Thing 20: The Library Routes Project

I've added a link to the Library Routes wiki and have looked at some of the other posts. Seems like a lot of people stumbled upon the profession but once people grab onto that first rung of the ladder they're hooked.

I think my career path has been fairly typical - or rather a bit textbook. Gradutate trainee, Masters, Chartership and now revalidating. I've mostly stuck to academic libraries with the hospice as the exception (although we did a lot of work with the palliative care students from the local Uni). I did a bit of moving around in the beginning to move up a few rungs on the ladder but I think that's ok. I knew I wanted to be a subject librarian but couldn't decide which subject. After dabbling in health, nursing and then drama, I knew health was the one for me.

In terms of advice for people at the early stage of their career, the following are things that have stuck with me over the years:

1. Get stuck in - yes, long stints on the issue desk can be a bit boring but it helps later on. You get customer care training, often gain experience of supervising a team or even just supervising the desk for one evening a week and meet the users in their good and bad guises. People (users and colleagues) can be odd, funny and/or quite cross - and in my experience they don't change so you might as well get to grips with these things early on.

2. Remember that librarians are part of an enormous network. You are bound to keep crossing paths with the same people. You might arrive at a new job miles from home only to spot a name on the staff list that you recognise - in my case I realised I had conversed with them about inter-library loans for many years. When you're starting off there will always be someone who knows someone else that will let you shadow them for the day or visit their library. This is good news for the Charterhsip process and for getting experience in different sectors.

3. Be willing to change. When I started there was a lot of paper - forms, forms and more forms. Now we are a bit sniffy about paper and in some cases have reached e-only. Courses like cpd23 make you think about what's happening now and how you can keep up with the pace of change.

2012 will be an interesting year in academic libraries and so I shall have to see what paths remain open to me in the future.