If your typical image of a librarian looks like the photo above, prepare yourself as your world is about to be rewritten as I debunk the traditional image of librarians. All librarians are alike.I know, when you think of librarians, the mind conjures up an image of an elderly woman with a tight bun, thick rimmed glasses and a stare that forces people into silence submission. Trust me, we're not all like that. Librarians can be a little quirky, it is nature of the profession, we're "Jack-of-all-trades, master of none" type of people with interests dotting over the entire spectrum of knowledge. I recently attended a state-wide conference for librarians (North Carolina Library Association Biannual Conference) and believe me, we are a varied and diverse population of people. Librarians are just in it for the books.Yes, librarians are usually bookish, but we're in it for more than just books. Being a librarian is a customer service type of career -- we're in it for the people and connecting people to information. It is very rare to find a non-people person working in a public or academic library -- if you do, go find another librarian so I can keep my point. We're a service driven industry dealing in information and that extends beyond print books...just saying. Librarians just sit around all day, reading.Yes, you have probably witnessed a librarian reading at the front desk -- I can almost guarantee you that we're looking at something that just came in and we're flipping through it to see what it is about. We're naturally curious people! The majority of librarians out there are very active people -- we're up helping people find something, we're reshelving material, we're tidying up (seriously people, push in the chair after you leave, it is kindergarten 101), we're checking book drops throughout the day, we're fixing printers, we're helping with technical problems, we're watering plants...you get the picture. It is a very active job. Now, I'll admit some library positions do require a lot of sitting like if you're a director, there is a lot of doing budgets and statistics in the back but the majority of the profession is on your feet. We'll be unemployed in the next ten years due to the death of print mediaFirst, I would like to point out that librarians have been around since ancient civilizations such as the Library at Alexandria in ancient Egypt and we've survived through countless changes throughout history. The coming of the internet and its coinciding components such the rise of the e-reader and tablets, will not eliminate the profession of librarianship. Actually, it has enlarged the prospects of libraries and librarians as we are no longer a single brick-and-mortar institution, we have online tools and collections to assist remote users in addition to local users. The new technology has caused us to change our services and focus, but it is not the death of librarianship, it will take far more to kill the Library and Information Science/Studies profession. We're all cat people, with an outrageous amount of cats at homeSeriously, we're not all cat people. I currently work with five people and three of us have dogs, some in addition to have cats. We're not all crazy cat ladies and men. I will admit that some of us do have a plethora of cats but that is a personal choice, not one tied to the profession.
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People often tell me that I am in a career that is going to dry up within decade's end, because Google and electronic books means there will no longer be a need for librarians or even libraries anymore. My response, with great effort not to use sarcasm, begins with "Libraries have been around since Ancient Egypt and we've survived many changes in format since then and we'll survive many more formats and media that are going to come. Don't count us out yet -- we're adaptable and our business is information and until the world runs out of information, we'll have open doors." It is similar to when people ask me question about services dogs, the law concerning service dogs, questions about the training or Juneau's breed. People have seen them but their understanding of their purpose or what they actually do is very limited, therefore explanations are required.
