Thursday 2 April 2015

Moving Forwards: The Librarian's Apprentice 18 Months On

(Or 'Things I Like About My Work')

So, nearly two weeks ago I left St. Hilda’s, and shortly after I was plunged straight into a new life in the History Faculty Library and Wellcome Unit Library for History of Medicine. It’s all very exciting, and there are oodles of things to assimilate. And while I’m far more interested in the strength of a library’s services than the beauty of its architecture, the fact that the Radcliffe Camera (where I’m based in the mornings) is Oxford’s most recognisable building impresses my grandparents, where attempts to whip up enthusiasm for reader services might not…

But I was sad to leave the college. Back in 2013, as a nearly-graduate with bundles of library keenness but minimal experience, I applied for many Graduate Traineeships without success, and it was Hilda’s who finally gave me my way into the profession. Once I was there, it was a steep learning curve for me simply to adjust to working life and manage my work load, having never had a full-time job before. Hilda’s was in many ways a very nice environment in which to do that.

Graduate traineeships have several purposes, but some of the main ones are thus: gaining library experience prior to undertaking the MA in Library and Information Studies, learning some of the skills needed in a career in librarianship, and finding out whether or not being a librarian is actually for you. In terms of that last point, I am pleased to report that yes, I do indeed want to be a librarian. My extended trainee year gave me a whole host of things to like about working in libraries, so I thought I’d summarize the best of them here:

Readers
Thank goodness these feature high on the list. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago if I could ever see myself in a customer-service role, I’d have said: not a chance. But readers are the best sort of customer. Naturally, some are a pain in the backside, but they’re largely great. They’re here for all kinds of reasons – to seek academic knowledge, primarily, but also to escape distraction by finding somewhere quiet to sit, to seek distraction in the form of books or DVDs, and to ask all manner of questions. College libraries are a really nice setting in which to get to know regular readers.

There are these moments, just occasionally – say, when you know a reader’s name and they’re surprised, or when they apologise for taking you away from the desk and you tell them it’s your job to help – when you see a reader realise that they’re not an incidental part of your responsibility, but the entire reason your job exists. And that’s pretty cool. I love helping people find things.

Connecting with other library folk
Library people are brilliant. For my first year in Oxford, pretty much all of my friends were library folk. There are over a hundred libraries in this city, which equates to a huge network of librarians (a term I’m going to use as shorthand for ‘library people’, even though not all of us are qualified librarians). After two months as a trainee, I attended Library Camp in Birmingham (an ‘unconference’), and meeting people in the field was a big highlight. In a mad moment of boldness when sessions were being pitched, I piped up about an interesting-sounding topic I’d seen suggested beforehand, and found that I’d therefore inadvertently volunteered myself to chair a session. ‘But… I don’t know ANYTHING about ANYTHING!’ I protested. No matter – two very nice librarians stepped up to assist me, everyone who came was lovely, and the experience was fantastic.

In the year and a half I have so far been working in libraries, I have got to know a lot of librarians, but a special mention has to go to my three colleagues at St. Hilda’s – two library staff and our Archivist – who I do miss. Our generous tea breaks (justified in the name of ‘team building’) were always enjoyable – librarians and biscuits/cake are a recognised Excellent Combination. Being in a very small team, we worked very closely together, and I always appreciated the fact that despite my junior status, I was given the chance to have a say in how the library was run and help to inform important decisions.

Variety
At the level of Graduate Trainee, and continuing into my new job as Library Assistant, I see my role in three main parts: physical work, involving getting books back to the right place; enquiry work, involving dispensing information to readers; and office work, involving general admin tasks. As I have said, interacting with readers is one of my favourite parts of the job, but I also really like the fact that my tasks are variable. Sure, reshelving isn’t the most exciting of jobs, but getting away from the computer for a little while to do something manual can be a welcome break. “What do you actually do?” people ask. A little bit of everything, that’s what.

One of the projects I most enjoyed working on at St. Hilda’s was redesigning library maps. The old ones were unhelpful and a little outdated, so I was given free rein of Inkscape to create something new. I ended up doing a lot of pacing around the library going, ‘But how does this fit together?!’, and also lots of Googling to get to grips with using layers for design work, having never used Inkscape (and neither had anyone else in college….) Figuring things out was all good fun, and leads me to…

Learning stuff 
A huge part of being a trainee, as you would expect. To start with, there were all of the rules, processes and eccentricities at St. Hilda’s to learn, and quickly – being part of a tiny team meant that it wasn’t long before the first time I was left on my own to handle everything our students could ask of me. Being in a new job in the information sector is terrifying, because people (unsurprisingly) look to you for information, and you don’t yet have all the answers.

The Graduate Trainee programme widened my library horizons beyond my own library. The training sessions covered a myriad of topics – customer service, eBooks, finding resources, evaluating library services, referencing software, conservation. There are so many different roles within the library sphere, and we had talks from people in areas of work I’d never have known existed. We also visited more libraries than you can shake a stick at – seriously, just so many libraries – and so by the end of the year, I felt like we’d packed in learning a pretty high volume of Stuff About Libraries.

Now that I’m doing my library MA, through distance learning at Aberystwyth, there’s plenty more to learn. And when I finish that, there’s chartership, and hopefully one day learning to manage other people – and by the time I get there, I’m sure librarianship will have evolved further, and so on. Sometimes the things I learn are unexpected – like the time a reader decided she wanted to give me a mini lesson in 12th century sculpture. You get to be a small part of people’s research, and I like getting little snapshots of their interests from time to time.

Currently, I’m finding my way in a whole new environment in the Rad Cam and Wellcome, and enjoying it hugely so far. There will be more to say about all of it at a later date, I am sure, but it all seems to be falling into place. More of the things I have come to love about libraries, and some totally new things too. I’m a happy library bunny.

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations on your new role Grace, glad to hear you're sticking with librarianship!

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    1. Thanks, Niamh! Hope you're well and happy :)

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