Return of/Why Libraries?

Oh, I had plans. I was going to be organised and have several posts waiting in the wings before I started posting again but then I started thinking about things too much and the next thing I knew, I had the blogging equivalent of stage fright and the only real way to break that is to just post, regardless.

The best laid plans of mice (and men!).

So, hi. It’s Barbara Gordon, you may remember me from such blogs as Batgirl was a Librarian /The Simpsons rip-off. I had to abruptly stop posting partially because time was not on my side and partly because I was dealing with a mild case of internet harassment (nothing particularly serious but more than I wanted/or had time to deal with.)

But I’m back and while time is not exactly plentiful (What’s that? Time to chose my thesis topic already? Aiee!) I have slightly more of it. And anything relevant you wanted to know about me can be found on the About page. So there’s that.

I’m almost finished with my first semester of my Library and Information Studies Masters and as part of my degree, I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to listen to some very interesting speakers on the subject of Library and Information Management. In fact, the final speaker for this semester was Ian Snowley, the out-going president of CILIP (and you can read his blog here) and he was talking in particular about the future of libraries and librarians/information professionals, something that I have to think about a lot, both personally and professionally.

One of the questions he asked us was: Why are we librarians?

It’s interesting question!

Myself? For me, librarianship is a career change. I come from a very technical background – I worked in and around the IT industry as a web designer/codemonkey/technical support for most of my late teens/early twenties and chose an undergraduate degree that while softer than traditional technical degrees was still going to get me into more work along the same lines as pre-university. But by the time I finished my BSc. I’d burnt out on the IT industry and was staring down my graduation date with absolutely no idea where or what I was going to do after that.

So I started considering other careers. I’d always been a voracious reader and as a child, I spent a lot of time in various libraries. I’d learnt how to play the system at Uni – 5 month-long loan copies of the core textbook and approx. 150 students? Ahahaha! Guess who always got a copy? – and I’d always been an information/object organiser. I have a hobby where I actively worked as an archivist for several years and in my second year of my degree I had the opportunity to do an internship abroad where I worked for a digital archiving company in the Czech Republic. I wrote my dissertation on archives and archiving in online subcultures.

Suddenly my career path looked a lot clearer. I applied and interviewed for several Graduate Traineeships before ending up at Gotham Library and after working in a library for a year, I had pretty much decided that yes, this was the career for me. (And as for my choice of specialisation? Well, one of the other options considered was taking a conversion degree and going into IP law, which is a particular area of interest of mine. Thankfully, I realised before I did anything there that I would make an *awful* lawyer and thus the legal system was mostly spared. Heh.)

I realise that not everyone who may read this blog will be a librarian but for those of you that are – why? What made you throw your lot in with the rapidly changing world of information management? I am but the cat to curiosity.