Who would be a librarian now? You know what, I'll have a go (Anonymous)

 About the only drawback is dismissiveness from my friends and family. A working-class male taking a degree to be a what? Photograph: Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images

“Who would want to become a librarian now?” asked an anonymous public servant on National Libraries Day, seeing before them a graveyard of dead libraries and old reference desks filled by volunteers. A valid question, and one to which I’ll reply: “You know what? I’ll have a go.”

I’m training to be a professional librarian, having just finished a lecture on “semantic web ontologies” and “linked data”, and sat dumbstruck in front of a “Dewey Decimal assembler” without a clue as to what I’m looking at. The course is challenging – it’s a three-year master’s degree that bites eye-watering chunks out of my wages. Why am I doing it to myself?

The fact is, I can’t not. It’s a sort of calling – like becoming a priest, only with warmer business premises. I can’t stand by and let public libraries sink. I won’t.

Forget all about reading as a pleasure, forget that children should have unlimited access to books, throw away arguments about libraries being lifelines for those less fortunate – they’re falling on deaf ears. You just have to look at the comments beneath pro-library articles to gather a general response: Kindles, the internet replacing information needs, and so on. And the one we wheel out about libraries being the centre of the community – there’ll be someone swatting that old classic aside with a “and yet the majority of the population doesn’t use them”.

For me, it boils down to one important point: the internet is a shallow (but extremely wide) surface-level summary of secondary, often opinionated information that sits on a bedrock of substantive knowledge that either isn’t on the internet, or lives behind a paywall, or is too expensive to purchase. Public libraries broker equal access to all that stuff. Get rid of them, and your information becomes drip-fed through Google filters (if you have a computer to access it). Read more...

Burn the libraries and free the libraries--by David Lankes

Burn the Libraries and Free the Librarians from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

What Went Right: A Case Study of a Successful Hiring (Part 1) by Ellen Mehling, Career Development Consultant, METRO

When the right person is hired, there is a story...
Well, actually, two stories: the employer’s story of the search for the best applicant, and the new employee’s story of his or her job search.
These stories begin apart and can cover weeks or even months with multiple steps and behind-the-scenes activities before converging in the new hire’s first day, when a new story begins.
This month we’re interviewing Krissa Corbett Cavouras, a recent hire at the Brooklyn Public Library, about her experience applying for the position of Engagement Manager in Marketing & Communications.

Ellen Mehling: Where did you go to school? What degrees and/or certificates do you hold?
Krissa Corbett Cavouras: I attended Sarah Lawrence for my undergraduate degree and earned my masters from Pratt School of Information and Library Science (SILS) in 2011.

EM: Were you employed elsewhere when you applied for this job? For how long had you been job hunting?
KCC: I was working for a small e-commerce company, as a knowledge manager on their marketing team, for two years prior to starting at Brooklyn Public Library. I had probably been actively looking for about three months when I had my first interview here.

EM: How did you learn about the position? Did you have any connections via your network to that workplace?
KCC: I heard about the position on a couple of fronts -- first, because I’ve had Brooklyn Public Library’s job page bookmarked for years, ever since I graduated from library school! Second, my manager Robin and I have several mutual friends from our early days as bloggers, so I saw the job shared around that mutual circle on Facebook. (I do think that’s how I knew it was in serious recruitment, because sometimes you don’t know from a website job posting if it’s a really open position.) I also have several library school colleagues who now work in the system, although I don’t think I saw this specific posting on my library school listserv.  read more...

MarketMeSuite - MarketMeSuite 17 LinkedIn Profile Must Haves [infographic]

How to Land a Library Job

The library job market may finally be heating up, but so too is the competition for those jobs

By Brian Kenney |

Aug 02, 2013

Comments

I don’t claim to be an expert in much, but when it comes to securing a library job I’ve got hard-won advice worth sharing. For much of my career I suffered from a kind of librarian wanderlust, switching jobs every two or three years, which pretty much means that I spent my first 20 years in this profession engaged in a continuous job search. But I’ve also put in plenty of time on the other side of the interview table, having hired scores of librarians while managing libraries large and small, as well as hiring librarians as editors, back when I worked in publishing.

Although the economy is slowly climbing out of its sinkhole, don’t expect finding a library position to get easier any time soon. State funding is under pressure, and local funding—which now makes up nearly the entire budget of your typical public library—remains flat at best. Although there are more job openings in 2013 than in previous years, there is also more competition for those positions. Jobseekers, especially those looking for their first librarian positions, need to have their game faces on. Read article...

PW contributing editor Brian Kenney.

How to Actually Get a Job on Twitter - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

How to Actually Get a Job on Twitter

We know a lot more about our latest hire from his tweets than his transcript or resume

Alexis C. Madrigal Jul 31 2013, 3:23 PM ET

Tomorrow, my newest hire starts here at The Atlantic. Robinson Meyer is his name, he just finished up school at Northwestern, and he may be the only college kid to actually get a job because of how good he is on Twitter. He's so good that I've been wanting to hire him since he was a sophomore. I brought him in as an intern last summer, and now, we've hired him as a staffer.

The Twitter thing is not what you're thinking. I didn't look at his Klout score. I don't care how many followers he has. I don't care how funny he is (though he's very funny).
Rob got my attention by becoming a part of The Atlantic Tech's extended cast of writers and interlocutors. His network analysis was uncanny. One minute I've never heard of this kid, and the next minute, he's engaged in interesting, respectful conversation with half of my Internet friends.

That takes a certain kind of fearlessness, and most of the time it'd be paired with arrogance. But not with Rob. His humility is genuine, driven by a real desire to think this stuff through. And the thing that I always noticed about Meyer's conversations with everyone was that he was such a good and generous reader of other people's work. He tended to respond with whatever the opposite of snark is. His role became to connect good ideas with each other by connecting good writers with each other. He wove the social fabric tighter and made our conversations richer. Read more...

Professional Emancipation 2013 | CAREEREALISM [Click to view infographic]

Infographic authored by CAREEREALISM Media, a Career Media Company. To view the original post, see the original Evolution of Employee infographic.

Professional Emancipation 2013 | CAREEREALISM