Skip to main content

One Year Later

Thursday was the one year anniversary of starting my first professional librarian job. I'd worked plenty of library jobs before, but this was my first full-time gig with real professional responsibilities. I was looking forward to finally having collection development responsibilities and maybe doing some programming. After working in various libraries all through college and grad school and being a book lover since birth, I was ecstatic. My dream was finally coming true.

In reality, dreams are never perfect, and while I still think I am incredibly lucky to have found a career that I can see myself being happy in for a long, long time, things have definitely not been perfect.

Exactly four weeks after beginning what I hoped would be my dream job (or at least the beginning of a dream career), I, along with the rest of my co-workers was forced to leave the library building at 5PM due to the city's mandatory evacuation of downtown in anticipation of the rapidly rising flood waters of the Cedar River.

A year later, we've bounced back tremendously, but things will never be the same and it will still be years until we are back to a similar collection size in a building with similar amenities to what we had before the flood. Since they match up so closely, it's hard to separate my first year on the job from the library's flood story, but I think it will do me some good to focus on my job as my part of my professional development rather than in the light of natural disaster.

Here are the highlights from my year:

  • Despite all my previous library experience and recent graduation from library school, I spent my first few weeks on the job with a feeling that seems pretty common among new librarians. I felt lost. Although I knew what kind of stuff I was supposed to be doing, I still didn't know what actual every day duties that stuff translated into. Eventually I was able to pull a few co-workers aside to clue me into what projects were up for grabs and to teach me some of the things I needed to learn in order to perform my job. While it initially seemed like my dream job had turned into a nightmare, slowly but surely, I started finding things to keep me busy, and now I generally wish there were more hours in the work day, so I could finally finish something.
  • Cataloging is fun, even if you didn't take that class in library school. I should have known that my borderline OCD penchant for organization would win out in this regard.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ebooks & Libraries

For a long time I've been frustrated with the way ebook publishers have been approaching library lending, but my rage has been overruling my sense and I haven't been able to get many coherent thoughts into print. Luckily Bobbi Newman pretty much hit the nail on the head with her " 9 Reasons Why Publishers Should Stop Acting Like Libraries Are the Enemy and Start Thanking Them ". I could go through each of her reasons and expound on why each one makes so much sense and explains a piece of where my frustration is coming from, but I'm going to focus on the points that have been bugging me the most. First from the consumer side, I know I'm not alone in the group of people who don't like to buy books until they're pretty sure they're going to love them. I simply read too much for buying every book I read to make any sort of financial sense. Often that means borrowing the first book in a series or by a new author to see if I want to spend money on th...
1 comment
Read more

Dystopian Series for Teens

Talking about dystopian novels last time, this week I'm back with more, this time with teenage protagonists. It's interesting how the adult novels tend to focus on the society at large and then you start to identify with the main character. These novels for teens start with the hero's story and then progress to illuminate how their story affects the larger world. Also because I happened to find so many, I'm sticking with only series. The Giver Trilogy by Lois Lowry - a loose trilogy following three teens through a world where each community limits the lives of their people in different ways. The Giver (1993) - 12-year-old Jonas is assigned the occupation of "Receiver of Memory". It is his job to take on the memories of their community before it was wiped clean of the strong emotions of love and hate and things like colors. As he begins to learn more about the way life used to be, he finds it harder to stay in the community. My seventh grade English teacher ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflections of a New Community College Librarian

After months of searching I finally found found a job and I have to say that I'm really surprised with both where I landed and how much I'm loving it. After focusing primarily on the public library reference jobs that were similar to my most recent position, I stumbled onto a couple openings at nearby community colleges. When I'd first graduated from library school I heard somewhere that people who worked in community college libraries claimed they were this magical land where public meets academic, where you don't have to deal with spoiled rich kids and people are looking for things more stimulating than the latest James Patterson novel. But I went to library school so I could become a public librarian and I loved the public library job I eventually got, so I never really thought about that statement. While I loved my public library job, one of things I discovered I loved most about it was teaching public computer classes. Eventually it clicked with me that academi...
Post a Comment
Read more