Over at Meredith’s blog, a fine, fine statement about whether, why, and how to pursue an MLS.
I’ll be blunt. If you’re thinking about it because of all this hoopla about the librarian shortage, forget it. There’s no librarian shortage, and there isn’t going to be, either. The uproar is based on unexamined assumptions about retirement numbers and about what will replace retiring library personnel, assumptions that hold about as much water as a pasta colander.
Even worse, librarians are pretty darn underpaid given the education and skills required of them. Not your ticket to Easy Street.
Moreover, an MLS is not an automatic job ticket. It is the minimum requirement for a librarian job, and with the librarian job market what it is at the moment, damn few employers have to settle for the minimum! Meredith’s correspondent is probably in reasonable shape (I rather assume 20 years of business experience includes some supervisory stints), but that doesn’t make Meredith’s advice wrong. Far from it.
The problem boils down to this: if you don’t have anything to offer but your MLS, you’re dead in the water. You’re competing with people with second master’s degrees (see Meredith’s résumé, or mine for that matter) and even doctorates, people with paraprofessional library experience, people with teaching or publishing experience—self-made geeks like me you’re competing with, even. I don’t know how my job search is going to go, seeing as how it’s barely begun, but I can tell you this: what makes me a good hiring prospect has next to nothing to do with my MLS. It’s what I brought to the table before I even started school.
Most of the people I go to school with realize this. Those who don’t are in for some choppy waters. Not coincidentally, those who don’t are (in my highly biased opinion) not going to be terribly good librarians, if they stay in the field at all. (They aren’t the only ones, I should say; I can number three or four people in the SLIS program that I’d go very long distances indeed to avoid working with. Whiners, shirkers, tight little bundles of sarcasm and meanspiritedness… you know the drill. Fortunately, three or four out of the dozens of SLIS folks I know isn’t much. Far more people I’d go long distances to work with!)
Again, it takes more than an MLS. And (this is usually said on the first day of Intro to Librarianship, but it bears repeating) “liking [reading] books” is not sufficient qualification. Do you like making them? Hunting for them? Weeding them out? Budgeting for them? Fighting would-be censors and “libraries are irrelevant” legislators for them? Scanning their title pages endlessly? Building events around them? You better like something about the written word that isn’t reading it for pleasure, is what I’m saying. Because you’re competing in the job market with people like Meredith, who love this field for its own sake.
If you do? Come on in. I love this field too, more even than I knew I would when I started school. I daresay CavLec provides more than sufficient evidence of that: my Librariana category is the newest one, yet it’s quite as lengthy as any other, lengthier even than most. Some of what’s in there is stunningly fatuous, because I’m still learning—but if nothing else, it shows that I think about this stuff, regularly and with passion.
And if that’s not enough evidence, I got my hands on the Elaine Svenonius book mentioned in this post via the local public library (I never thought they’d have it, but what do you know? they did) and am chugging my way through it. On my own time. For personal enjoyment. Because I love this stuff; I really do. It tickles my brain where my brain likes to be tickled.
(Good book so far; wish I’d known about it before Extreme Markup, because it’s a fine addition to F.W. Lancaster. Straightforward, clear, incisive, and remarkably unemotional—which may seem like an odd recommendation coming from Ms. Heart-on-Sleeve here, but given that so much of the hysteria around the digital revolution in bibliographic control and the items being controlled is utterly silly and wrongheaded, unemotionality would seem to be just the ticket. Recommended, in other words, both to librarians and to those among my markup-geek readership who want to know just what the heck those bloody librarians are on about.)
Anyway, if you’re going to do this, yes, you’ll have to be ready to claw and bite and scratch your way into a job. I’m ready to do that, because I want to be in this field so badly I’ve turned down honest job offers in other fields. If you don’t want to be a librarian that badly? I’m not going to say don’t do it, but I will say “think twice.”