I had an assignment this semester to create a short three minute video with a required topic -- one of the topics was a "soap box" and "elevator speech" of what we really do in our positions as librarians. My actual assignment was on what reference librarians do but I did a lot of thinking about what I actually do, what librarianship really is. People assume many things about librarians which annoys me because of it is not true, in any sense. Even when I started my position as a circulation assistant, I thought it would be shelving, checking in and out materials, and then more shelving but librarians do so much more! We're the defenders of knowledge! We're basically superheros without the spandex and flying abilities! If you add up everything that they tell us we're supposed to do as librarians when we're in library school, it paints a picture that librarians truly are the real superheros. Librarians bridge the gap for information literacy, we provide free and easily accessible resources to create an informed citizenry, and we introduce new technology with instruction on how best to utilize it. Yes, it is difficult that we do not have the ability to reach every single person, but we try! We have different library types for all ages, trying to keep the learning spark alive and curious from two year old kids to eighty year old grandparents. Tales from Circulation: Library Book Gems and Damageam Have you ever sat down and really thought about what a single library book goes through in its lifetime? As I'm taking Collection Management with Dr. Bird, I have begun to consider the life cycle of a book. A collection as a whole goes through its life like an living organism does which I find very interesting to consider. A collection is much more than a bunch of books on a shelf -- it has a birth, an aging process, high points and low points of success and failure, and eventually, to some extent, a death (not a final death where the collection is dead and buried, but it has to do a phoenix where the old dies and a new forms from the ashes). When I worked at ACCCL, we used to find some very interesting things in library books and I talking beyond the occasional bookmark or photograph. Personally I always enjoyed when people leave money inside of library books (we always put it as a donation towards the library) but I've also found letters and photographs. It is a tiny peek into our patron's lives and generally if we can return the items, we did. It always amazes me how people treat library material. Occasionally we get library books back that have been badly beaten, thoroughly soaked, or a dog has decided that particular book looked like a yummy snack. Some people are very apologetic while others don't seem to notice. Cheaper by the Millions: Family Ties with Collection ManagementThroughout the course, I have been thinking of a collection and its items like a family. The collection as a whole is like a mother, with librarians as nannies. It is a strange beginning, but stay with me. A mother gives birth to her children and decides how she wants them to be raised and educated -- think of this as collection development policies and the overall mission of a collection. Through acquisitions, new children arrive whether it be by the mother (I attribute actual purchases with library funds as biological children) with the occasional adopted children through donation, the family begins to grow and take new shapes. It could be like the Brady Bunch or Cheaper by Dozen, a little crazy but the core family is there. Then the children go forth into the world through circulation and have adventures of their own, sometimes returning with bumps and bruises but it is a tough world out there, accidents happen and sometimes the outside world is not always the friendliest of places but for the most part, the kids always come home. From time to time, a child goes missing and the mother and nannies put out missing posters and offer rewards (that would be a good consideration for library lingo -- rather than calling them fines, call them rewards for returning items). It would be a good note that the "mother" of this collection is immortal and omnipotent. Continuing on, the children start aging and new kids start filling the shelves. The nannies make the difficult choices that some of the kids have to move out, whether it be to new homes or to be reincarnated to another life. The mother continues to care for her children, making their time in the nest comfortable and encourages them to go see the world. The nannies see to collection's health and safety, processing them with affection and repairing them when need be. And life goes on, the collection grows and changes appearance as physical books are replaced with new formats. The Balancing Act: Needs & WantsCollection management mirrors an organism's life cycle in many ways. It isn't quite as complicated as a traditional life cycle but it does have its moments that can determine its future or its death. A collection can be complex in its many parts, all working towards a whole with several different material types and the various needs for its users. In the end, a collection serves its users more than anything else, it is not about survival, it is about what the users ultimately need for their own survival. It would be nice if librarians could pick whatever they wanted according to their own values and likes but as librarians we serve a much greater purpose and our users. The collection and librarians alike serve our users above all else and we will fight tooth and nail to see the success of our users through assistance from our collections. It is a noble deed that may be quite underappreciated as users think that the collection should have more James Patterson than Janet Evanovich or Stephen King or that collections should have material on scientific matters than on soft science research. Collection management, like all things in life, is simple and complex at the same time and we endeavor to create a collection that meets our user's needs and desires.
As I've probably mentioned before, I am aiming for working in archives and/or special collections after graduate school (fingers crossed). Since I have vocalized my interest in this at work (Brevard College), I was assigned the task of reorganizing our archives in the library. Most of the content is unique to Brevard College and its many transformations throughout the years such as the collection includes items like school beanies and pennants to the archival staple of minutes from the Board of Trustees. Here comes the fun part -- the system that was generated was one completely unique to our collection so there is no way to input it into another system. My job is to make it more compatible with the outside world so potentially in the future, we can have a finding aid online and patrons (most likely students and faculty) can request to see it and we'll be able to find it.
