To follow up with silveradept's excellent comments - I work in a special library that's pretty weird even by special library standards (niche collection). I talk about it in my journal under lock, generally glad to add anyone interested.
Even pre-pandemic, 75% or more of our questions came in by email, the in person stuff not with co-workers involved a couple of people a week wanting to find things in our stacks, and then the occasional larger project that involves coordination.
When we're in the office, I and the two library assistants (both part time in the library, I'm the only full time library person) have desks (them) and an office (me) within nominal yelling across the open space distance, and we'd chat about stuff as it came up. These days, it's Google Chat, which works fine, honestly. There were plenty of days where I'd see 2-3 other people go through the space to the offices upstairs, and that was it.
I also work regularly with our archivist (and one of the library people is mostly in the archives) - they're in a space about 5 minutes away in the building, so even when we were in the office, we did a lot of by chat and meetings every week or two or as things came up.
My work is a mix of reference questions (again mostly by email), occasional web or phone calls for additional discussion/interviews (mostly because we have a collection where we get questions from people doing school projects for National History Day). And then longer-term project stuff, with 2 standing meetings most weeks right now, and usually 1-2 others depending on what's going on for internal stuff (and 1 every 2-3 weeks for work I'm contracted to do with another organisation in our field.)
I've also worked in a high school library (which I loved, even though teenagers are sometimes exhausting), but involved a lot of coordinating with all sorts of people and departmental politics at times. I also have worked in an academic library, and I liked parts of that a lot, but wow, the politics were fairly lethal.
The downside to my current job - which I love - is there's basically no upward mobility. People have usually stayed until they retire. Now that I've got my own office, quiet, a lot of autonomy over how I structure my day, and so on, it'd be hard to give that up, but my salary is on the low side for our metro area for someone who's mid-career as a librarian, and that's unlikely to change.
I'm mostly okay with that trade-off (especially having come from a job where I had 6+ months of continuous migraines due to background noise, a refusal to let me work somewhere that didn't trigger said migraines, and a lot of internal political nastiness... My immediate boss was great, but everyone above him, not as much.) But it's a really significant trade-off in some ways.
The other jobs that are sometimes fairly low interaction: 1) I have a friend who's a cataloger in our large library consortium, overseeing the stuff the consortium catalogs (mostly local history/local interest, and some foreign language materials.) She talks to a handful of coworkers most of the time, and there's no patron interaction. You have to love cataloging for that one, though, because basically, it's all cataloging all the time. (There are also not a lot of jobs like that total.)
2) There's also a few types of jobs which are sometimes combined with reference or other duties (that do have patron contact) but in some libraries are just the one thing with minimal patron contact - systems librarians jobs (need tech skills), interlibrary loan (mostly non-MLIS jobs), and some things like digital resources librarians.
no subject
Even pre-pandemic, 75% or more of our questions came in by email, the in person stuff not with co-workers involved a couple of people a week wanting to find things in our stacks, and then the occasional larger project that involves coordination.
When we're in the office, I and the two library assistants (both part time in the library, I'm the only full time library person) have desks (them) and an office (me) within nominal yelling across the open space distance, and we'd chat about stuff as it came up. These days, it's Google Chat, which works fine, honestly. There were plenty of days where I'd see 2-3 other people go through the space to the offices upstairs, and that was it.
I also work regularly with our archivist (and one of the library people is mostly in the archives) - they're in a space about 5 minutes away in the building, so even when we were in the office, we did a lot of by chat and meetings every week or two or as things came up.
My work is a mix of reference questions (again mostly by email), occasional web or phone calls for additional discussion/interviews (mostly because we have a collection where we get questions from people doing school projects for National History Day). And then longer-term project stuff, with 2 standing meetings most weeks right now, and usually 1-2 others depending on what's going on for internal stuff (and 1 every 2-3 weeks for work I'm contracted to do with another organisation in our field.)
I've also worked in a high school library (which I loved, even though teenagers are sometimes exhausting), but involved a lot of coordinating with all sorts of people and departmental politics at times. I also have worked in an academic library, and I liked parts of that a lot, but wow, the politics were fairly lethal.
The downside to my current job - which I love - is there's basically no upward mobility. People have usually stayed until they retire. Now that I've got my own office, quiet, a lot of autonomy over how I structure my day, and so on, it'd be hard to give that up, but my salary is on the low side for our metro area for someone who's mid-career as a librarian, and that's unlikely to change.
I'm mostly okay with that trade-off (especially having come from a job where I had 6+ months of continuous migraines due to background noise, a refusal to let me work somewhere that didn't trigger said migraines, and a lot of internal political nastiness... My immediate boss was great, but everyone above him, not as much.) But it's a really significant trade-off in some ways.
The other jobs that are sometimes fairly low interaction:
1) I have a friend who's a cataloger in our large library consortium, overseeing the stuff the consortium catalogs (mostly local history/local interest, and some foreign language materials.) She talks to a handful of coworkers most of the time, and there's no patron interaction. You have to love cataloging for that one, though, because basically, it's all cataloging all the time. (There are also not a lot of jobs like that total.)
2) There's also a few types of jobs which are sometimes combined with reference or other duties (that do have patron contact) but in some libraries are just the one thing with minimal patron contact - systems librarians jobs (need tech skills), interlibrary loan (mostly non-MLIS jobs), and some things like digital resources librarians.