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Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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10:29 pm
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There's been a library routes / roots meme going around, so let's see. How did I get to be teetering on the brink of the profession?
My mum always seemed to have a vague idea that I'd be a librarian someday, and when I was looking around trying to figure out what jobs to apply for as the end of my BA Hons degree at Durham approached, I couldn't summon up any excitement over the usual graduate trainee schemes I saw advertised. I have a feeling that it was browsing over the university careers library information on librarianship that first brought the idea of LIBRARY graduate traineeships to mind, and once I found out about those (and especially the scheme at Oxford University, which I saw a Durham graduate had gone on to - so it wasn't that unattainable!) I was away. In my final year at Durham and over the next two years, I applied and went for interview for at some 30 library jobs, nearly all traineeships, several places twice over - they started recognising me as I walked into the interview room which was quite nice! Still didn't get offered a job though.
Eventually in desperation, after having spent time volunteering at my local branch of Oxfam and the library at the United Nations Environment Program's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) in Cambridge, I applied for two shelving jobs at Brookes (as my then-boyfriend was living in Oxford). They very kindly offered me both of the posts, which meant travelling to a campus on one side of the city to work for 3 hours in the morning, going home for the afternoon, and travelling to another campus on the other side of the city for 2 hours in the evening - phew. Just before I went to Oxford in September 2005, I was offered a temporary position at the British Standards Institute, helping out with archival work for the International Standards. I went there for a month (or was it two?) - just long enough as they're based on the opposite side of London and the journey was exhausting. At Brookes, I enjoyed getting to know the Dewey Decimal system properly and getting my foot on the ladder. My temporary contract (I'd been covering maternity leave) was due to end in July 2006, and having split up with my boyfriend I was going to go back home, so applied for a job in the local university library at home. My first interview in a year, and to my complete shock and elation they rang as I was on the bus back to Oxford (where I had to go to work that afternoon) to offer me the job.
So started 2 years providing library support for distance learners at Middlesex, until the campus was closed in 2008 and we were all shuffled into a restructured, relocated library. Luckily there were jobs available at a campus 25 minutes walk from my home, so I applied for that, got it, and I've been there for the last year. Soon after I started at Middlesex I embarked on study with the Open University, and in December 2008 I was awarded a 2.1 'Open' degree. With this confidence-booster and the experience of studying by distance-learning behind me, I applied to the distance-learning MSc in Information & Library Studies at Aberystwyth, and was offered a place. Somebody told me about Middlesex's staff development fund, I applied for funding for my MSc and the upshot is that they are paying IN FULL for my course as well as providing generous study leave to boot. I never thought this would happen! I mainly applied for funding because I thought the study leave would be useful, not with the aim of getting the cash!
In a way then it's been quite lucky that I didn't get the graduate traineeship anywhere, because then I would probably have had to pay for my course myself and wouldn't have had the experience and steady employment I've gained at Middlesex. Or, more importantly maybe, met the people I have met at Middlesex.
Right - back to that module......
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