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[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
Most Properly, this is "Things I Should Have Learned In Library School (Had I/They Been Paying Attention), #1: How To Run A Cash Register", but that's a long title for the title field. So the tag for this year will be the titling, and each post will be the thing itself. With that out of the way, here we go.
It's been more than a decade since I actually went to library school. At the time, librarianship took on the opinion that it was a siloed profession - there were pages, who checked in and shelved, circulation clerks, who handled the money and the checkout, and librarians, who handled the questions that weren't intimately related to the function of the circulation clerks. The world of the library school spins a grand scheme for you where, as a profession, you will be surrounded by program planning and execution, intellectually challenging reference work, recommending the finest of materials to an appreciative audience, community partnerships that welcome you and your information abilities with open arms, and a budget that allows you to get most, if not all, of what you request so that you have the very best resources at your disposal.
This is, to put it mildly, bullshit.
Just about every library or archival professional will have to interact with something other than the materials during the course of their career. For most people exiting library school, that other factor involves either members of the public in general, students, or other members of your cohort. Sometimes two or more, sometimes all three. Only those who are the sole library worker in their library and blessed with a budget that has more money than what it knows to spend it on could potentially get away without having to actually interface with others. I have yet to see any place that could actually fit that description.
Now, I also got out of library school right before the economy tanked when it turned out that all the house speculation was not, in fact, sustainable. The first few months, the library's location was temporary, but there was a definite separation between the clerks and the librarians in terms of physical layout of the building. The classification scheme in the job descriptions of the various workers also made it clear that these roles were supposed to be separated. After the crash, the library system had to essentially take the money that they'd just received in a public vote and figure out how to make it stretch, while continuing to maintain the promises made to the voters to expand open hours and services.
One of the ways they figured out how to do this was to bring the librarian cohort and the circulation clerk cohort together into a single service point, where someone could ask questions of all the people together. (They also did this because the library realized that people will ask all of their questions of the person they approach first, and that the idea of sending people to two different service points, or back and forth between service points, is going to make people upset and frustrated.)
This caused two essential problems - the circulation clerks needed to be trained to answer questions that would normally have been the exclusive province of the librarians (much to the consternation of the higher-paid librarians and the union, who were afraid they were going to be replaced with lower-paid clerks doing their job), and the librarians were going to have to be trained on the duties the circulation clerks normally engaged in, such as handling money, creating library cards, and checking out materials.
For me, this was not a matter of consternation - as an intern at a couple of library systems, I'd already worked a desk that circulated things, so it wasn't new to me. Additionally, I thought it was a good idea that librarians should be able to do circulation and money things, since it didn't really seem like a good idea to not be able to take someone all the way through the process of getting a good thing in their hand. That might make me weird compared to the older colleagues who were used to a different way of doing things.
So I learned how to use a cash register. And then learned how important it was to use the cash register correctly, as a little while afterward, one of the State Auditors came by to take a look at our financial practices and records. (We passed, as we have for a good long time. But it's the only time that I've ever been able to ask a state auditor for their identification before showing them to where the records are kept.)
This might seem like a small thing, but librarianship is often a profession where people come from privileged backgrounds - the kind of people who might not have had to take a job during their schooling, or worked in a position where they would be expected to work a cash register. So I'm probably not the only person who had to learn how to use a cash register while on the job as a librarian. Or who had to do other things that seem like anyone can do.
And it was only really until this year that my location wanted to make sure that the librarians knew how to set up the cash drawer for the day and run the appropriate register tape and records to do a morning deposit and make sure the auditors stay happy with us. There's still a lot about the profession that has nothing at all to do with information seeking that a library school student needs to know before they start their first job, internship, or practical experience.
Most Properly, this is "Things I Should Have Learned In Library School (Had I/They Been Paying Attention), #1: How To Run A Cash Register", but that's a long title for the title field. So the tag for this year will be the titling, and each post will be the thing itself. With that out of the way, here we go.
It's been more than a decade since I actually went to library school. At the time, librarianship took on the opinion that it was a siloed profession - there were pages, who checked in and shelved, circulation clerks, who handled the money and the checkout, and librarians, who handled the questions that weren't intimately related to the function of the circulation clerks. The world of the library school spins a grand scheme for you where, as a profession, you will be surrounded by program planning and execution, intellectually challenging reference work, recommending the finest of materials to an appreciative audience, community partnerships that welcome you and your information abilities with open arms, and a budget that allows you to get most, if not all, of what you request so that you have the very best resources at your disposal.
This is, to put it mildly, bullshit.
Just about every library or archival professional will have to interact with something other than the materials during the course of their career. For most people exiting library school, that other factor involves either members of the public in general, students, or other members of your cohort. Sometimes two or more, sometimes all three. Only those who are the sole library worker in their library and blessed with a budget that has more money than what it knows to spend it on could potentially get away without having to actually interface with others. I have yet to see any place that could actually fit that description.
Now, I also got out of library school right before the economy tanked when it turned out that all the house speculation was not, in fact, sustainable. The first few months, the library's location was temporary, but there was a definite separation between the clerks and the librarians in terms of physical layout of the building. The classification scheme in the job descriptions of the various workers also made it clear that these roles were supposed to be separated. After the crash, the library system had to essentially take the money that they'd just received in a public vote and figure out how to make it stretch, while continuing to maintain the promises made to the voters to expand open hours and services.
One of the ways they figured out how to do this was to bring the librarian cohort and the circulation clerk cohort together into a single service point, where someone could ask questions of all the people together. (They also did this because the library realized that people will ask all of their questions of the person they approach first, and that the idea of sending people to two different service points, or back and forth between service points, is going to make people upset and frustrated.)
This caused two essential problems - the circulation clerks needed to be trained to answer questions that would normally have been the exclusive province of the librarians (much to the consternation of the higher-paid librarians and the union, who were afraid they were going to be replaced with lower-paid clerks doing their job), and the librarians were going to have to be trained on the duties the circulation clerks normally engaged in, such as handling money, creating library cards, and checking out materials.
For me, this was not a matter of consternation - as an intern at a couple of library systems, I'd already worked a desk that circulated things, so it wasn't new to me. Additionally, I thought it was a good idea that librarians should be able to do circulation and money things, since it didn't really seem like a good idea to not be able to take someone all the way through the process of getting a good thing in their hand. That might make me weird compared to the older colleagues who were used to a different way of doing things.
So I learned how to use a cash register. And then learned how important it was to use the cash register correctly, as a little while afterward, one of the State Auditors came by to take a look at our financial practices and records. (We passed, as we have for a good long time. But it's the only time that I've ever been able to ask a state auditor for their identification before showing them to where the records are kept.)
This might seem like a small thing, but librarianship is often a profession where people come from privileged backgrounds - the kind of people who might not have had to take a job during their schooling, or worked in a position where they would be expected to work a cash register. So I'm probably not the only person who had to learn how to use a cash register while on the job as a librarian. Or who had to do other things that seem like anyone can do.
And it was only really until this year that my location wanted to make sure that the librarians knew how to set up the cash drawer for the day and run the appropriate register tape and records to do a morning deposit and make sure the auditors stay happy with us. There's still a lot about the profession that has nothing at all to do with information seeking that a library school student needs to know before they start their first job, internship, or practical experience.
