Resume, Building your

If you graduate with your Master’s degree in library science but can’t find work as a professional librarian (due to lack of experience), build yourself a miniature library, fill it with your unsold library school textbooks, and appoint yourself “director.”

Library lingo, Celebrating

Librarians should speak to their colleagues using highly specialized, technical language. Your masterful use of the library lexicon, using terms like, “EBSCO discovery service,” “MFHD,” and “the 856 field,” should send perplexed patrons and lay listeners rushing in search of a library and information science glossary in the 020s (DDC) or Z1006s (LCHS) of your reference monograph collection.

Ask the readers: Share some of your library’s professional lingo in the comments below.

Travel, Professional

Library webinars are supplements to (not substitutes for) travel to conferences and professional development workshops. Challenge your library director to stretch the “social boundaries of the online community with a live, off-line event” where you can network and learn with your colleagues.

Cat, Adopting a library

Librarians should adopt library cats to live in the book stacks. Every library needs more self-obsessed,  neurotic individuals on the library payroll who like write blog posts and take naps in the stacks.

Vacation, Preparing for your

Librarians should always secure substitutes to cover their reference desk shifts before they leave for extended vacations. If your coworkers are unwilling to help you out, substitutes can be obtained commercially for roughly $125 (depending on your height).

Quotable, Being

Make your words more memorable in your library instruction classes by typing them onto photos of yourself and making them available for your students to share on Facebook. Here’s one to get you started.

Update: 6/28/12, 2:45 PM
More "library instruction via word pictures" are available on the LGTE's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/polite.librarian

Loner, Being a

If you see librarianship described as a “job for loners,” it is your professional responsibility to quietly tweet your disagreement from your dimly lit acquisitions cubicle in the basement of the library.