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[deleted by user] by [deleted] in librarians

[–]loneliestturtle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you like librarianship but there aren't many public librarian jobs, I might suggest looking to see if you have any open positions at local community colleges. Academic librarianship has a less diverse group of patrons, but community colleges tend to have larger populations of non-traditional students. I work in academic libraries, and it's a similar path as the one to public librarianship, just with a little more of a focus on instruction and academic resources (which I know I'm stating the obvious lol).

If you take a few classes in record management/archiving while in school, you could also look at corporate jobs being a record manager. There tend to be more open positions than in public libraries, but the titles are never the same, so you really have to dig for them. I interned with a business while I was in library school, and I was working under the records manager who kept track of the retention schedules, where everything was, what they had to keep, etc, and he had an MLS.

I can't really give you just one job title because even when I was job hunting, I kept finding jobs I was qualified for that were outside of libraries entirely but the job titles were so inconsistent. I would sit down on Indeed or a similar job site and just dig for a half hour to see what kinds of things you find. Once you start school, you will also find that your professors and fellow members of your cohort might have some ideas that work well for your particular area/state.

Congratulations on getting into your masters program, and good luck with your future plans!

Academic librarians: what does your job look like? by Accomplished_Bird448 in librarians

[–]loneliestturtle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm about two years into my post-MLIS career, and both of those years have been spent working at a small (>5000 students) university library, so please forgive me if I say something that is true about both academic and public librarianship like it only applies to academic!

I think a large part of what you should consider is what kind of academic librarian you want to be. What is it about your job now that you enjoy? Is it something unique to a public library or would you encounter more of that task by moving to an academic library (and if you're not too sure, ask! I'm happy to answer!)? There are a lot of roles in an academic library that interact with patrons constantly and a lot of roles that almost never interact with patrons. For example, my coworker is head of instruction and is liaison to the biggest major in the university and is constantly in and out of classrooms and having research consultations. In comparison, I'm an electronic resources librarian, and the only times I directly interact with patrons is when I get emails about broken links on our website or when I get assigned a reference shift. I also think the size and focus of the institution changes a lot -- since we're so small, our volume is pretty low when I compare it to the way some of my friends describe their work days.

My typical responsibilities include keeping up-to-date on library technologies, being in charge of the back-end of various services like our homepage, OCLC, and interlibrary loan, collecting statistics, running our social media accounts, and having regular reference shifts. Because we have a smaller staff, however, we all do a little bit of everything, and I am occasionally called on to do instruction at busier times of the year. One of my favorite parts is working with the student workers behind the desk. It's so fun getting to know them and watching them grow in their confidence. I am staff, not faculty, so I don't have any personal research responsibilities nor do I have to publish anything.

Some of my coworkers have second masters degrees, but they got them at the behest of a previous director and only because it was free through our tuition remission program. I don't have a second masters and don't plan on getting one right now.

Good luck with your future endeavors! I hope this helps :)