THE AMBIDEXTROUS LIBRARIAN

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 ...

PD IS NOT A CHORE. I am pretty new to this whole Librarian thing.  I only graduated in 2015 and can count the number of library jobs I have held on one hand - but my inexperience and untarnished idealism mean that I am keen to throw myself straight into the mosh pit.  I ain't afraid of getting few bruises, or perhaps a scuffed Dr. Marten in the chin. Having just gained employment at both a public and academic library, I have so many "Professional Development" options to choose from.  It's kind of overwhelming.  I'm not even sure which career path I wish to take; but I do know that I want to keep up and keep learning.  Drink my coffee in places where all the interesting stuff is going down, the ideas are fresh, the music is good and (most importantly) the coffee is decent.  But being new to the block, how do I know where to go? It seemed to me that the most obvious choice was to seek guidance from my professional association.  Enter ALIA (the Aust...

After a minor interruption to service, I'm back and I've installed an upgrade! For those of you out there who may actually read this blog (the one or two of you, hi Mum), life has been more than a little busy of late and has interfered with my ability to read, and to blog.  Basically, I have been experiencing a career crisis.  Actually that's a bit dramatic it wasn't really a crisis (I just like the familiar-sounding alliteration), it was more that I really didn't like my job.  Don't get me wrong, my colleagues were AWESOME and that counts for so much in a workplace, but as a new Librarian, the job itself was probably as unchallenging and backward as it could get.  A career cul-de-sac.  A dead end.  A career coffin.  A place of final rest. So what was the position?  It was at a school.  A lovely school of a certain educational philosophy that was rather anti-technology and fairly set in its ways.  I sort of knew this when I started,...