I graduated with my MLIS degree about 1 month ago. So I can officially call myself a librarian, I guess. However, how do I spend my days? I work as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital, so am I truly a librarian? If you asked me a year ago where I would be today I felt sure that I would be job hunting or hopefully in a librarian role, but here in Charlotte both the public schools and the public libraries are not fairing well and are either laying off librarians or not hiring any more. Since moving is not an option right now, where does that leave me?
I just started this job as a veterinary assistant slightly over 1 month ago. I took the job because it was full time (I was only part time before) and it meant no working on Sundays and after 90 days I will have health benefits. Are these good reasons for taking a job? In this economy (which in Charlotte is still not great) I personally thought that it was a good decision. But what does that do for my career as a librarian?
I have been thinking about this a lot recently, I still feel called be serve others through providing them with information and I still feel that literacy, books, and reading are extremely important. Right now I am fixated on the career of being a researcher, of being assigned a certain topic to research and then righting a report about it for a client. Part of me would like to be a consultant of some kind, helping companies organized their materials. (Part of the desire to be a consultant stems from a cataloging internship that I did and blogged about in my last semester as a graduate student).
On days like today I feel lost as to where I am supposed to be going in my career. Questions whether to stay at my job or keep looking for a new one. I feel an obligation to my current job because they just hired me and I feel it would be kind of crappy for them to invest all this time training me and then I go and quit on them.
I just read a post by Ken Haycock, a summary of a speech he gave as a commencement address to graduating MLIS students. And this paragraph stuck with me:
"7. Your job title is irrelevant. The discipline is Library and Information Science, the profession is Librarianship (in my opinion, there is no such profession called Information) and the job title is irrelevant. Don’t look for a job title in the ads, look for a reflection of your knowledge, skills and abilities. There are jobs, good jobs, if you don’t limit yourself by geographic location, by type of preferred work environment or type of library or by lack of imagination. Remember that employers do not care about your grades or the courses you took but do care deeply about what you can do and how well you can play with others. The largest employers of librarians today are not libraries but vendors, and they are challenged in finding qualified and capable librarians to work for them. In my forty years I have never had the job title “librarian”; indeed, my professional skill set was probably most useful when I was a school principal where we planned action research, made decisions based on evidence and collaborated through partnerships. "
I want to look outside the traditions, but I feel caught between wanting to continue to search for new opportunities and the desire to be lazy and stay where I am at. I have been job searching for almost 2-3 years straight (long story, but I basically kept changing jobs). I am tried of job searching, but I afraid that some great opportunity is going to be passing me by if I don't. I want to use the skills I gained through my MLIS, I feel I could be great at a job where I could use them... but it seems like there is little out there for me right now and it is difficult to keep up with trends in librarianship when you aren't in a library...
Or maybe I am just a big whiner. :)
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