Realia

Archive for March, 2010

I’m reviving a somewhat old Internet meme, inspired by Steve Lawson’s revival of an even older Internet meme. It captured my imagination a few months ago, and now that I have a blog, I present to you my list:

1. My parents realized I could read when I quoted them some fact about George Washington from The How, Why and Wonder Book of the American Revolution. I think I was three at the time.

2. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye more times than I can count. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s my favorite book, but it’s sort of my comfort book.  I read it when I want something very familiar.

3.  There are three authors that I buy every book they put out, sight unseen, without reading reviews: Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, and Nick Hornby.  They all had new books that came out this past year, which made me very happy.

4.  My mom was usually the one who read to my sisters and me when we were growing up.  However, my dad had two specialties, the Little House on the Prairie books and the Wizard of Oz books.  I have very fond memories of him reading these two series to my sisters and me.

5.  It is not unusual for a conversation between one of my family members and me to contain a quote from a children’s book, particularly Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, or one of the Frog and Toad books.

6.  Because of #5, when I was in college, I bought my boyfriend (now my husband) a copy of Winnie the Pooh and Days with Frog and Toad, just so he could understand what the heck I was talking about when I quoted them. 

7.  When I was a kid, I was scared of this version of Frog Went A-Courtin’.  There was an illustration where they were pouring medicine down a chicken’s throat with a funnel, and that freaked me out.

8.  One of the most voracious reading periods of my life was when I was in junior high.  I usually check out library books based on recommendations and reviews, but in junior high, I would wander the young adult section of the public library and check out anything that looked remotely interesting.  It was a great approach to reading, but I wish I kept better track of what I read, because now I have all these memories of great young adult books, but I have no idea what books they are.  I remember them with vague descriptions like “the book where the girl has a dog named Bribe and it ends up dying because it falls out of a pick-up truck bed.”

9.  In my high school speech class, my best friend and I had to present a commercial together.  Our chosen product was a “Discuss Writing with the Dead” hotline, where you could call dead authors for writing advice.  One part of the commercial involved someone calling Dr. Seuss to ask him what rhymes with Xerox.

10.  When reading non-fiction, I need to be able to highlight passages in the text.  I sometimes don’t even go back and look at what I’ve highlighted, but somehow, highlighting helps me process the information.

11.  The summer before my sophomore year in high school, most everyone chose to read Of Mice and Men off of our summer reading list (probably because it was the shortest book).  For reasons that I don’t completely understand now, I chose The Fountainhead.

12.  I feel compelled to see movies based on books that I’ve read.  Even when I loved the book and know that I’ll most likely be disappointed by the movie, my curiosity gets the best of me; I have to see what the movie is like.

13.  I like reading non-fiction history books, but I’ve never really gotten into historical fiction.

14.  I’m not a big fan of fantasy and science fiction books.  I think that I don’t have the patience for world-building.  I like to pick up a book and immediately have at least a rough idea of the environment in which the characters live.

15.  I generally take good care of books, though I’m not obsessive about it.  When I was working on my degree in museum studies, I inadvertently ruined a book by letting juice spill on it in my backpack.  Ironically, it was the textbook for my Conservation and Preservation class.

One of the reasons I’ve always hesitated when I’ve thought about starting a blog is that I worry about not being a prolific enough poster.  I find it hard to think of topics on which to write.  So I decided to look for other blogs for inspiration.  One of the library blogs I read regularly is Library Alchemy.  Leigh Anne recently wrote a couple of posts entitled Cranky Bodhisattva in a Long Black Dress: How I Got Here, Why I Stay (divided into Part I and Part II) and invited others to explore the same topic.  It seemed like a good enough writing prompt to me, so here goes:

In a way, librarianship was a second choice career for me.  While I was an undergraduate student (history and psychology double major) I interned at some history museums, loved it, and decided to get a master’s degree in museum studies.  I loved every minute of my graduate program and my summer internship at the National Museum of Roller Skating (yes, it does exist), and at the completion of my internship, I was excited to be offered a part-time position as the assistant curator, which gave me some extra spending money during my second year in the program and some solid museum experience to put on my resume.  I started feeling somewhat less thrilled when I finished my degree and was sending out job application after job application, resulting in a few interviews and no job offers.  A year later, when I was still working my part-time assistant curator job, and feeling kind of hopeless about the museum field in general, I signed up with a temp agency to get some full-time employment, and I started thinking about considering other options.

I went through a phase where I thought about just about every career possibility under the sun (“I’ll go to law school! No, I’ll get a teaching certification!  Are there any nursing programs in my area?”), and librarianship was one of the options I considered (I think my thought process was something like, “Libraries are in the same general category as museums, right?”), but I didn’t think of it as a real possibility because I didn’t think there were any programs in my area.  In the mean time, in an effort to enrich my life in non-career-related ways, I started a knitting group at a local coffee shop.  At the very first meeting, one of the women who showed up told me that she was a social worker, but she was going back to school to get her library science degree through the University of Missouri’s distance education program.  I checked out the program, and I was hooked.

So, yes, I started library school without ever having worked in a library (aside from volunteer work shelving books at the public library).  Yes, I only applied to one school.  And yes, I was doing it at least partially because it seemed like the next best thing to museum work, rather than pursuing librarianship for its own merits.  So no, it probably wasn’t the most well thought out career move.  But as it happens, the library field has turned out to be perfect for me.

You see, while I thought that the similarities between libraries and museums (the fact that they are both informal learning environments, for example) are what drew me to the library field, in a way, I think I realized that the differences between the two environments were important to me as well.  My interest in the museum world was never simply about preserving the stuff, it was about connecting people with information about the stuff.  I enjoyed creating exhibits and educational programs that told the stories behind museum artifacts.  I got a kick out of digging through our archival collections to help people who came to the museum looking for their names in a program from a roller skating competition they were a part of in the 1950s.  I loved handling research requests over the phone (basically doing reference work) for people who needed information that could be provided by the items in our collection.  (On more than one occasion, I combed through our collection of roller skate patents to find information for patent attorneys looking to defend their clients’ claims that their inventions were original.)

I also started library school without any real idea about what sort of work I wanted to do when I finished.  I think my main idea of what library work was centered around the reference desk at a public library, and I hadn’t really thought about what other kinds of library positions existed.  When I took my required cataloging class, I fell in love with cataloging.  For me, learning the intricacies of AACR2 and MARC format was like learning a language, something I’ve always enjoyed.  But it was not the nitpickiness of cataloging that really drew me to it; I promise I am not the stereotypical anal retentive cataloger (one glance at my kitchen table will tell you that is definitely not the case).  What really thrilled me about cataloging was the whole idea of the importance of organizing information in order to make it easier for people to find.  In my mind, cataloging is a public service; there is no use in libraries having all the stuff that they have if no one can find it.

Even though I loved cataloging, knowing that I was not going to be very geographically flexible in my job search after graduation, I was reluctant to specialize too much.  I got a job as a reference assistant at an academic library, I did my practicum in technical services (again in an academic library), and I did some volunteer cataloging work at a local museum.  I finished my degree in May of 2008 and started applying for pretty much any local librarian job posting I saw.  In August of 2008, I applied for the job that I have now, cataloging librarian at my state’s library agency.  I was lucky enough to be hired and started October 1 of that year.  I consider myself very lucky to have found a job in the exact area of library work that appeals to me most, without having to relocate.