Here is the basic low down on archive arrangement and description -- there are many standards out there to pick from as well as twice as many archive management software systems. If I have learned anything in the past few months is that archives are a full time job. Since the collection has no formal description, we are starting from scratch with description. We have an arrangement scheme, most of the collection is divided by who donated the objects or a running series such as the registrars going back since the inception of Rutherford College (Brevard College is not the first institution on the campus, it has gone through three different names and ownership before becoming Brevard College in the 1930's). After much research from publications of the Society of American Archivists, it is the best to keep the items in their original order as well as how they were donated. I am an archive newbie so I figured I would be rearrange the documents and items themselves in accordance with the finding aid created by the last archivist but after my research immediately halted this assumption (no changes have been made to the collection). The organization made by the donor or original owner gives context that is invaluable to the description of the item. As a historian, one wants to collect as much information from one piece and then depending on how they are conducting research (from bottom-up or top-down) the context can be invaluable. If a person saves a correspondence, there has to be a reason. Think about all the documents and mail you have acquired over the years -- what do you save and what do you get rid of? You are creating a collection of your own and fifty years down the road, it may be invaluable to an archive. You may not think a little letter you received from a friend about news events or the weather or whatever may be precious to a historian somewhere down the line. How you store those letters (in an old shoe box) also is has value as somewhere in your organizational scheme, you put them together for some reason. In archives, that is VERY important to descriptions as the descriptions are the first step the user has in the finding aid. The user doesn't want to sift through millions of shoe boxes to find that one letter they need for their research and that is where the archivist is more liason between the patron and collection. Archivist, from my understanding, are more than the guardians of treasures from the past (great job description), but also the bridge between the present and the past and in some cases even the future. Arrangement and Description is step one to making an archive an integral part of a working institution (whether it be museum, library, historical society, etc) and can be very fun as you learn about each piece and helping place context for it. For all of those aspiring librarians who want to work in special collections or archives, there is a new trend of digitization and a little program of ContentDM that we must endure. When I first decided I wanted to become an archivist when I was an undergraduate at Western Carolina University, I thought the wave of the future would be digitization and I couldn't be more happy. In the summer of 2011, I had an internship at Hunter Library working with a special set of Civil War letters that the library had. They had already been scanned and uploaded, and it was my job to identify as much as I could from the letters and provide background. I thought it was the greatest job in the world!
Now, as both a student of Library and Information Science and a budding archivist, I know so much is done to make a single collection available online. Looking back, I was more concentrated on the history side of special collections and while that is still my love, I understand much more has to happen before you get the core of history. Digitization is a process that can either be painful or fun. It is painful because it takes time to get high resolution documents and photos. I've been digitizing things my whole life -- my first job was to scan a collection of 5,500 slides from a esteemed professor at Wake Forest University. It was the greatest and worst job on the planet...the scanner took FOREVER to scan. Four slides would take the better part of a half hour but on the bright side, Netflix was my friend through the slow and painstaking process. Then I upgraded to a new scanner that could do fifty slides at a time....but it took an hour and a half and let me tell you paper slides and this machine were incompatible. Back to the point, scanning is a process that must be endured, for as much as the historian in me would like to keep everything for as long as possible, documents, books, and photos disintegrate over time. Scanning is step one. Step two goes into metadata. You're taking a single item and having to catalog it to the best of your ability. People try to label things but not everyone can be librarians and meticulously label and catalog everything the first time so it becomes the job of the person digitizing the item to find as much as possible. Most of the time, if you look at a picture of a rock, all you are going to assume about the picture is that is a rock, not that it is some place special or a particular date or if it a specific type of rock. Metadata seems daunting at first, as quite frankly, a rock looks like a rock in a slide and trying to pry information out of thin air or in this case, a photo, gets frustrating. Librarians are tasked with the duty of pulling as much information from the item itself -- the dimensions, the type of photo, date if possible, what collection it came from, etc. Historians and librarians must fuse together to extract the information as one depends upon the other. ContentDM is the program I have used concerning the basics of metadata (not the coding of it but the fields needed to give as much information as possible). It used to rank up there with nails on chalkboard for me when I briefly worked on a project at Western as I did not fully understand the need for all those fields and what the heck most of the fields meant. Now, after attending a conference with the Appalachia College Association, I know understand the importance and more importantly, its purpose. Metadata is essential for users to be able to find what they are looking for. A photograph doesn't usually contain many words so metadata acts as those words, make the photograph searchable. There are those people who like to find what they need as quickly and efficiently as possible and those who like to browse in order to find what they are looking for and ContentDM makes that possible for both types of user. My area of history is the United States Civil War and most documents and pictures from that area are looking at their 150th anniversary and access is becoming more and more difficult. It is heartbreaking to watch a document fall apart in your hands because of age and extended use. Time no longer has to be the enemy as digital projects are preserving these and making them widely available for many users. A good example is the United States census as it is fully digitized and searchable through HeritageQuest. So as much as I initially hated ContentDM as I thought it was an impossible program that spoke a different language all together has earned my respect and I now know it is an integral part of the digitization process. If you ever asked yourself, "What in the ContentDM?" remember it is a stepping stone for your users to unlock the secrets of their own past and our collective history. When people hear that a library is weeding its collection, many images spring to mind that are a tad bit unsettling, such as piles of books being thrown in dumpsters. The disposal of books is never an easy thing to process for patrons or librarians. Book lovers do not wish to see the end of a life span for books and other materials but occasionally it is necessary.
