What does the day of a librarian look like?
I have wanted to be a librarian as a kid, but I am not really interested in being one anymore. I am just curious on what they work on and what it takes to be one. #reading #librarian #bookkeeping #library
3 answers
Stephanie Adams
Stephanie’s Answer
Hi Carlos,
Librarians are employed in so many different types of positions none of which really resemble what most people have in their minds as a traditional librarian. There are academic librarians who teach information literacy skills to college students and assist professors with research and grant writing. Then there are also public, law, special, corporate, and systems librarians and there is a great deal of variation in what each of these librarians do all day. Librarians are also employed as archivists, document managers, and patent researchers. I am an Electronic Resources Librarian in an academic library. In the course of my day-to-day activities, I rarely touch a book or work with a patron. I do the behind the scenes work in purchasing a myriad of electronic resources including ejournals, ebooks, databases and a variety of other online tools. My responsibilities include setting up trials and communicating access information to our public services librarians, working with our web manager to make sure the tools are available on our library web site (including off-campus access) for our patrons to use, and working with the university's purchasing department to negotiate the terms of the license agreements for all of the resources with the vendors and publishers. Many librarians also work for the electronic resources vendors and publishers as sales representatives, account managers and trainers.
Professional library positions typically require a masters degree in either library science or information science from an American Library Association-accredited program. Some specialties require alternate degrees such as public history for an archivist or a law degree for a law librarian. In addition, many academic library jobs require an additional masters degree for tenure.
Good luck to you with whatever career you decide to pursue!
Andrea’s Answer
this really depends on your type of work, as a librarian you do multiple things, you can work with kids and teens, with adults, answer questions, give advice on what to read, manage the technology in your library, seek funding, seek communitry support, do programming and plan events, do outreach, do PR, the possibilties are endless! if you are curious and want to know more, it is also good to go to your local library and volunteer there, lots of libraries have volunteer opportunities for teens!