Comment on Almost 38 & This Is Where I'm At Now

• Syltti@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You certainly don’t need a masters just to do that.

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  • Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don’t you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren’t?

    Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.

    It’s really much more broad than “Someone who works at the local library”

    Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living… untill I saw the effort required and the pay.

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    • VAK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can’t know about everything. You’d just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?

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      • mandolrain@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Research skills that you acquire during your master’s (incl. but not limited to, talking to other experts)

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      • smh@slrpnk.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they’re worth acquiring for the collection. So, you’d look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there’s anything they’d suggest. You research the author, find out if they’re involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.

        Yes, that sounds trivial, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.

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      • Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Sure, you can ask 10 experts, and get 11 opinions.

        Researching books, authors, subjects, and determining which ones are appropriate and which ones aren’t is complex stuff.

        You would, for example, research the authors prior publishing history of books and journal articles, read peer reviews of their articles, check their references, research the history of the authors of their references ECT to build an idea of what sort of author you’re dealing with. Do they know their stuff, or are they just a book mill?

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    • Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Your library experience was very different from mine. We mostly just told people how to sign up for the wait list for 50 Shades of gray, what programs we did for the kids, and putting away the books everyone left everywhere.

      The pay is what scared me away. Branch Manager, highest position I interacted with, couldn’t afford their own transportation, and was going through their second green card marriage for money because they were desperate. Had 2 Masters.

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      • Signtist@bookwyr.me ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        A lot of jobs are easy on a day-to-day basis, but get hard every once in a while when some edge case comes up and you’ve gotta have a breadth of background knowledge of the field to handle it effectively. It’s why AI seems so useful to middle managers who don’t realize that edge cases exist; their employees can handle them without issue, but AI spits out total garbage and calls it done. I’d imagine librarians are indeed dealing with people looking for the latest fad book more often than not, but they still have to be prepared for the person coming in wanting to know all about insect phylogeny.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.

    “Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.

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  • teslekova@lemmy.ml ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Think museum curator, not book warehouse owner. They have to make complex decisions involving knowledge about knowledge.

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  • Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You don’t but it does gatekeep the position. Helps your job security…

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