THE AMBIDEXTROUS LIBRARIAN

A few days ago, I had two people approach me in the library and ask me if there were any jobs going. This is not unusual, I probably get a couple of people a week asking about work.  I work in a pretty flash, modern-looking library (and it's a fabulous place to work) so I can totally understand why a lot of people ask about jobs. It made me think of one of my posts a while back about the importance of understanding yourself and the things you enjoy. This is especially true when it comes to choosing a career path.  I don't know if I ever mentioned that I used to be a scientist of sorts.  A Clinical Research Associate, which basically is a fancy job title for someone who manages human clinical trials for drug companies.  It was a great job for many years, but it was very stressful and I literally had no life outside of work.  The pay was outstanding and light years above my current salary; but did this make me happy? Nup. Not at all. So fast-forward a few ye...

A few weeks back I accepted a temporary secondment into an actual Librarian role at my workplace. My usual job is Library Officer (Programs and Support), and my day-to-day duties are to run programs and provide customer service without any of the "traditional" Librarian duties. Now that I have the title of Information Librarian, I have been gifted a few Librarian tasks, and one of these is to attend to the "Dead" and "Grubby" lists and get my weeding mojo on. Weeding is a very personal thing; even if you do have lists and statistics and hard numbers in front of you.  A lot of us would have chosen to become Librarians because we love books and yet here we are, forced to discard them on a regular basis. Into the skip they go, where they lay looking forlorn next to the folded cardboard boxes and old newspapers. I find it hard. Very. HARD. I did not expect weeding to be such an angsty experience (is everything about library work so emotional or am I just ...

... that is the question! I read an entertaining blogpost the other day from @restructuregirl, who was having a wee bit of a rant about obsolescence.  To summarise a rather first world problem, after much research into the various quirks and largely baffling features of new TV's she eventually settled on a selection to soon discover that the very feature she wanted had been made obsolete in the latest models.  What a total pain in the arse.  Tying it all back to the library sphere, she pointed out that we should really plan for obsolescence in our industry. I have to say I agree; particularly when you consider the speed at which anything related to information use and storage (i.e. our entire industry) is changing. This got me thinking of another article I read ages ago about how a small group of engineers had to laboriously reverse engineer machinery capable of reading super high-res pictures taken by lunar satellites in the 1960's: Lost lunar photos recovered by...

For those of you who have followed my story from the beginning (yeah, just me!) the whole idea of The Ambidextrous Librarian is that I am a newbie librarian working two jobs; one in a public library and the other academic.  I try to blog about my experiences and provide a bit of insight into each library environment, maybe provide other newbies with a bit of an idea what each is like.  My version of worldly wisdom and all that! But enough intro - I'm sure you're dying to hear my thoughts. Since the beginning of the year I have been getting a lot of shifts at the academic library. These were very welcome, not just for the extra bucks but because the job gave me interesting things to do - long term projects that require me to plan and create and research and present things. I've made it sound all very high-brow but let's not get too excited, it's basically just a Digital Literacy learning plan for struggling new tertiary students.  Still, I was part of a ...

It's wine o'clock on a Saturday night, and I am kicking back with a red and contemplating (with a not insignificant level of exhaustion) one of the most thought-provoking and emotional conferences I have ever attended.  It was called "Reading Matters", and it was a YA conference organised and run by the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria, Australia. It was politically charged and emotional.  I mean, I guess I kind of expected it to be.  A lot of librarians, teachers and writers are very socially conscious and are actively concerned about the multitude of injustices, inequalities and hurts that thread through modern society. More importantly, they want to talk to teens about this stuff.  They want to present realistic, meaty, honest narratives that tackle bullying and racism and poverty and mental illness.  They want teens to know that it's OK to feel strongly, to question, to look outwards and not feel alone, to walk in someone else...

Yesterday, I decided to kick start my blog writing again and I joined #blogjune.  I have been ignoring my blog lately and have been regretting it and feeling more than a little bit guilty.  My reasons have been very noble.  I have been working. Working, working, working - with a little bit more working on the side. You see, I was recently promoted and made full time.  It's only a temporary secondment, but hey, it's good experience and good for the CV yadda, yadda.  But what I didn't realise was how much this change in circumstance would totally take it out of me.  Like, I am completely knackered.  How did I ever work full time in my previous career?  How does anyone work full time at all!?!  I have tried to explain this phenomena to my friends who have seen less and less of me these last few weeks.  Librarianship is very tiring.  It's physical, what with pushing the carts around and running around the library and shelving heavy bo...

It's February and I haven't posted a thing all year. Not a jot, a word or a doodle.  I know you're all clambering to hear my latest thoughts on librarian life, and it's not like I haven't been thinking (well, most of the time).  Things have been happening.  Big ideas are afoot.  So where do I begin? I have become interested in the study of Bibliotherapy.  Biblio means books.  Therapy means therapy.  Book. Therapy.  There was a man, an essayist and minister actually, who first came up with the term Bibliotherapy just over 100 years ago (he coined the term as a bit of a piss-take, but eh, we shall run with it).  Bibliotherapy has endured, if not a tad under the radar, since this time.  Recently though it has begun peeking out from behind the book shelves and tentatively interacting with the modern world.  There are articles, websites, blogs - even the odd radio program - talking about the concept with joy and wonder.  But is it...