52 Ancestors Challenge Week 32: "At the Library" - Talk to the Librarian

I am always "at the library", silly. I am a librarian! 

This post is not really about my family history but rather a service announcement from my profession.

"Librarian" was never really a career goal for me. Had you asked 4 year-old me, or even 20 year-old me, what I was going to grow up to be I would have said an artist. That is all I ever wanted to do was paint. I still do but it is really infrequent and mostly involves bedroom walls. Anyway...

My bachelor's degree is in Art Education from Adelphi University. I also have an associate's degree in Commercial Art from Nassau County Community College, here on Long Island, New York. I was accepted to other more grandiose sounding art programs but it came down to expense for me. My father helped me through Nassau but when it came to paying for college I was pretty much on my own. Without a full-ride anywhere I opted for community college and then transferred to a local private college which offered me the best scholarship and which is really where my library career began. 

While at Nassau I worked as a student employee in the Art Department assisting in the organization of their slide collection. Remember slides? Now images are presented to art history students through the Internet, there aren't any slide projectors around. Back in the day though, if an art history professor wanted to show the class an image it was done using slides; little encased bits of film projected onto a screen at the front of the classroom. 

Well, I organized those slides. When I transferred to Adelphi, I again took a position as the slide organizer for their Art Department but my paycheck, yeah there was no direct deposit back then either, my check kept getting sent to the Art Library. Every payday I had to traipse over there to get my money. One day the head of the Art Library asked me if I just wanted a job in their library organizing their slides. Oh yeah, slides were everywhere. They were the bane of art history education pre-Internet. I said sure and in about 1995 I acquired my first library job. 

Sure, I did my student teaching and had a brief stint subbing in art classrooms but honestly, I hated working in a school. It wasn't the kids so much as the politics. People weren't kind and I went back to working in the library where pretty much everybody just wants to give you the information your looking for. 

After a string of library experiences as a clerk, I realized I was doing the work of my boss, a librarian, and the only way I was going to be recognized and paid for the position was if I went to grad school and got a master's degree in Library Science. So, at about 31 years-old, I found a job as a clerk in a university with a Library Science program of study that offered the benefit of tuition remission; meaning my job would pay for me to get my degree. 

Once my master's was finished at St. John's University, I started looking for a position as a librarian. It was during the 2008-09 recession and there weren't many jobs to be had. I went on 2 interviews for children's librarian and each place told me I was obviously a cataloger despite my focus of study being on youth services and public librarianship. Most, if not all of my library work experience had been in organization and technical services. So I relented to the forces of experience and applied for a job at Farmingdale State College, a college of technology in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, as the cataloging librarian and here I am.... at the library.

A portion of my present job is working at the reference desk helping students navigate their college careers and our resources. Sometimes I teach one-shot information literacy classes; showing a class how to find resources for their upcoming research for a specific class. My niche in the library though is to write, and right, records for books in our collection. I make sure our physical resources are properly represented in our online catalog so that no matter how you search for them, you're going to find what you need.

That's all I want. Librarians just want to help you find whatever information you are looking for. If you go into a library to do genealogical research and you don't talk to the librarian you are doing yourself a great disservice. They know more about the collection than you do. Oh yes they do! No matter how much you prepared for you visit, they work with it all the time. They know what they have. Show a little respect. By all means go prepared. We're not going to do your research for you but if you are wondering about the contents of their local history collection or archives, I betcha they have worked with it a time or two and have seen some gems they are just dying to shine some light on for you, OR they know the librarian who knows. You find yourself spelunking in one of their databases, the librarian might not be entirely familiar with it but they understand how information is organized. Ask them if you're lost. It would be rare if they told you that you were just on your own.

I tell this to all people I research with and all my students; talk to the librarian. 

As an academic library faculty member, I hold 2 master's degrees. My second, also from St. John's University, is in Public History which is a little like museum studies in that its aim is to make history accessible to the public. One component of public history is genealogy and thus I have the great pleasure of teaching a credit bearing genealogy course through St. John's University's Division of Library and Information Science. I teach pre-professional librarians how to do it and how to assist others in doing genealogy research. 

I know when my students complete my course, which for this semester is in just 2 days on Wednesday August 10,  they know how to do genealogy research. I know they know. And then they become librarians who know how to do genealogy research. Then you go into their libraries and you want to know. So trust me when I say, I know they know what you want to know. Now you might not be talking to my former student, but you might be. So, better safe than sorry, just Talk to the Librarian.