Interviews, Dressing for library

Never wear a suit for a library job interview. Instead wear a threadbare blazer, unpressed khakis, a stained tie, and well worn shoes. Women... if you can't stomach an ill-fitting pants-suit, wear a dowdy skirt and an oversized cardigan. Remember, most search committees are suspicious of style.

Plus, if you dress too well, it becomes obvious to the potential employer that you have unrealistic expectations about library salaries and their ability to keep you dressed in your fancy clothes.

Tote bags, On hating

The next time you go to a library conference you will be given a tote bag with your registration materials, usually emblazoned with some type of library-related logo. Unless you want to look stupid, make sure you throw the tote bag out or refuse to accept it in the first place. Tote bags are cheaply made, ugly and totally impractical. There's nothing worse than a librarian carrying a tote bag...nothing! Stop making an already bad image worse. Stop it!

Books at work, Reading

Always keep a stack of books on your desk. Though most non-librarians and naive LIS graduate students think that librarians spend their work days reading books, nothing could be further from the truth. While this image is romantic and quaint, the reality is that most librarians spend their days dealing with annoying administrators, attending mind-numbing meetings, and pushing paper of the non-book variety. Keeping a stack of books on your desk will help you maintain the romantic image of librarianship, and should you find yourself (by some stroke of luck) with the opportunity to actually read at work, you'll already have a book within arm's reach. In the meantime, books also make good paperweights.

Prospective new boss, On Googling the living sh*t out of

A new prospective employer will probably do a minimal background check to ensure that you fit the qualifications for a job at their company... and you should do the same on them. The last thing you want to do is to leave a pretty good job for a new position working for an insecure, immature, bi-polar workaholic (true story, btw). Do your own due dilligence on the person who interviews you by Googling the living daylights out of them. Remember, blogs and MySpace profiles probably won't use the person's real name, so get creative. And if you find the person's personal website, run it through a domain search tool in order to find the joker's real email address and Google that too. Remember, the job interview is a two-way street.

Interviews, Doing presentations at

When hiring a librarian, many academic libraries try to fill part of the obligatory eight-hour interview with a presentation by the candidate. More often than not, the candidate is asked to "demonstrate a database." Zzz. When inviting candidates to your library to interview, make things more challenging by asking them to...

• Speed-weed your ready reference collection.
• Work a real-life reference desk shift... blind-folded.
• Make a halfway decent pot of coffee... then catalog it.
• Play a game of Trivial Pursuit/Scrabble against your most cantankerous faculty member.
• Explain Ranganathan's laws of library science through interpretive dance.
  
• Wrestle a cataloger.

Signatures, Using email

Put a little spice into your correspondents' lives by adding a personality-filled signature line at the end of all your outgoing email messages. In addition to your name and contact information, include a quippy quotation from A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette, a particularly poigniant Bible verse, or your favorite Garfield quote ("I hate Mondays"). This extra little gem at the end will make it worth your readers' time to wade through your boring everyday library talk.

Vacation, Going on

If you go on vacation, be sure to come back to work with a photo album or scrapbook, a tan, and souvenirs for everyone. It's important to remind everyone that you were off having fun while they were at the library working. Plus, if you don't celebrate your own return, you may come to the painful realization that no one even noticed that you were gone.