So you want to be a subject librarian...

I work as an Academic Liaison Librarian - a subject librarian - at the University of York. It's a role I'd always wanted to do (preferably at York) and last month I was made permanent, proving that it's sometimes worth taking a gamble for the right role! (It was maternity cover, and I was leaving a permanent contract elsewhere.) But even though I'd always wanted to do this job, and I'd work-shadowed subject librarians before, and I'd talked to LOADS of them about the job, I still felt like I didn't really know what it would be like - it seems everyone has a slightly different experience, and there isn't 'a typical day in the life' as the job changes all the time.

With that in mind, here's a post about what the job has been like for me, and specifically where it matched my expectations and where it confounded them.

Things I expected about being a subject librarian

• There's lots of teaching. October and the student-induction in particular are an absolute manic whirl of preparation and delivery. My previous experience of teaching was putting on sessions that any student could come to (voluntarily) - during induction you're fitting your content around what the department has set up for you, which brings with it its own set of challenges.
• Working with academic departments is great. I really like the academic environment but don't want to be an academic - academic librarianship shares quite a high number of themes, as it happens, representing the best of both worlds for me. And I'm really lucky to work with switched-on and fascinating departments / academics. Higher Education is ace.
• You have to be able to balance a budget. I've been in charge of a budget before, but it was pretty straightforward supply and demand. With book budgets there's a whole load of factors complicating things, like different pots for different periods of writing with one of my subjects, and needing to spend up exactly what you have by a certain time, and keeping some money back for emergencies, and developing the collection whilst meeting teaching needs, and all that stuff. There is a sense that if you take your eye off the ball you could really stuff things up. That said, spending thousands of pounds on really great resources is an undeniably great feeling... 
• There's a lot of freedom. You can really be the master of your own subject domain, which I love - and you get treated like a grown-up, and are allowed to get on with stuff in the way you see fit. I honestly don't think there's a better fit in libraryland for people who want responsibility but don't want the kind that leaves you fighting fires the whole time and all the stress that brings.
• You get your fingers in many pies. Relates to the point above - subject librarians tend to get involved with all sorts of wider projects which don't relate to our subject role, so for example I'm involved with the social media and marketing side of things, implementing the new catalogue, research support, info lit in the digital age, etc.
• It stumps your ambition. I don't know where I'll be in 10 year's time, but there's a strong possibility it'll be right here doing the same thing. I've looked at the kinds of jobs on the pay-grades above mine, and the increased stress and decreased freedom aren't worth the extra money / career advancement / prestige / whatever. I did think this might happen. You're always supposed to think two jobs ahead, but I no longer can.

Things I didn't expect about being a subject librarian

• Checking your email requires actual brain-power. I know this sounds stupid, but the emails you get take a lot more time and energy to process than I expected... They take a lot more thought. I've got used to it now, but compared with previous jobs where you could quickly deal with emails and move on, in this one it felt like almost every one I got (and there are lots - it's an emaily kind of a job) required concentration and good chunk of time.
• There's lots of tricky decisions... This is related to the above, and I should have anticipated it really - but it still surprises me how often I get asked questions to which there is no right answer. Lots of judgement calls, about whether to buy stuff, about what type of binding we go with, about whether the ratio of books per student we're buying is correct, etc etc.
• There is an expectation that you know what books you have in your collection - as in, all of them! A side of the job I wasn't prepared for was going into the houses of the recently deceased, at the request of their family, to see if they have anything we'd find useful. This has actually happened twice in the last month, and generally speaking we get asked quite a lot to look at people's collections that they wish to donate to us. And they expect me to be able to say "Ah, so and so's treatise on community in post-war Prussia! We've been looking for that!" when, of course, I don't have off-the-top-of-my-head knowledge of the tens of thousands of books we have in stock already. So I take a laptop and spot-check stuff against the catalogue and then it usually turns out we have much of it already. Maybe in 20 year's time I'll be able to nail this particular skill?
• Just how much of my existing interests and skills could be pulled into the job. I obviously thought the job would match my interests but I've been really pleasantly surprised by just how many thinks I've played around with and blogged and presented about have come in handy. I tweet for the library, create Prezis for the library, use Issuu for the library, edit and create video for the library, teach students about web 2 tools for the library, etc etc. Woot. .

 From Twitter...

