Post-reveals Yuletide friending meme

[dolorosa_12]

I hope everyone had as good a Yuletide as I did! It's sometimes hard to find people who like the same small, Yuletide-eligible fandoms as you do, so I thought it would be great to do a friending meme after reveals, so that people could find and add the authors, recipients and commenters who made their 2018 Yuletides so enjoyable.

Please feel free to share this meme far and wide. To participate, just leave a comment on this post, copying the code below and filling in your own answers. I've enabled anonymous commenting so if you don't have a Dreamwidth account you can still participate.

People who didn't participate in Yuletide are also welcome to participate in this friending meme — obviously just leave out answers to the questions regarding Yuletide.

<b>Archive of Our Own username:</b> <b>Usernames on other platforms (Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Twitter etc):</b> <b>Preferred platform(s):</b> <b>I like to post about/read about:</b> <b>Fandoms (including bigger, non-Yuletide fandoms):</b> <b>This Yuletide I wrote:</b> <b>Any recs from this year's Yuletide and/or Madness collection?</b> <b>Anything else you want to say:</b>

Comments

[tehexile]

how does one become an academic librarian?

[shadaras]

One works at an academic (college) library after getting one's Library and Information Sciences Master's Degree. I suspect the academic/public distinction is something that matters a lot more to librarians than to the general public? But that's fair, it's their field.

[tehexile]

cool, I have done neither job but I am looking for a way in, I have been volunteering at a bookshop for years now, I need work to do where I can organise stuff efficiently and not talk to customers

[shadaras]

If you can do volunteer work at libraries, do that! It'll help a lot. And if you genuinely want to be a librarian, you will need a master's degree—and it's better to go into that with more knowledge of the field itself. There's a lot more going on that just organizing books. :)

The problem there, of course, is that a lot of the time libraries do customer service, especially at public libraries. At academic libraries, you might not be public-facing as much but those jobs still need to be filled, and part of your degree is in being a more helpful google interface. If you aren't doing public-facing work, you're still working with a lot of specialized programs and spreadsheets and bureaucracy.

During the library degree you'll be able to specialise in academic/public/archives (which I do not understand, as neither of my friends who did library degrees were interested by it). But, like. If you're interested in working at a library, talk to librarians about the realities of their jobs and not just the aesthetic part of getting to be around books all day.

[tehexile]

cool, thx for the advice

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, I agree with all of this. As someone who works in libraries (and, incidentally, loves books), I've seen a lot of people apply for jobs in libraries on the basis that they love books and reading. To be honest, if that's their main reason, most academic libraries are unlikely to hire them. But generally what libraries want, at least in the UK academic sector, which is what I'm familiar with is:

1. Customer service experience (so you can work comfortably at a busy enquiry desk helping people find books, 'being a more helpful Google interface' as shadaras says, and generally answering any questions people might have).

2. Really good IT skills, particularly with Microsoft Office (honestly, half the time I seem to just spend my days solving people's problems with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and basic email stuff).

3. Willingness to learn new things and adapt to a really quickly changing field.

If those things suit you, then academic libraries might be the place for you. But if you don't like customer service, I would probably recommend something more like special collections (medieval manuscripts or early printed books, or some other kind of specialised collection of books such as music librarianship) or archives, since you'll do a lot less customer-facing work and a lot more hanging around with books. I'd probably advise speaking to someone who works in that kind of area in your own country, though, to see what it's like.

[dolorosa_12]

This is good advice, although it's not how I got into it in my case. I don't have a library degree, and I got my job on the strength of two things:

1. I had a PhD, and therefore experience of what it was like to be an academic, and extensive experience teaching in a higher education context (my job in my library involves delivering teaching and training).

2. I had more than a decade's worth of customer service experience, including five years of working as a library invigilator (think someone doing the basic enquiry desk stuff, shelving, and basic administrative tasks), which I had done as a weekend job while doing my PhD.

In the UK there's a lot of debate currently about whether library/information studies degrees are necessary or desirable, and whether existing library/information studies degrees are fit for purpose, because a lot of the content is extremely out of date, none of them teach about research data management, scholarly communication and stuff like that, which is increasingly where the field is heading. My husband has a career profile like me — PhD but no library degree — and he also works as an academic librarian, and was hired on the strength of his academic background and scholarly communication experience.

Of course, all countries have different routes into librarianship, so what I've said may be very UK context specific.