librarian.net

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.

Most librarians I know can pinpoint a time where they learned that most librarians have much more to do than just sit behind a reference desk and/or buy books. This can be problematized by media renditions of librarians that highlight these parts of the job at the expense of others, or news reports that view every person working in a library as a librarian. These are hard issues to resolve, especially when you don’t want to widen the rift between professionals and paraprofessionals in the field, and espcially where in many libraries people wear many hats. In any case, since I’m now working with libraries, but not as a librarian, I thought I’d let people know what it is that I’m doing all day lately. My official title is Community Technology Mentor, but really I’m just the Computer Lady and one who works a lot with libraries and librarians.

More on the librarian shortage. Remember, just because librarians are retiring doesn’t mean new ones will get jobs. A great article and post by one of my favorite Australian library bloggers whose Exploded Library blog is now going to be archived by the PANDORA project of the National Library of Australia.

Now it can be told: Meredith from Information Wants to be Free, and the ALA Wiki, is going to be my new [sort of] neighbor. She’s moving to Vermont to become a Distance Learning Librarian. We got to meet her and her husband this past week, and I’m really looking forward to having another tech-savvy librarian to pal around with.