Narratives of Academic Librarians: Prologue: Everything Up to the Beginning of Everything

Prologue: Everything Up to the Beginning of Everything

This is a forward that would really be everything kind of going up to when I started library science grad school. 

I consider my time professionally from the time I started in grad school.

That's when I started working seriously in the library. 

Before that, I had spent years volunteering in our local library and it was not a very uncommon story.

It was always a place that I went to as a kid.

The first librarians at our local public library were probably the first adults when I was a kid that I would consider friends and that shaped the sort of interpersonal relationship that I had- not just with the library as a repository or as a space. At the time this would have been pre-internet. 

What I would eventually understand to be library “as service” was still at a time when I was a small kid so even my ideas of accessibility even physically to get in the building weren't even so much in librarianship.

Being fortunate enough to be able to experience those resources, those spaces, those people, I never considered it a profession though it's a career for me [now.]

I never considered it as a career option, I had other things I was going to do.

But when I talked to people who knew me as a little kid and then up through being a teenager and before I went off to college and moved away, they're not surprised at all.

 “[Librarian 5] became a librarian, of course [librarian 5] became a librarian.”

But if you were to talk to folks that knew me in college, they would have been shocked that I was going to be a librarian.

It was never a career option that really occurred to me, but it was something that was a very present part of my life.

It was another place and it was another set of interactions with what felt like were really good people.

I decided junior or senior year in college to go to grad school for the library science program.

Everything up to that point would have indicated that it would have probably been a common sense move but it didn't really occur to me as a career until I was a junior in college.

“Everything before everything.” 

Maybe it's been building for all those years before I entered the professional track but that was always a very positive and strong influence on me.

[The first chapter] was teeth- T -E -E -T -H, teeth.