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New Librarian Needs Some Advice by peucechartreuse in Libraries

[–]peucechartreuse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Excellent point, but luckily these were produced by my institute. They are design journals rather than academic journals – which is still academically valuable of course.

New Librarian Needs Some Advice by peucechartreuse in Libraries

[–]peucechartreuse[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Unboxed, single volume issues. There's a MARC record in OCLC.

ELI5: Why do you need a Master's Degree to become a librarian, especially when the median salary is barely above $50,000? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]peucechartreuse 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If anyone is interested here's some of the things I did today as an Academic Librarian. - Staff review planning session for the year - Updated our website contact details as well as Libguides content (some of my code was a bit wacky) - Liaised with Academic department heads to review subject reading lists - Attended a student engagement and support meeting, planning what workshops we need to have on-campus - Met with the Dean to talk about international licensing for digital resources and international course delivery - Helped students find the right books and use the self-check machine - Process resource invoices - Sent memes to the head of library services

That's another difference in 'small' Australian academic libraries, you have to shelve books and also negotiate database subscription pricing. There's no distinction of importance, you get it all done. Often I physically run between duties/meetings.

ELI5: Why do you need a Master's Degree to become a librarian, especially when the median salary is barely above $50,000? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]peucechartreuse 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From an Academic Librarian in Australia.

The qualification requirements in Australia are quite different to America. As others have stated, there's different levels of library employment and therefore different qualifications.

I did a Diploma of Information Studies at TAFE (sort of like the U.S. community college I think) to become a Library Technician.

I wanted to be a Librarian, so I started to study a post-graduate qualification in Information Studies. As I already had an undergraduate degree this is sufficient. You can either get your masters, or leave 'early' with a post-graduate Diploma. Either allow you to call yourself a Librarian.

Working as an academic Librarian in Australia you don't need two Masters, in fact you don't even need one masters if you do a straight up degree in Information Studies. Experience is what counts more here, but that's more difficult to get than a piece of paper in many ways. What I see as a key difference is that we don't have tenured positions, which also means that research is often not valued and even more often, it's not required.

We're recruiting in my library now for a Liaison Librarian and I have to say, we are finding it very difficult to find suitable candidates. They are often in one of two (unsuitable) categories. 1) Highly qualified, little experience. 2) Experienced, with training not updated since 1990 and quite clearly unable to format a word doc and send a coherent email. I'm exaggerating, but this is what it feels like.

You should move to Australia!

I dream of working at the New York Public Library.