Sarah Cohen wonders what motivated people to participate in Library Day in the Life and who we are writing these for. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I wanted to share my own reasons for doing it (and since this is a bit long, I thought it better to post it here than to Sarah’s blog).
I wasn’t one of those people who first worked in a library before going to library school. I started library school about a month after I started my first job in a library, so obviously I’d made the decision to pursue this career before I had the inside scoop on what library work was like. I’d read a number of articles about digital preservation and digitization of special collections materials and thought that librarianship seemed to be an exciting profession that allowed people to pursue all sorts of interesting and diverse work and would have a tremendous impact on the preservation of born digital materials. Also, coming from a helping profession (social work), I was looking to do work where I felt like I could make a difference in people’s lives. But did I have any idea what I’d be doing as a librarian on a day-to-day basis? Not a clue! I took a huge leap of faith and luckily it paid off. I would have loved to have had a better idea of what librarians do in their jobs, but, at the time, there weren’t really many resources that offered that sort of information.
Because of my blog, I get a lot of people emailing me for advice on whether or not they should become a librarian or asking me what librarians do (or what I do as if my experience is somehow representative). I never tell someone if they should or shouldn’t go to library school, but try to dispel some of the myths about librarianship (it’s not stressful, you read books all day, etc.) and point them to resources that give them a sense of the breadth of experiences in our profession. That, I think, is what Library Day in the Life offers. It paints a picture of the diverse work we do as librarians in a very real and unromanticized sense. If you’re interested in working in public services, you can visit the blogs of librarians who work in public services and see what their days are like. If you’re interested in working with library systems, you can see what sorts of projects those librarians are working on. It doesn’t romanticize, doesn’t cheer our work — it just lays out what we do in a way that people who are interested in our profession can learn from.
So, I guess I’d say that I was writing this for the “me” of seven years ago, or for people who, like me, have not worked in the profession but think librarianship sounds like a good match for their interests and might want to participate. And while it’s valuable for future librarians, I also found it interesting myself to see what people at other libraries do during their work days. It’s fascinating to me how different the work of instruction/information literacy librarians can be at different institutions. But, again, I think it’s less for us than for those people who are searching the web in an effort to get a sense of what this profession they’re thinking of joining is really like.
When someone emails me and tells me they’re considering becoming a librarian, I will tell them that before they make any sort of decision, they should look at librarians’ library day in the life posts and see what the work of a librarian is really like. It’s an awesome resource and I applaud Bobbi Newman for starting it all.
Thank you! I really appreciated the “Day in the Life” posts for exactly the reasons you stated.
Agreed. And a little more selfishly, I find the day in a life posts helpful because I have discovered other librarians working on similar projects as I am working on, which gives me someone to commiserate with. And sometimes it’s just comforting to know that other people are involved in the same kind of work, that I’m not working in isolation.
I even have discovered some interesting things about people I know by reading these posts. Talking with them at conferences usually involves discussing Big Idea, but there still is a lot to learn from our day-to-day work.
It has been said that it’s useful to look at the resume of people whose job you like, to help your job search (or education) along. I think the Library Day in the Life is a little like that — if you see the activities of someone and think “I’d love to do that” (or “I’d hate to do that”), it can help guide you in your choices of classes to take, jobs to apply for, projects to explore, etc. I think it’s both valuable and interesting to be able to peak into the day-to-day work that people do.
Thank you, Meredith, for taking the time to blog, especially for doing your “Day in the Life” posts. I have just finished one semester of the SLIS program at SJSU and I have yet to have any real library experience. The sad thing is, I feel really lame admitting that because it seems like so many other people in the program are already working as librarians, like it should be a pre-requisite or something! 🙂 I know my time will come, but it isn’t here quite yet. In the mean time, I’ve enjoyed reading your “Day in the Life” posts, especially the plans you’ve shared regarding orientation sessions. Thank you again.
Meredith, I appreciate your taking the time to make explicit what, for you, was implicit. It is that level of intentionality that I felt was not being expressed in the myriad of Library-Day-In-The-Life posts. If these posts help add more creativity, interesting, and diverse people to our profession–ROCKIN! Thanks for sharing another perspective.
As someone applying to mlis programs right now, I found your posts immensely helpful. Thank you.
Not to rain on the parade too much but here’s why I didn’t. I too want my blog readers to learn something of value from what I have to write (Ok that latest ACRLog post was just to take a break and have some fun), and since my time is limited and I consider my blog writing an important investment of my time I want to offer something that challenges the reader, that gets them thinking and most of all will help them have a self-directed learning opportunity. From my perspective I will be much more successful meeting those goals with a topical post than one that just lists what I did on any given work day. How will it help one of these students to know I sat in a strategic planning meeting for two hours. They might even get the wrong idea about being an academic library adminstrator – they might say “wow, who wants to be in meetings all day or deal with patron complaints and problems (that’s part of my job)”. But a lot of what I do is really rewarding and I doubt my passion for it would come through in an hour by hour listing of my day. I’d much rather write a post about experiential brand statements over at Designing Better Libraries and get our LIS students thinking about how they could create or contribute to the design of an experience at their library – or be able to speak to others about it on a job interview. I suppose for some bloggers the day in the life could be a nice break or it might get someone whose blog has run dry of ideas blogging again, but it just didn’t work for me.
Oh – one more thing. As a general principle as a blogger I make an effort to find things to write about that no one else is writing about, issues that no one else is paying attention to, or ideas that haven’t yet been introduced. It doesn’t always work out that way, but in general, if others librarians are writing (or have written about) X, I’ll be sure to write about Y (and Z).
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