librarian.net

I’ve been fascinated to see how the jobs for librarians have been changing, just over the time I’ve been a librarian. Check out this job for a Head Librarian in a facility that they are predicting will be “bookless” before too long. Information architect for the Veterans Health Administration (posted at MetaFilter jobs, whee!) doesn’t look too librarian-ish, but then you look and see that it’s all about metadata, 508 compliance (accessibility) and controlled vocabularies. It’s been a while since I was actively looking for work, but even scanning LISJobs now is a different experience than it was when the site started. Interesting times to be us.

I did my class project in my Library Services to Special Populations class on prison librarians. I took a trip out to the medium security prison and got to spend some time with the librarian there and learned a lot about both prison libraries and the odd and unique role that libraries have within prisons. This week my landlady’s son is visiting. He is a prison educator. He said they are trying to hire some librarians. I dug up a few links for him in my “Oh have you tried PRISON-LIB, the prison librarians’ listserv?” way and figured I’d drop them in here as well.

• Directory of state prison librarians - the best source for names and numbers
• Library services to adult prisoners in the United States - a good intro and a well-sourced paper
• Internet Resources of Use to (Ex-) Inmates - and more from NYPL
• Three Experts Describe “How to be a Successful Prison Librarian: Preparation for a Foreign Land” - published by the ASCLA division of ALA
• Prison librarians needed: a challenging career for those with the right professional and human skills - a paper given at IFLA, 1999

This is the job my old boss used to have. The library is amazing and 50K will go a long way in ruralish Vermont. I made their website. If you’re at all Vermont-curious, think about applying; I’ll be happy to tell you what I know about the area and I’ve already done a community analysis of the population.

I’m looking around at library careers sites this week after the interesting story about the IMLS grant from a few days back. I was sent a link to the Canadian Library Association’s recruitment-type site, InfoNation. ALA launched their own site at LibraryCareers.org which, given that it’s the ALA website, redirects to http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdr/librarycareerssite/home.htm which is the URL you’d bookmark, no matter what the website says. Check out CLA’s library blog page with its subtle use of RSS feeds (and the inclusion of ALA employee Jenny Levine’s blog, how collegial!). Check out this competencies page that looks like a tag cloud and this page with desktop wallpaper. And who is this handsome man who says “I first became interested in librarianship due to my desire for world domination.”? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Canada has actually published research about the current and future human resources aspects of librarianship in the The 8Rs Canadian Library Human Resource Study. Their work is something of a response to what we think we already know which, as they put it “the existing literature on recruitment, retention, and leadership in the library profession is based on either anecdotal evidence or aggregate statistics, most of which are American.” You can read the reports they have published here. The woman who emailed me about this sums up one of the results

while there’s no imminent crisis in numbers of recruits, there are issues around competency match between grads and workplace needs, need for leadership and management, etc. In other words, it’s more about personal / professional qualities than the panic about needing “bodies” for our libraries (as was expressed over & over in the literature a couple of years ago).

Priscilla Shontz from LISCareer is finishing up her book on librarian careers. She’s stuck on a few chapters. If you are a library consultant or an international school librarian, would you mind writing a quick and not terribly long summary of what you do? Slightly more details here. Tentative Table of Contents here. Yes, that’s me writing the introduction.

Please, someone awesome take this job.

Happy National Library Week! You’ll be happy to know that the librarian shortage has been pushed back another few years. You’ll be even happier to know that advances in health care combined with the rising costs of health care mean that librarians are living longer and keeping their jobs longer. While there are plenty of creative ways you can give your work away for free or for cheap, you might want to look at this as an opportunity to go back to school or maybe find a new hobby while you wait.

Seriously, this is not an April Fools post, though I wish it were. I just wanted to let you know that Michael McGrorty posted a message to the ALA Council list talking about the librarian job market and the odd juxtaposition of the Library Corps idea. I followed up with my own response which you might find interesting. Catch up on the whole thread here and hope people don’t get too turned off to the entire idea of librarianship with the post that followed mine.

In the meantime, if you need a bright spot among all this darkness, please enjoy the Rock n Roll Library video created especially for this week. Got anything else to share for NLW? Add it in the comments.

One of the best thigns about not having a job in any particular library is the fact that when I see job ads like this one that Michael McGrorty writes about, I can sit back and daydream about being that sort of librarian. Reminds me of one of my favorite Hal Hartley quotations about trouble and desire.

Please join me and others in congratulating Michael Stephens on his new job as an instructor at Dominican University, starting this Fall.

ALA President Michael Gorman posted this to the Council list and I made a web page for it using pasta. Please pass this information, or this idea, on.

Temporary Librarian Position, For Librarian Displaced by Hurricane Katrina

In order to offer support to those in our profession who have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, the Henry Madden Library of the California State University, Fresno would like to hire one librarian with an ALA accredited M.L.S. or equivalent who was displaced and/or unemployed because of the hurricane.