I asked subject librarians from Twitter what they didn't expect about their roles - here are some of the replies, via Storify:

So there you go. Would I recommend being a subject librarian? Absolutely, 100% - it's even better than I thought it would be. Got any questions? Leave me a comment...

- thewikiman

P.S

Some other stuff I really like about this role which doesn't really fall into the categories above

• Working with students. I have a real bug-bear with people who dislike students en masse - don't work in bloody HE then! I like them - some groups are more engaged than others, but the really engaged ones make it all worth while. They're likeable, enthusiastic, self-aware. It's fun working with them.
• Helping people. I'm not a particularly virtuous person, I don't wander round thinking about how lovely it is to help people - but when I actually do, I love it. Quite often students will come for a one-on-one session on finding information and stuff, and leave really, really pleased with what they've learned. They're better equipped and more enthusiastic than when they came in - that's a great feeling.
• Related training and conferences. I had a bit of an issue in my old job, where they didn't particularly encourage me to go and present at stuff -  I did a lot in my own time. Here, though, they're very encoruaging - plus the kind of stuff I like talking about is much more relevant to this job. So I'm enjoying presenting as a York person, rather than just as me independently. (Here's my schedule for 2012 if anyone is interested - so much for saying no to everything! While I'm self-promoting, here's the updated publications page too, with news of books and things.)
• Twitter being a constant source of invaluable stuff. More so than ever, the time I put into Twitter pays massive dividends. The amount of times I can go from not knowing anything to having several valuable opinions in minutes is amazing - it's enabled me to learn on the job much quicker.
• My colleagues. Obviously this is a very York-specifc one, but I work in a really great team, with supportive, nice, and funny people. .

P.P.S This has very little to do with the above, but I'd recommend reading Katherine Widdows' excellent post about social media and Web 2.0 in the academic library environment - it's on her blog here and it's really informative. Warwick are brilliant at this sort of thing, and this is an insight as to why.

Updated: Guardian web chat on the evolving role of the academic librarian

UPDATED (22nd March 2012): the Guardian have now published a summary of the discussion which you can read here. It takes some key points from each panelist. For an explanation of what this is, and links to the original debate itself, see the original post below. Overall the experience was enjoyable but exhausting! 2 hours of really intense reading and writing, but I think we all got a lot out of it...

__________

Just a short post to say, come and join me for a live-chat on Friday lunchtime!

I'm excited to be a panelist for the Guardian newspaper's Higher Education Network, along with Jo Webb, Andy Priestner and Simon Bains. We're discussing 'the evolving role of HE librarians', in real-time, on the Guardian's website.

Full details of the chat are here.

The chat takes place in the comments section beneath the article - so you can either follow it along (don't forget to hit refresh regularly...) or actively take part by logging in to the Guardian's website. There'll be a summary of the best bits posted online at a later date, you can follow @GdnHigherEd to get updates during the process too, and the hashtag to search is #HELiveChat.

Hope to see you there!

- thewikiman

'Assume that discovery happens elsewhere, and focus on fulfilment'

I came across the phrase in the title when browsing through Tony Hirst’s review of the Arcadia project from a couple of years back. (You can read the review here, in PDF format. The Arcadia Project is a programme looking at the role of the academic library in the digital age – you can read more about Arcadia here.)

The sentiment is one every right-thinking information professional will now be familiar with, but I’ve never seen it encapsulated quite so perfectly. It is an eloquent riposte to those who believe we should still be clinging on to an anti-Google or anti-Wikipedia stance, rather than embracing as ‘let us help you with that’ mentality.

In fact, I think you could adapt it to ‘Assume that discovery happens everywhere, and focus on fulfilment’ and you have a mantra for all of libraries going forward, a subtle repositioning to better deal with all the “asynchronous and asymmetrical threats” (Stephen Abram) we face in the modern age. We are the service, rather than the container.

- thewikiman

Spoon feed them, then give them the spoon, then chuck away the spoon

I seem to have a different view to a lot of information professionals in that I'm all for spoon-feeding. It's a loaded term - I'm actually all for the process it involves, rather than the philosophy it evokes. Above all, I think libraries are there to provide information and we should do this in as straightforward a manner as possible. Crucially, I think we can spoon-feed the students AND give them the skills they need to ditch the spoon entirely over time.

