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dolorosa_12Welcome to the first day of my January talking meme, where I answer questions that people have asked me to write about. Today's question is very fitting, as I'm heading back to work for the second day after the Christmas holidays.
falena asked me to talk about my favourite thing about my job, and the bit I dislike the most.
I work as a research support and teaching librarian in one of the faculty libraries in the University of Cambridge. What this means is practice is that I deliver group or one-to-one training on academic and research skills, support students and researchers with their coursework, dissertations, theses, publications and other research outputs, coauthor publications with researchers, and, like every staff member in my library, do my share of daily shifts out at the enquiry desk helping with what most people perceive as 'typical' library work (issuing and returning books, helping people find physical books in the library, and so on). I'm also responsible for the website, social media, and communications of my library.
It sounds really cheesy, but my favourite part of my job is helping people, particularly those moments where I somehow find the right way to explain something that had been confusing them and worrying them immensely. You can see the confusion disappear from their eyes, as if something has been unlocked, or a weight has been lifted from their shoulders. I once had a woman burst into tears when I was teaching her, because she'd been feeling so helpless and stressed about an assignment, and what I'd shown her had given her the information she needed to finish it. Something I said in one of my (essentially unrelated) group training sessions finally made this guy understand the conventions of the Harvard referencing style, and he finally realised why people had been criticising his referencing style on every output he had written since becoming a student, and later a researcher! I've been given gifts of plants, cards, chocolate, biscuits, and acknowledgement in publications by grateful students. But to be honest, none of those things are necessary, nice though they are. It's the moment you can see that something really clicks for someone, that they get the point of what I've taught them not just for that specific moment, but for their academic work in an ongoing sense, that I really love. I guess my short answer to this part of the question is teaching, and the students I teach.
My least favourite part of the job is somewhat related: it really frustrates me when some library users don't perceive what I'm doing to require any skill, and think of me and other librarians as sort of mindless dispensers of books and journal articles (so, they'll come in and demand we immediately find twenty articles for them online — all of which are easily accessible with their university logins or from a university computer, and simultaneously whinge and complain that things are too difficult to find, and give off the impression that they think what we're doing for them is trivial and unimportant). There's this sense with some people (and it's not just older academics) which I'm struggling to convey, whereby they simultaneously don't want to bother to learn skills that we librarians have (mainly relating to using Boolean operators to search for online resources), but think what we do is unskilled and unimportant.
My other least favourite thing about the job is being held responsible for the iniquities of academic publishing ('why doesn't the library subscribe to this journal?', 'why do we have to pay to make our journal article open access?') while all academics continue to view publication(s) in high impact peer reviewed journals as the only metric by which they can judge the success of their own career, and other people's.
You can still give me more prompts at the original post.
falena asked me to talk about my favourite thing about my job, and the bit I dislike the most.I work as a research support and teaching librarian in one of the faculty libraries in the University of Cambridge. What this means is practice is that I deliver group or one-to-one training on academic and research skills, support students and researchers with their coursework, dissertations, theses, publications and other research outputs, coauthor publications with researchers, and, like every staff member in my library, do my share of daily shifts out at the enquiry desk helping with what most people perceive as 'typical' library work (issuing and returning books, helping people find physical books in the library, and so on). I'm also responsible for the website, social media, and communications of my library.
It sounds really cheesy, but my favourite part of my job is helping people, particularly those moments where I somehow find the right way to explain something that had been confusing them and worrying them immensely. You can see the confusion disappear from their eyes, as if something has been unlocked, or a weight has been lifted from their shoulders. I once had a woman burst into tears when I was teaching her, because she'd been feeling so helpless and stressed about an assignment, and what I'd shown her had given her the information she needed to finish it. Something I said in one of my (essentially unrelated) group training sessions finally made this guy understand the conventions of the Harvard referencing style, and he finally realised why people had been criticising his referencing style on every output he had written since becoming a student, and later a researcher! I've been given gifts of plants, cards, chocolate, biscuits, and acknowledgement in publications by grateful students. But to be honest, none of those things are necessary, nice though they are. It's the moment you can see that something really clicks for someone, that they get the point of what I've taught them not just for that specific moment, but for their academic work in an ongoing sense, that I really love. I guess my short answer to this part of the question is teaching, and the students I teach.
My least favourite part of the job is somewhat related: it really frustrates me when some library users don't perceive what I'm doing to require any skill, and think of me and other librarians as sort of mindless dispensers of books and journal articles (so, they'll come in and demand we immediately find twenty articles for them online — all of which are easily accessible with their university logins or from a university computer, and simultaneously whinge and complain that things are too difficult to find, and give off the impression that they think what we're doing for them is trivial and unimportant). There's this sense with some people (and it's not just older academics) which I'm struggling to convey, whereby they simultaneously don't want to bother to learn skills that we librarians have (mainly relating to using Boolean operators to search for online resources), but think what we do is unskilled and unimportant.
My other least favourite thing about the job is being held responsible for the iniquities of academic publishing ('why doesn't the library subscribe to this journal?', 'why do we have to pay to make our journal article open access?') while all academics continue to view publication(s) in high impact peer reviewed journals as the only metric by which they can judge the success of their own career, and other people's.
You can still give me more prompts at the original post.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 09:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 02:45 pm (UTC)The title of the post is a quote from Peaky Blinders by the character whose icon I also used in the post, Ada Shelby. She's the sister of the main character, and is a communist who ends up working in a library, where (with the quote above), she tries to prevent her brother from tearing pages out of the Communist Manifesto...
no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 11:21 am (UTC)Looks like you're surrounded by a lot of sweet colleagues, students etc though!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 02:48 pm (UTC)My favourite, though, was the elderly professor who used to show up in my old library with stacks of photocopying. We had a (free) public photocopier, and he only ever wanted to photocopy A4 pages, so it would have been very, very easy to do, but he would always just hand over the stack and claim 'you know how to do it so much better'. The thought of it still makes me seethe!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-05 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 10:41 pm (UTC)I think there's a particular thing with academics not perceiving support services to be complex/valuable, which applies with archives a lot too. But libraries suffer from the extra issue that most people broadly understand the basics of being a library users (and super basic search skills) so there's a tendency to assume that's the important part. Huh.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-05 11:17 am (UTC)What you say about academics and support services is so true. (I mean, it goes for all fields of work — if someone is doing something for you that you are not doing yourself, that work is skilled and complex). And it's true that people have a lot of misconceptions of what libraries actually do, and that affects how they react to librarians.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 04:42 pm (UTC)Thanks for answering my prompt.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 04:11 pm (UTC)You're welcome — it was a good prompt.