Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. Vault Guide to Library Careers is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting.
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Vault Guide to Library Careers Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. Vault Guide to Library Careers is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting. |
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Vault Guide to Library Careers Librarians organize and provide access to information, whether print materials, such as books, magazines and journals, or CDs, DVDs, music scores, maps, electronic books, electronic journals or databases. Today, opportunities for librarians are more varied than ever. While there?s still plenty of work in the traditional settings of public, academic, corporate and government libraries, some librarians these days work as consultants or in information services companies, and other non-library jobs are growing in number.
Librarians are also increasingly combining traditional duties with work involving technology. And the industry?s embrace of technology ensures that users will continue to enjoy better access to better-organized information. Who will be behind these innovations? Librarians, of course. |
Barbara Gordon was a librarian by day but spent her nights as the superhero Batgirl. She went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, hanging up her bat wings briefly. After her stint as a Congresswoman she returned to Gotham City and resumed her role as Batgirl until she became paralyzed after being shot by The Joker. So what did Babs do? She fell back on her super intellect, her expert knowledge of computers, experience as a hacker and her training as a librarian. Barbara became known as Oracle, and continued working as a modern day librarian/information broker?searching for information and gathering intelligence to assist law-enforcement agencies and, of course, her fellow superhero crime fighting community. Of course, Barbara (a/k/a Batgirl and Oracle) only lived in DC Comics and later in books, but what a role model!
Jet Li played a librarian in the movie Black Mask; Katharine Hepburn showed Spencer Tracy the right way to do research in Desk Set, and the sultry librarian and martial arts expert Evelyn (played by Rachel Weisz) is no shrinking violet in the remake of The Mummy. One of the more popular characters in popular culture today is the endearingly geeky Yomiko Readman, a bibliophile who works as an agent for the British Library?s Special Operations Division. In Operation Document Retrieval, Yokimo fights to recover manuscripts stolen from the Library of Congress (after its destruction). Yomiko was first introduced in a series of novels (nine at this writing) set in a fictional universe known as R.O.D. or Read or Die, and her popularity continues in Japanese anime and manga, television spin-offs, fan websites, and merchandise including T-shirts, trading cards and a figurine of Yomiko (which sells for about $150). If it weren?t for Rupert Giles, the school librarian who doubles as ?The Watcher? in Buffy and the Vampire Slayer?poor Buffy might have been history quite early in the WB television series.
On the flip side of the coin, there are more than enough portrayals in the past and today that stereotype the librarian as a grumpy (and frumpy) silencing character, usually with her hair in a bun, her finger raised to her lips, peering over her glasses and a stern look on her face. From The Rugrats to Irma Pince in the Hogwarts library of the Harry Potter novels, librarians are just as often shown in a negative light. Every holiday season when It?s a Wonderful Life can be found on television around the clock, viewers are reminded what a horrific life Donna Reed would have had as a librarian had George Bailey (James Stewart) not heeded his guardian angel?s warnings. Furthermore, Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones gives us crotchety librarian Jocasta Nu, Nick-at-Nite?s All That has The Loud Librarian who scolds anyone for the slightest noise, even a cough; and finally, Noah Wyle should stick to ER because he was quite a wimp in the made-for-TV movie The Librarian.
Above all, information-keepers
So, are librarians superheroes, individuals with photographic memories and vast storage random access brains? Or are they the stern looking women (or men) who guard the books, keep unruly library users under control and constantly tell people to be quiet with either a shush or a look?
Most librarians and those who work with them would probably settle on something in between. All types of individuals are found in the profession of librarianship and working in paraprofessional or clerk positions in libraries. It?s not so much about the books these days as it is about information regardless of the format: print, electronic or digital. As for gloom and doom predictions of the demise of libraries and the superfluity of librarians, many predict that ongoing technological innovations will only continue to create better access and organization of information to serve users. Who will be behind these innovations? Librarians, of course.
