The 10 Hottest Occupations, On librarianship not being one of them anymore

Five to ten years ago, library schools were abuzz with projections about the importance of information professionals with MLS degrees and their roles in the New Economy. This line of thinking is as dated as the term 'information superhighway' and now you are faced with the startling realization that your skill sets aren't needed nearly as much as the dean of your grad school had promised. You read magazines that compile annual lists of the hottest job trends and you see that an MLS degree is sandwiched between 'Clerk at Doctor's Office' and 'Phone Sex Operator,' though either of those professions would probably pay better. And with every passing day, your technical skills become more outdated and less relevant to the work force at large.

Buzzword Bingo (conference edition), Revisiting

To keep your mind sharp while sitting through professional conference presentations, adapt your homegrown library buzzword bingo game for recurring buzzwords dropped at the conference. Some real-life examples:

• embedded librarians (... as in embedded in BlackBoard, WebCT, etc.)
  
• wikis (bonus points for instructional uses for wikis)
  
• blogs (bonus points for instructional uses for blogs)
  
• 24/7 reference / e-reference
• co-browsing
• meta-search
• librarians as advocates

Privacy, ALA and your

The American Library Association is a staunch advocate for personal privacy and intellectual freedom...

“The American Library Association affirms that rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”—Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights

However, those ethics apparently go out the window when a vendor or publisher offers to buy the mailing addresses for ALA members. ALA would sell your mailing address to the devil himself if he had an encyclopedia for sale.

Vacationing, Checking email while

Never check your email when you are on vacation. Leave the laptop at home. If you can't give up reading email about library stuff for a week, you may have a problem. Yes, your inbox may be filled with messages in your absence, but trudging through that filled inbox is a great way to kill your first full-day (or two?) back on the job.

Faculty status, Librarians with

The question of faculty status for academic librarians is an issue that elicits passionate debate from people on both sides of the issue. Some academic librarians are considered faculty and have all the rights and responsibilities that such a title entails. Others are called faculty, but are really just academic support staff with glorified titles. Most, however, are somewhere in between and are responsible for things that fit into both categories:

• staff: working at service desks, cataloging and automation, collection development, etc.
• faculty: teaching and instruction, research and publication, service and committees, etc.

Not sure where you fall into this landscape of muddled job classification, professionalism, and self-identity? Lack of controlled vocabulary strikes again!

Online catalog, Lamenting your

All librarians should have a love/hate relationship with their online catalog. For all the time and effort librarians put into maintaining their online catalogs, you might think the interfaces would be a lot more user-friendly. (How often does Amazon.com have to do training sessions on "Finding Books"?) The only real course of action is for librarians to lament the sorry state of their catalogs' interfaces to one another -- informally, in meetings, at conferences, with users' groups, and on listservs. In the meantime, just be sure you keep paying your catalog vendors outrageous fees for their substandard products.

Vendors, On enduring

When your boss thinks that it'll be a really swell idea to bring in the most annoying vendor reps to demo a bunch of crap your library would never use, make sure that you make the dude work for it by asking the dumbest questions you can think of. Your objectives are two-fold: to irritate the vendor and to put off going back to work for as long as possible. Ask really hard questions that salespeople would never know and when the vendor squirms and answers the question with a really inadequate response, try not to be too impressed with your evil self. When the vendor leaves, make sure to gossip with your favorite co-worker(s) about whatever tacky thing the vendor said or did (because they pretty much always do.) Bonus points for baiting the vendor into taking you out and paying for drinks on his/her company's tab.