Library career advice

... courtesy of a source which shall remain unnamed (per his/her/their wishes).

For new librarians in public libraries, some career advice from a bunch of veterans sitting around having
one too many beers. Thank goodness one of us was sober enough to take notes! This message may be
freely disseminated provided it remains intact and no one dishonestly claims authorship. The authors are
anonymous and intend to stay that way.

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1. Your undergraduate degree or previous experience is irrelevant. If your background is English, you'll
be assigned to the Science Department. Fluent in a second language? Your collection development
responsibilities will be Hollywood videos. Want to work with children? You'll do cataloging. Your
acquisitions expertise will get you assigned to the bookmobile.

2. Forget the publish-or-perish law of academia. In public libraries, it is publish-AND-perish. Do not
publish anything as an entry-level librarian, except what you have been asked to contribute to the library
newsletter, until after your first promotion. Attracting favorable outside attention too soon
irritates your supervisors, who labor long and hard in the unglamorous administrative trenches with no public
recognition. They feel resentful when their subordinates develop name recognition or independent
reputations.

3. You can never suck up too much. Loyalty often counts for more than competence. Be punctual, be
perky, be passive, and don't ask tough questions. If you get called a "poor team player," it means your
boss dislikes you but has no objective basis for criticizing your performance. Start looking for
another job.

4. Tread carefully when ordering books with sexual themes or illustrations. Remember that not all
censorship challenges come from outside: if your support staff objects to typing the order or shelving
the book, your administrators might not back you up the way they would with an outside challenge.

5. Never forget that the public library is a political creature. It must satisfy its board and its
funders. In addition, there are always those jockeying for their next promotion. These political
tensions and alliances can be subtle and difficult to discern but they are there and potentially
treacherous.

6. In spite of its deserved reputation as a profession where eccentrics, nerds, free-thinkers, and
"alternative" people of all kinds can find refuge, public libraries can still be bastions of gender
conformity. As in other fields, male librarians often float to the top. Female librarians are often
promoted based on how well they do femininity (attractiveness, wardrobe, ability to follow orders)
rather than how well they do librarianship.

7. Does administration ask for your input? Consider it a formality. They want cheerleaders, not critics.
They've spent long years in tedious career purgatory, waiting for another lifer to retire or die so that
they can advance to where they can launch their own policies and projects. They're not interested in
yours.

8. Public libraries with low turnover and a civil service system where promotion is restricted to
insiders are more likely to be followers than leaders in the field. This is because those with the freshest
training and most energy, the new hires, have the least power and the longest wait to attain a position that allows them to innovate.

9. Exercise caution when seeking employment within 50-100 miles of a library school. Unlike places far
from library schools, which must work hard to recruit and retain librarians, cities with library schools in
town do not have to treat their staff especially well because they are easily replaced with the many new
graduates saturating the local market.

10. If your library is not unionized, start one. Historically, it is the most reliable way to elevate the traditionally dismal librarian salary.

Let's see: so far in my experience in public and academic libraries, numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 have bitten me. Number 4 is insufficiently inclusive, since it fails to warn against acquiring, say, religious or pro-Second-Amendment viewpoints that other staff wish to suppress. Number 6 is from a distant and unfamiliar planet with no relation to the reality I inhabit; every library at which I've worked has had a female director, and to the extent that I've observed any sexual discrimination, it has been directed against men in the public library. Number 10 is quite amusing, since the union to which I am required to belong as a condition of employment is currently spending most of its time and effort (and, probably, most of my mandatory dues) on internal squabbles and power-struggles, complete with the usual anonymous e'mail flames and self-righteous defensive responses from groups with names like the "Committee to Replace Person X" or the "Ad Hoc Committee for the Truth". This follows two or three months in which no one in the union administration could be bothered to respond to my telephone calls or e'mails seeking information about "my" union and its activities. Obviously the people in charge have a healthy system of priorities.

I'm not sure whether I've violated Number 2. Do pseudonymous weblogs count?