(There's an on-going debate in academic librarianship about spoon-feeding - should we give students all the help they need and make things as easy as possible, or should we be looking to educate them so they can fend for themselves? For example, providing digitised materials via the VLE - many people object to this, because if the reading is put on a plate for them, how will the students learn to find good quality literature? Etc. Simon Barron wrote a very thoughtful post on the subject yesterday, and linked in the comments are other bloggers' views on the same subject: Jo Alcock, Georgina Hardy and Sian Blake.)

Ideally, though, spoon-feeding should be the first step in a structured approach to helping students navigate their way through a degree, with the library embedded and responsive at all stages. I'm all too aware of where the phrase derives from because I have a 17-month-old daughter (or "17 month-yearold" as I always seem to call her) - we feed her with a spoon. We also give her a spoon of her own so she can feed herself. We're just starting to get rid of the spoon, and let her loose on a fork. The point being, spoon-feeding isn't a directive or a philosophy or an way-of-life, it's a stage - just as it should be with information in education.

She absolutely had to be spoon-fed at first because she couldn't feed herself - it was spoon-feed or no food at all. This is analogous for undergrads, for me - I think we underestimate how stark the change is from school and Further Education to Higher Education, and they have a LOT to adjust to in their first term without the library contributing to their problems as part of some misguided belief that it's for 'their own good'. If possible, we should be digitising all the core readings for undergrad modules, and putting them in the VLE, so that the students definitely get to read what they need to read. This allows them to participate fully in their lectures and seminars, which is more important than their level of information literacy at this stage. I used to run a digitisation service that did this, and the lecturers loved it because it allowed them to teach in the knowledge that EVERYONE had done the reading - without it, there were always people who couldn't get hold of the book in the library in time.

One department had a pedagogical objection to the digitisation programme and didn't use it - they said this wasn't preparing the students for real life because they didn't have to come to the library, learn to use the catalogue, find books on the shelves etc. But of course, real life isn't like that - real life is using Google because in 99% of cases that's perfectly adequate. I liked this quote from Georgina Hardy:

We must be very careful not to value process above principles.  Because, let’s face it, the skills of getting good results from a Library Catalogue, remembering to reserve books over a month in advance in order to photocopy a single chapter, and negotiating a complicated, publisher-specific, multi-stage login procedure to access journals from off-campus are skills only useful to those students who wish to go on to become Librarians.

Or, indeed, researchers / academics...

Once students get past the crazyness of their first couple of terms, that's when we can start trying to help them develop the skills to find stuff for themselves. I'm currently looking after English at my institution, and I really like the approach of one of the lecturers - she's requested that the core readings be digitised, but she's got me in to do a workshop (or 7 workshops, actually...) in the second term all about how to find secondary readings, via e-journals, Google Scholar and so on. This is just right, for me - give the students what they need to function, AND teach them how to get stuff for themselves. It doesn't have to be one or the other - spoon-feed whilst teaching them to use the spoon is surely the way forward?

Ideally the library shouldn't be only involved in teaching at the start and the end of the degree. This is often how it works - we do loads of stuff during induction (literally week 1 of their academic lives!) and then get parachuted in at the end to provide much needed aid on the eve of exams or dissertations. Ideally, we'd do some stuff in the 2nd year - guiding their hand as they use the spoon themselves - and again at the start of their 3rd year - getting rid of the spoon and giving them the skills they need to find food for themselves from any number of sources. This 2nd and 3rd year intervention should be based on the level the students have reached, and the needs they have then.

This way, we get to be helpful in the way students actually want (and in the way that will ensure good NSS scores which is, of course, The Only Thing That Matters In HE) and will expect for their 9k a year, and we get to teach them to help themselves in the way they actually need in the long-term. Quite apart from anything else, if the students are getting what they perceive as a good service from us (i.e. we have the provision they need to help them study, so they spend their time studying rather than searching for materials) they'll be more receptive to our instruction about info/digital/all-the-other literacies later.

Spoon-feeding is a useful service to provide, at the beginning of the student lifecycle; we shouldn't eschew it entirely just because we want to teach them to fend for themselves later on.

- thewikiman

Why the 2nd job you ever get in libraries may be the most important of your career

I have a theory: I think the 2nd job you ever get in libraries is the most important. We’ll come on to the why in a minute – first of all I wanted to see if others’ experiences backed up my hypothesis. I put a poll on to Twitter, asking this: Which job was most significant in getting you to where you are in libraries now? Which most influenced you onto your current path?

