Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 1 Optimism of Youth

Chapter 1: Optimism of Youth

My first library job was right out of college. 

I mean as an undergrad. I was XX years old when I started working as a staff member, so I was a library assistant working at a circulation desk and a reference desk. 

I was definitely like a kid when I came into the “librarian” staff.

The staff were not all that much older than me, but they definitely all seemed like “real adults” who knew what they were doing. 

And I didn't necessarily think that.

I felt like a kid. I did.

I started as an assistant, and I was there for maybe a year before I started my MLS, since I got paid for it.

I started in libraries and I started this job thinking, “this is what I'm going to do, till I figure out what I'm really going to do.” 

I went into the investment plan for retirement and everything thinking, “I'm not going to be here that long. I'm going to figure something else out.”

It's been many years now.

I quickly decided, well, you know, if I'm going to be here, I better go ahead and get the master's degree.

Once I finished my library degree, I had to wait for a position [at a nearby library] that I could apply for to be a librarian, a real librarian. 

When they did that, it was also advertised as a “______ librarian” position.

I know you didn't need me to do this for this interview, but I actually went back and found that job description because I was like, “what was that?”

I saved it- because I save everything. The way they wrote it…. It was very strange. 

It was this weird mix of subject librarian and service librarian and they had ILL [interlibrary loan] written in there too. Maybe technology was a piece of it. 

They wrote some things, I think, to try to make it easy for me to get this job, which was very nice. 

I did get that job, but my title was ______ Librarian for a little while. 

I guess the topic of this first chapter, thinking about it – I was so young. I felt I was doing everything right.

I must just be doing everything right, and I was trying very hard to be kind of an overachiever. Making sure that I came in and was doing all the right things and working extra hard and kind of beyond reproach. 

But you know, just doing enough that no one could criticize me. Right? 

I think I was to a degree, but once I got my librarian position, they seemed to think that I was going to figure out a new role. 

Maybe they thought, “oh, here's this, maybe a combination of ‘young person’, and ‘seems to be good with technology’ and you are going to figure out new stuff for us.”

And I thought, “yes, I'm going to do that”. It took me a while. This is kind of getting into the next chapter of figuring out maybe I didn't know everything that I thought I did. 

Or being good with technology didn't necessarily mean I was going to be immediately successful with the technology projects I had been given to do, that there were some other pieces of that they wanted.

I guess this was before I went up for promotion. Yes, it was.
We don't have tenure in our institution. 

No faculty members have to go up for tenure, but we do have a promotion process that you can go up for promotion after XX years in rank.

So, I went up for promotion after XX years in rank. But before that, they had given me this assignment to redo this information literacy tutorial that previous librarians, I don't know, XX years prior? Some years prior, they had done this tutorial. 

It had been used as a basic library tutorial across the institution. 

We were very small too, and it was pretty out of date and they wanted somebody to redo it and I said, “yeah I can do that”. 

I think we had different ideas about how long that was going to take or maybe I underestimated how long that was going to take. I did it and it ended up being really successful. At the time that I went up for promotion, I felt I'd been doing a pretty great job, I knew that I was ready for promotion. 

I got some feedback from the XXXX committee at that point that I wasn't expecting- sort of a split vote sort of deal, reading their feedback. 

(And I went back and read that feedback again before this interview, which was fun) 

They weren't sure that I had done “enough”. 

One, in teaching, that I didn't have “enough” because I was a subject liaison for a few subject areas and had these other technology roles.

They came back and said that I hadn't been teaching enough. 

And that I had not... Well, this is not the time now for me to probably defend that, but you teach as much as you're invited in to teach. I mean, these were the old school “one shot sessions” and I was doing outreach and... anyway. 

The other piece of constructive criticism they said was that even though I'd finished this big tutorial, they wished I had done more “stuff” to support the other librarians in technology and that they're very confident that I would figure out how to make this XXXXX librarian position what it could be. (it was actually a XXXXX /technology librarian position)

So that was a little bit of a turning point, or maybe not turning point, but just something that I definitely remember as part of my working career. It's the first time that I got some feedback that maybe I wasn't the best at everything, and it was tough. 

I did get promoted again, I got positive letters from the dean and provost and my supervisor and all that stuff. So that was great, but I did have to work through what that meant.