Susan Waldon

I know how important professional development, organizations, and service are to continuing to be valuable in a professional capacity because I ignored them all for 16 years while I raised my four children to kindergarten age. When I was ready to go back to work as a teacher, I was able to get a provisional teaching certificate, but I did not have the computer skills or current instructional practices to really be employable. After three years of substitute teaching, it was plain that I was not going to be hired as a regular employee. I learned the hard way that a professional just has to stay current with the profession and the technology used to accomplish the work, in order to get a job, but more importantly to serve their clients in the best possible way.

 

One way I could have stayed more in the loop with teaching would have been to keep my professional memberships current. Professional library organizations are essential to knowing what is expected from a librarian. They spell out professional ethics and competencies and provide forums to trade ideas on keeping libraries relevant and healthy. They provide toolkits for marketing and advocacy and programs like Every Child Ready to Read @ the Library, which we use all the time where I work. Their newsletters highlight current library events and issues. In the three and a half years I have been working on the master’s program in Library and Information Science here at UNCG, I have learned so much about libraries, technology and people. Some of my ideas and attitudes have changed. I have learned things about information organization and information literacy that I would never have imagined. And I have learned how rapidly the information environment changes. In this profession, it is crucial to stay up to date in order to best serve your community. To that end, I have been a student member of the American Library Association and the North Carolina Library Association for the last two years. I am looking into joining the Public Library Association, as well. (It is unclear from the website how to add it to an existing ALA membership.) I am going to the NCLA conference for a day to see what kinds of things I can learn at a library association conference and thinking about the Public Library Association conference in Nashville in February.

 

My library education started shortly after I realized that I was not going to get a teaching job. At that point I started asking myself what I really wanted to do. I took a computer basics course and a career development course at a community college. I asked myself where, besides a school, I could work in a helping capacity to bring people and ideas together. When we did mock interviews in the career development course, I interviewed to be a library assistant. Then I set about making that dream come true. When my second son got a full ride scholarship to college, I was able to drop back to a minimum wage library page position to begin getting some library experience. I enrolled in Central Carolina Community College to do an associate’s degree in Library and Information Technology. More than half of my coursework was about computer networks and applications. Those courses gave me the technical expertise I needed to apply to be a part time library assistant. I have been in that role for 5 years now. In that time, in addition to working on my master’s degree, I have taken nearly all the training offered by library administration for its library assistants and I have subscribed to an e-newsletter called Library Link of the Day, which keeps me aware of what is going on in libraries and publishing.

 

As I look forward to graduation, I have started to consider how I am going to keep up with the profession when I am no longer in school. In addition to joining professional associations while I can still get a student rate, I am in the process of subscribing to Informed Librarian Online while I can still get a student membership. This site contains links to articles of interest on both library and tech topics and full text of Emerald library journal articles. I am also looking into a newsreader, an alternative to the now defunct Google Reader, which would help me to keep up to date with roughly a dozen websites and blogs that I want to sift through to see which of them will be most helpful in keeping me up to date on all things library related. In no particular order these websites are: the Open Education Database iLibrarian blog, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, Planet Code(4)lib, Voice of Youth Advocates, Librarian.net, The M-word: Marketing Libraries, Google news: technology, The Digital Shift, NYPL labs, Special Library Action Team (SPLAT), Swiss Army Librarian, Storytime Underground and Teen Services Underground, and Librarian by Day. I have purchased three books on literature to read in a leisurely way when I am no longer reading for class: Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests Eighth Edition (2019!), The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Teen Literature (2018), and an oldie that I really need Understanding Manga and Anime (2007).

 

Another way I can stay current is to take advantage of the offerings in OCLC’s WebJunction of free webinars for librarians. I took Supercharged Storytimes on that platform and it was excellent. It had so many resources on the Views2 theoretical background for early literacy and showcased an excellent TED Talk, The Linguistic Genius of Babies, that I tell young mothers about. I look forward to having more time to see what else is available on Web Junction when I have finished my formal coursework.

 

I am highly motivated by past painful experience to make an effort to stay sharp and current as a librarian once I graduate from library school. I have learned that if I don’t try day by day and week by week to stay current, it can take years (seven and a half in my case) to catch up and become a true professional once again. But I am also motivated by a passion for this profession. The more I have learned about libraries, librarians and their work, and the longer I have worked in a public library, the more I have realized that here is where I should have been all along. I am grateful for the do-over and I love my work. I look forward to what the future holds as I work to help make my community library the best it can be for the people it serves.

 

References:

Brenner, Robin E. (2007). Understanding Manga and Anime. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, Greenwood Publishing Group. Print.

 

Carstensen, Angela. (2018). The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Teen Literature. Chicago, IL: American Library Association Editions. Print.

 

Herald, Diana Tixier, and Stavole-Carter, Samuel. (2019). Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited. Print.

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