Weeding is not something librarians enjoy doing but we try very hard to find good homes for the books and other materials as we weed and the majority of the books do not get thrown away. There are exceptions. If a book is riddled with mold and bugs, it generally gets tossed for the protection of patrons and librarians. It is not a pleasant experience to have a spider crawl up the spine of a book and onto your person, ending with a small shriek of surprise and the entire library looking at you while you try to shake the beast off. Now, in olden days, you could do this and not have it posted on YouTube for millions to laugh at. If someone did film my moment of embarrassment, I pray it did not make it on the Internet. There are many purposes for weeding including to make sure your collection is up to date, in good condition, and to make sure there is a good representation of all areas. It is a good way to do inventory and find hidden gems that have been forgotten or pushed behind the shelves. Also, it can provide new ideas for promotions with what materials are available. Being a historian, I love old books but I do recognize that new scholarship is essential to expanding the field. Recently, I finished a small feat of weeding the 900's in the Dewey Decimal system for an academic library, approximately 6,500 books to sift through and figure out what was needed and what needed to be removed. The majority of my experience was removing duplicates -- it is no one's fault, just sometimes you get donations on top of what you've purchased or newer editions come out and added as the new record doesn't look like the old. I could go on. It was kind of fun, I got to explore through different areas of history that I previously did not study such as Asian history and found it quite fascinating! Weeding is necessary as sometimes to make room for the new, you have to say good bye to the old. I would highly recommend The Weeding Handbook by Rebecca Vnut for guidelines and some helpful tips. A big suggestion is to make weeding an on going process. I was weeding for months to get through my section and I did not get as much time with each book as I wanted because of a deadline. By keeping it an ongoing project, librarians can dedicate time to each and every book and research the material's full worth. It also makes the task less daunting and the small things such as repair, corrections, and double checking information are easier to manage a few at a time rather than a pile the size of a mountain. Remember to have fun! I've heard it said many times before that becoming a librarian in the 21st century is kind of a bad idea because who needs librarians when you have Google? Certain circles believe that librarianship is a dying art and pretty soon, librarians will be seeking unemployment. Why keep them around when we have the internet? Why have a physical building and physical books when you can get everything on a tablet or e-reader? There is a scene in Futurama, a goofy science fiction cartoon for adults, when the Planet Express crew is touring Mars University and they stop by Wong Library, where the universe's largest collection is held...on two discs -- fiction and nonfiction.
