Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

June 2008 Volume 6(3)

Like something almost being said...conferences & careers

Watershed moments

Tony Ross and Richard Fallis muse on coming full circle, the benefits of attending conferences and the competitiveness of current job-seeking.

It is our hope that regular readers of this column, should they exist, value us for our directness and honesty. In that spirit, we feel obliged to confess that ideas were a bit thin on the ground this month. Therefore, we each decided to write short pieces reflecting on what feel like watershed moments in our respective careers. Oddly enough, even though we wrote our pieces entirely separately, they convey similar impressions, of us simultaneously making progress while being conscious of having come full circle – of us moving confidently into new professional arenas, while still anxiously treading water. And something tells us we are not alone.

TONY: As I write this, I’m busy putting off preparing my presentation for the CILIPS Branch and Group Day in June. Attending the event will bring this early phase of my career full circle, given that I attended it for the first time last year as a humble student and my first piece for Information Scotland was a report on it.

Branch days and conferences are excellent CPD opportunities. They help broaden experience and one’s range of professional contacts, and also maintain a feeling of career momentum. Having spent (and regretted) a couple of years drifting, I value now having such a feeling and I am determined to gain new knowledge and experiences in as many ways as I can. Therefore, I am under a lot of pressure to make the most of this year’s branch day. However, it and most other extra-employment CPD opportunities, are voluntary additions to an already heavy workload. To make the most of such valuable opportunities, a lot of prior preparation is advisable, which seems eminently manageable when you first agree to participating in an event, months in advance, but can prove onerous by the time the event itself comes around.

So now an investment of effort is due. Usually the thought of public speaking would colour the antecedent weeks with shades of dread, and self-doubt over my ability to deliver a coherent and interesting talk that won’t condescend, baffle or bore a group of (more experienced) peers. In this instance, though, I really haven’t had much time to dwell on it, because I’ve been so busy doing other things. This might work to my advantage, lending my presentation a natural, unharried delivery. Or it might make my performance an ill-prepared disaster, culminating in a Q&A session that sees me sinking amid a sea of queries to which I’m hopelessly unqualified to respond…

RICHARD: Recently I finished reading The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s superb post-apocalyptic novel, recommended to me by one librarian and loaned to me by another. At one point, a character remembers how he once stood in an abandoned library and contemplated all the ruined books: “It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.”

At the risk of sounding trite, libraries are spaces of great expectation, especially to me, since the landscape of my career could be about to undergo a seismic shift. By the time this is published, I will hopefully have taken up my first professional post, as a part-time Assistant Librarian in a Glasgow hospital library. Right now, I am filled with a mixture of relief and anxiety: relief at finally being able to contribute meaningfully to a library service; anxiety over what is still an uncertain future.

In this latter respect, my situation is by no means unique. Some of my friends from library school have also found work, but in positions that are part-time, temporary or not in their desired sector. Other friends, meanwhile, haven’t even got that far, finding it difficult, or impossible, to even secure interviews. Worryingly, a few people who left library school full of optimism are considering changing career paths or returning to what they were doing before they tried to pursue librarianship. At the back of their minds, and of mine, sits a ticking clock, loudly counting down the hours till this year’s LIS students stream out of library school, to flood an already sodden job market.

The LIS profession today is extremely competitive, and it has taken many of us by surprise. Perhaps it was naïve of us to believe that librarianship would be easier to get into than other occupations. But is it so unreasonable of us to think that it shouldn’t be this hard to get a library job, without moving south? And if it’s proving so hard for us, how much harder will it be for the library school students who follow us?

Having opened on a literary note, I’ll close on a cinematic one. The new Indiana Jones movie features a sequence in which Indy evades Soviet thugs on a motorbike that crashes into his college library. While there, he tells one of his students that, to become a real archaeologist, the student needs to get out of the library. Whereas, to become real librarians, my friends and I first need to get into a library. Which, we are discovering, is easier said than done.

Tony is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde. Richard is an Assistant Librarian within NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde.

Information Scotland Vol. 6(3) June 2008

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Last updated: 16-Jul-2008