store the covers in a back storeroom, leaving the books on the shelves without covers. That would be well and good, but lo and behold what's probably a few thousand book covers take up space in storage, and a couple of months ago we asked the upstairs folks what we should do with all of these book covers in storage. The dean's solution is to have us look up every single cover's book by hand, find it in the collection, put the cover back on, and make new spine and barcode labels for the cover. Again, thousands of book covers. And she insists that we not use our student workers to handle the grunt work of looking up the books (by ISBN off the cover) and retrieving them from the shelves.
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Dec 11, 2014 00:01
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Insane Totoro posted:Also what was the rationale for the book covers? To highlight books in the collection if they're put on display other than the stacks? Nope, we have special cover protectors for books on display. I have yet to find anyone who has a good explanation as to why we were storing the covers to begin with, beyond that it was the previous dean's idea and no one thought to change that policy.
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Dec 11, 2014 00:59
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a friendly penguin posted:If not for this, then why do you have student workers? Helping man the circulation desk, reshelving books, sweeping the library and stacks for stuff that needs to be reshelved and misbehaving patrons, and fetching stuff from the stacks for ILL. This isn't much more complicated than anything they're already doing, and the explanation I got was "Because I don't trust the student workers to do this." Which, in my opinion, is a bit bullshit. Yeah, there are a few student workers we have who I wouldn't trust with this, but likewise there are a few who could probably do the job of an LTA (Library Technical Assistant, AKA low-ranking para) with a few weeks of training.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:35
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Lady Demelza posted:I once worked under an academic who refused to explain specialist terms in an exhibition, on the grounds that if people didn't know what was meant, then they weren't the intended audience. The idea that someone might come to a library and learn something new apparently hadn't occured to them. Academic librarian.txt. There is a shocking level of disconnect at the university library where I work between the actual academic librarians upstairs and the paraprofessionals like me downstairs in the Customer Service department.
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Feb 17, 2015 17:39
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I hate being apparently the only person working in my library who knows how to use Microsoft Excel. If you're interested in a library job, please learn Excel first. Please. I'm starting to get very tired of getting multiple requests every day from every department under the roof asking for new, slightly different spreadsheets of statistics from our existing spreadsheets of statistics in such a way that I can't simply copy paste rows and cells, and instead have to manually input everything for each new sheet and chart.
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Feb 21, 2015 17:11
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Insane Totoro posted:So riddle me this. Been working in this field for two years, still don't have an answer to that that isn't an empty platitude.
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Feb 27, 2015 23:18
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VideoTapir posted:After I lost my first paying library job, I went to China to teach English because I didn't want to spend another 6 months or more unemployed looking for work. I got ridiculously lucky getting a full-time library job less than a month after finishing my MLIS with only an eight month internship and volunteer experience to my name, but I definitely would not recommend trying it.
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Feb 28, 2015 03:57
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Took the librarian civil service exam a few days ago at a county position I applied for, if anyone's considering applying for a public library job that has a similar requirement and wants to know what to expect. The majority of the exam was pretty simple customer service and management skill questions, reading comprehension questions like you'd see in a high school English test, and looking through sets of data for discrepancies. Other parts included doing basic math on pencil and paper with no calculator (PEMDAS materiel), questions about library terminology and general procedures, filing questions (put a list of authors or titles in the correct order), and looking at simulated library card applications versus a template to spot errors.
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Mar 23, 2015 00:42
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