In the beginning…
There was this post. Welcome to the Logical Operator, a blog about academic library stuff from the point of view of a librarian ex nihilo, so to speak. I graduated from library school with approximately zero idea what it meant to work in a library or even be a librarian, except for two notions: one, libraries were an objective good, though that notion was unexamined and basically just an operating parameter, and two, that libraries were never cold enough and always made me sweaty.
My first day of being an actual, honest-to-FSM librarian involved walking into the building, being shown my desk, and given a handshake and instructions to “do good work.” It was somewhat different than my previous jobs in corporate America.
Heh. That’s putting it mildly. It was vastly unstructured, ideal for the self-motivator, an area where my personal development had lagged a bit, and it was a hell of an adjustment. It was also a far cry from the theory and deep pontification of library school, where dwelt the minutiae of RDF and semantic payload and content representation. Instead, being a librarian had less to do with library theory (though a thorough steeping in such theory made it possible to understand what was going on) and a lot more to do with making friends, marketing services, and developing practical solutions to immediate problems. Theory is for the downtime.
Now, four years in, I have a handle on being a librarian. There are so many areas where I still want to - and work to - improve, but the job has a familiar rhythm and swing to it.