Well, I hate to break the bad news to these people: librarians and libraries are not going anywhere. In a time of constant change and raging misinformation and distrust, libraries are the safe ground on which people continue to depend. Yes, with technological change means the field of library and information science is changing too as librarians are trained to help with tutorials for e-readers, new ways to master finding accurate and trustworthy information off the World Wide Web, and adapting to the change of the types of material. Librarians are the definition of evolution – we adapt to everything to ensure survival. And besides, librarians kick Google butt. Yes, it might take us a few minutes longer to find a result but guess what, we filter out all the garbage that you don’t want to deal with. We also cross reference databases, journals, and much more. We can tell you how to find more resources and how to find answers quickly as well as accurately and through trusted sources. Can Google do all that? And we’re not robots so talking to us is easier and will most likely not result in you banging your head on the keyboard. We are the vessels of information and in a world filled to the brim with data coming in streams, we provide safe passage and the best way to survive in this new world. Hello, my name is Hope D. Alwine, and I'm beginning my journey through the Masters of Library and Information Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (try saying that three times fast). So to give you a small introduction about myself and my journey of a librarians thus far, let us us begin: HOW DID I GET HERE?What seems like eons ago, I wanted to be a marine biologist....then I dissected a squid in junior high and decided that was not for me. Then I wanted to be a politician, preferably a Senator for Congress, representing my birth state of North Carolina. There was a minor part of my life where I wanted to be a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, but I lack the mathematical skills and my first experience on a roller coaster was not a pleasant one. I did some minor campaign work and went through my courses to receive my Bachelors of Science in Political Science from Western Carolina University. Problem was, while I love political science, much of the actual politics like running campaigns, making empty promises and aging prematurely due to lots of coffee and stress just did not appeal to me. Also, Western Carolina wanted to graduate me a year early so I decided to become a double major, adding my History major during my Junior year (or whatever was the equivalent at that point...after a certain amount of hours, you stop using the vocabulary and just say upperclassman or simply, not a freshman). I was reintroduced with a love of libraries through research and my internship at Hunter Library with their Special Collections, under George Frizzell and Jason Brady, I spent the greatest two months of my life. I reconnected with my desire to help people as I saw George working with community members, city officials, museums and local libraries and students, answering their questions and learning about the history of the surrounding area. It was like finding my home away from home. Then, much to my dismay, I graduated from undergraduate school with my two new shiny B.S. degrees and no job. I didn't want to leave the area so I applied pretty much everywhere. Then I stumbled across a Circulation Assistant position in Cashiers, North Carolina (pronounced CASHers, ignore the I) under the wise leadership of Serenity Richards. I applied for the position -- I misspelled the library name in my cover letter but Serenity saw past it and hired me. It was only supposed to be a temporary position, for the seasonal population of snowbirds from farther south descend upon the mountains of western North Carolina like flies to honey. Fortunately, the stars aligned and I ended up being moved into a permanent position. Working in a public library, even Albert Carlton-Cashiers Community Library (yes, I can spell it correctly now), was terrifying and I had to come out of my shell. I had another reconnection with my true purpose in life which is to help people. I was absolutely horrible at suggesting what people should read or watch as I'm not a big fan of murder mystery books but I learned, slowly, but I did learn! It was a wonderful two and half years, forming relationships with our library team and my boss, and then I decided that I wanted to return to school to get my Masters in History and another in Library and Information Studies so I could become the next George Frizzell. WHY NOT STICK WITH PUBLIC LIBRARIES?A question that rolls around in my mind from time to time is why didn't I just stay with ACCCL? It is an awesome public library with great coworkers who I consider family and a patron base that I connected with and I was finding creative outlets through programming and even working with children (who terrify me more than adults do....seriously, having a conversation with a four year old is impossible for me). It was an ideal set up but I felt like it wasn't what I was truly meant to do professionally. I grew up in higher education with my father working at Wake Forest University for 28 years before retiring and my youth was spent in the vast stacks of Z. Smith Reynolds Library. I knew the higher education system, having worked at Wake for close to 7 years myself, bouncing between various departments. I knew I could make more of difference in higher education and provide more help there than I can in public libraries. I still love public libraries but try as I might, I just don't love James Patterson's work and I would be spending the majority of my time trying to convince people that there are other genres and works of fiction out there! WHAT NEXT? So here I am, after much bouncing around from different jobs and now starting a new position at Brevard College as their Night Manager for J.A. Jones Library and attending UNC-G's distance learning program for my MLIS. The journey will be long and there will be times when I will think back longingly for days without readings and paper assignments but the end result will be worth it as I have the end goal of being a Special Collections director and this is step one.
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AuthorA public and academic librarian shares her views, thoughts, and tales of being a budding librarian in the 21st century Archives
November 2017
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