I didn’t want to prejudice the outcome so I didn’t mention my theory. The results were interesting – they did seem to (just!) back me up:

Now, this is a very specific question. I’m not asking which factor is most significant to where people are now (a lot of people would say professional development outside of their 9-to-5 jobs, or their Masters perhaps) and I’m not asking which job is the most important in terms of people being in the information profession at all (presumably that’d be the first job for the vast majority of people) – it’s all about where you are, the path you’re on, the area of librarianship you’ve ended up in or the role you’re currently doing.

So I believe the 2nd job you ever get in libraries is arguably the most important because it dictates much SO of what happens to you afterwards. Obviously all jobs have an effect on what comes after them to some extent, but the 2nd job is something of a tipping point whose significance is, I’d imagine, not appreciated at the time most people are applying for it. Most people’s first library jobs fall into one of two categories – securing an entry-level position prior to doing the Masters (or becoming a graduate trainee), or securing an entry-level position because you’ve sort of stumbled into libraries accidently, and then finding it was a lot more interesting than you thought, so you stay in the sector. As has been discussed before, almost no first library jobs are beyond the entry-level – even people who have the Masters have to start at or near the bottom.

So – as a result of this, there’s not much proactive career choice about your first library job: you just need a job. Most people start as something like a ‘Library assistant’ – often a customer facing role, in the library itself, issuing books and helping with queries etc. You only really start to mould you career when you apply for that 2nd job – and my argument is that you need to make a really sound choice here, because it has a vital domino effect on your subsequent career. And actually, it’s tricky to divert off the path you choose for yourself at that 2nd job choice, because the 3rd job will (probably) be a higher up or better or related version of that 2nd job and (probably) pretty good, meaning you build a career off the back of it.

I’m obviously generalising here, and of course there will be exceptions – and throughout I’m imagining someone staying in more or less the same place, rather than having accrued several jobs at the same level on their CV simply because they’ve relocated a few times. But generally speaking, if you’re in that position that so many of us were in – you’re in your first library role, thinking it’s actually pretty good, wondering about making it into a career – you need to think carefully about the path you choose and, not least, how long that path is in reality.

I’ll take the academic library as an example, because that’s what I know best. Your first role was in Lending Services on the desk, so where do you go next? If you choose to stay in Customer Services then you’re looking at a Reference / Enquiries Desk role perhaps, otherwise there’s a big jump up to something like Customer Services Manager or Site Manager. If you go into the cataloguing side of things you could go for an Assistant Cataloguer post. You could try and move towards the subject librarian side of things by going for a Team Assistant post in an academic librarian subject team. Or there might be a ‘Digital Library Assistant’ type role, to do with digitisation or e-Resources. Whichever of these you choose, your 3rd job will probably also be in this area, is my point. And your 4th job too, perhaps. Of course people change all the time, but it’s quicker to develop a career in a roughly straight line. (I know this, because I didn’t - and have only in the last few months arrived at the job I actually wanted to do all along, and have much younger colleagues who took a more direct route…)

Part of the reason I’m writing this is because I know some people who’ve been working in libraries a good while, and are just sort of treading water – because that second job took them down a path, and now that path is blocked for whatever reason. There just aren't any more senior jobs than they're already doing, in the area they've come to specialise in. So I’d recommend getting hold of one of those organisational structure charts for your library (or the library you’d like to work in) and literally plotting your ideal route upwards, seeing what’s feasible, where the obstacles are, when you’d be waiting an age for people to retire or leave, etc. Some paths have very few destinations so are more competitive. Some might not even exist by the time you get to the good bit. Some paths might look like their beyond you in terms of expertise, but actually you could get there over time. Some paths have loads of destinations but aren’t well paid. Money certainly isn’t everything, but progression means a lot – you don’t want to get stuck in a rut.

It would be nice just to live in the moment, just to ‘be’ and not worry about all this stuff. But librarianship is a hugely competitive profession, with far more qualified librarians than there are jobs for qualified librarians. So it’s really never too early to be thinking about the career path you’re embarking upon – ideally, you need to start making informed choices almost from the very start.

If you’ve made it through all that - do you agree with my 2nd Job Hypothesis?

- thewikiman