Back by popular demand

Carlos, you asked for it. It's been a busy month, but I should find it easier to update the blog on a regular basis over the summer.

Goodbye to All That

As of the beginning of May, I'm no longer an Academic Librarian. I question whether I'll ever want to try that career path again. My experience in academic library-land has been that unless you're an unsuccessful would-be academic with multiple unused graduate degrees, there are no steady jobs to be had, and no opportunity to work one's way into a long-term career. Covering a university library's reference desk for twenty to thirty hours a week counts for precisely zero in the academic measure of an employee's worth. Likewise with any desire to provide good quality service to students or faculty who don't happen to be the heads of their department or the personal friends of library administrators.

In the calculus of academic careers, students and low-ranking faculty are undesirable pests to be avoided, since time spent with them detracts from the amount of time one can spend kissing administrator's asses, schmoozing with tenured colleagues, padding one's vita with "scholarly" publications that no one will ever read, and collecting and carefully arranging paper documentation for future promotions. Students (and library users generally) have no influence on hiring committees, tenure committees, or budget allocations. Therefore a wise aspiring academic will do everything possible to avoid them and avoid wasting time on them.

When I interviewed with "Huron State", I was told that the position would involve reference and bibliographic instruction as well as other duties. During the two years I was there, I was assigned to precisely one hour-long bibliographic instruction session. I was assigned twenty-two to thirty hours a week of reference desk coverage, including the majority of the library's evening hours from 6 to 10 pm. The "other projects" ranged from the fun (event-related bibliographies and displays) to the mildly interesting (investigating or confirming the availability of lists of titles) to the dull (modifying MARC records for periodicals to include links to electronic indexes and databases) to the stupendously pointless and time-consuming (transcribing information from thousands of electronic catalog records onto paper). When I questioned the methodology and purpose of the latter, I was informed in so many words that, as a lowly lecturer, I wasn't supposed to ask such questions.

Meanwhile, tenured faculty with three-day work weeks made sarcastic comments about my selfishness and disloyalty for having a second, part-time job with which to supplement my munificent $25,000-per-year salary and pay rent during my otherwise unemployed summers. Another tenured faculty member consistently refused to speak with students who had complex or specialized reference questions in her assigned subject area, and complained bitterly to the administration about mere lecturers who complicated her life by referring such students to her. And another considered it to be her perogative, as a tenure-track faculty member, to throw shrieking temper tantrums at Mere Lecturers.

Meanwhile, in addition to covering 22-30 hours of reference desk service per week, I was expected to cheerfully volunteer to cover whatever reference hours the tenure-track librarians didn't feel like covering. And, oh, by the way: lecturers get no vacation time at "Huron State", and must apply well in advance for permission to earn or use comp time.

The university is currently conducting a search for tenure-track librarians. Since I did not have the foresight to accumulate a stack of unused graduate degrees before becoming a librarian, I was not qualified to apply for said positions.

Suburban Public Library, amazingly, considers me to be capable of ordering books, organizing library programs, and doing other things that professional librarians do, despite the fact that I'm only working there part time. I've applied for a full-time position there, and I hope to get it. I may get frustrated at the paucity of resources available for in-depth historical research, non-bestseller fiction, and poetry. I may get bored dealing with a clientele made up largely of people whose interests revolve ceaselessly around the latest fad diet book, the latest quick-get-rich infomercial, the latest paint-by-numbers bestseller or right-wing political hatchet job.

But at least it would pay enough to live on.