Library volunteerism in Zambia February 9, 2010

Today at lunch time, the McGill Librarians without Borders student group hosted Marjorie Gagnon, a librarian who volunteered for 5 months in Zambia. During her stay in Zambia, Marjorie participated in two library projects: The Book Bus and the Lubuto Library Project. Many students in librarianship have a burning desire to help people (even those stuck cataloguing in a back room want to help people find resources more efficiently by doing a good job classifying). Marjorie argued that because she stayed for 2 months at each project, she was able to observe the difference that books made in the lives of the African children who she was working with. By the time she left, she was able to see the progress in their reading skills, which is pretty rewarding! Many college/university students participate in this type of project during their “gap-year” when they embark on whatever volunteer-tourism program sounds most interesting. These student volunteers did not have the same goals as Marjorie since they had no idea what needed to be done in a library setting (Marjorie described their complaints at having to do a library inventory in the hot sun). Most of them preferred visiting the country’s touristic highlights to doing actual volunteer work. This did not faze Marjorie, she was able to draw upon her management skills from her job experience to prioritize projects and motivate others.

Marjorie did a lot of research before choosing to which projects she wanted to dedicate her time and energy. She was extremely helpful by giving us a list of other potential NGOs performing library work in Africa that she discovered during her research. This was extremely useful and I was able to copy down many of the names like Under the Reading Tree and Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL).

We were warned that a volunteer trip like this cost a lot of money and volunteers must cover their own expenses for travel, vaccinations, visas, etc. Luckily Marjorie has been working full-time for the past ten years and could afford this trip that was taken during a sabbatical year. I’m not sure that most MLIS students would have the funds saved up for the type of trip. Okay, I know that I would not be willing to pay these expenses when I am just finishing school and I do not yet have a secured job with income. Having said this, I will be going on a less expensive library-volunteer trip to Guatemala for 10 days in April. More on this in a future blog post…

Gerald Beasley and Joceylne Andrews speak at McGill’s SIS February 8, 2010

Gerald Beasley, University Librarian at Concordia University

Joceylne Andrews, Technical Services Librarian at Westmount Public Librarian

This is a post that I started writing over a week ago but was never finished because the Web 2.You conference completely took over my life. I strongly believe that everything in this post is still relevant and important even over a week after the presentations discussed below took place:

Most students do not enter librarianship to become managers. Much to the dismay of these MLIS students, who cannot possibly envision themselves as managers anytime in the near future, the majority of MLIS programs do require at least one core course on management. This semester, I am the Graduate Assistant for McGill’s Information and Agency Management class. This is slightly ironic as, I too, only last year was a student sitting through this class thinking to myself, “I know nothing about business models, managing a budget, or dealing with the conflicts of staff members, I can’t possibly become a manager!” This is such a common frame of mind amongst students as well as a source of some concern. Therefore, it was incredibly reassuring last week in class to listen to Gerald Beasley and Joceylne Andrews, two engaging guest speakers, who addressed this common notion with much honesty.

Gerald Beasley is the University Librarian at Concordia University in Montreal (directing both the downtown and Loyola campus libraries). In the field of librarianship, no one has more management issues to deal with than an academic library director and Gerald Beasley seems to accept the responsibilities of his position with humility and extreme interest. His extensive career demonstrates the potential to be elevated to positions of authority without necessarily seeking them out. Gerald Beasley began as a Rare Books cataloguer, probably the position least likely to lend itself to becoming a leader in an academic library environment. However, when listening to Mr Beasley talk, it is easy to understand why he was promoted to a position of authority. He comes across as a man who genuinely cares about the mission of libraries in addition to the well-being of the people who choose to work in these settings. As a response to one question on how he started taking on leadership responsibilities, he answered that in a work environment, decisions are made all the time and at one point he realized that he wasn’t always happy with the decisions that were being made. He then started to become more involved in the decision-making process and obviously the decisions that he made set him apart as a respected leader in the library as he was then rose in the ranks of management.

Although Gerald Beasley was extremely inspiring and he has had a fascinating international career, I think that it was easier for students to identify with Jocelyne Andrews’s talk on management. Jocelyne graduated from McGill’s MLIS program only four years ago in 2006 and therefore seemed a bit closer to the current mind frame of students. Her well thought out talk highlighted various reasons of why students might be afraid of the prospect of management and discredited these potential fears. Like I said, I did not enter into librarianship to become a manager but Jocelyne argued that as professionals, the likelihood of us being called upon to fill a management position is quite high. We therefore need to think about developing valuable management skills like problem solving, learning to prioritize and communicating effectively. She argued that we can start improving these skills immediately by becoming involved in library associations, taking part in group projects and by drawing on our experiences from part-time jobs.

I am so grateful to be the Graduate Assistant for this class. I honestly feel that I am learning just as much in this position as last year when I was taking the class. It is perhaps because I am getting closer to graduation and I realize more now than when I was in first year just how important management skills are when working as a professional librarian. In fact, I have a few interviews lined up in the upcoming weeks for a few open positions in library management. I hope that the theory learned in the Information and Agency Management course, my various job experiences, as well as the valuable insight shared by Gerald Beasley and Joceylne Andrews will help me convince my interviewers that I have the skills necessary to be trusted in a position of management!

Web 2.Wow February 7, 2010

The unfortunate thing about working on the weekend is that I have not yet had time to recap on my blog the unforgettable impact that Web 2.You 2010 has had on me as a person and as a future information professional. Organizing this conference with Adrienne Smith (MLIS I) has taught me so much and all of our hard work has been rewarded with positive comments and words of congratulations from everyone who participated in the event.

It seems that I have already waited long too long before posting anything to my blog (I would have been tweeting about the conference live but my laptop was needed as an emergency back-up for the speakers). In the meantime, Lora Baiocco has beaten me to the punch by posting a fantastic summary of the day’s activities entitled “Web 2.You at McGill – the little conference that could and does”. I really encourage everyone to read this post to get a better idea of the diversity of ideas that were presenting on Friday and that still have my head spinning.

For those of you unable to attend Web 2.You 2010, the video should be available on the Web 2.You Wiki in the next week as soon as we are finished editing.

Weeding a library is like weeding a garden January 23, 2010

I’ve done a lot of garden weeding in my life. One summer, I worked maintenance at a golf course and I got stuck weeding all of the flower beds around the club house and the tees for the whole summer. This was an incredibly tedious job and I realized that you could either be a perfectionist (picking every last weed) or just get the most obvious ones. Either way, you are never truly finished weeding because almost as soon as you are done, more weeds spurt up. This past week, I have been working on a project to weed the Reference Collection at the Education Library. This section has some really fantastic resources in it, however, mostly you can’t see the flowers for the weeds. Just like weeding a garden, this is a tedious job going through the individual titles to determine their current relevance to the collection but in the end it can be rewarding. This library collection has obviously not been weeded for years and it was in dire need of a good clean up. If you are entering a garden or a library collection that has not been weeded in a long time, there is temptation to just pull everything in sight. The problem with this of course, is that in your haste, you are potentially removing valuable plants/documents. I am cautious and try to think of the potential interest for a document before it is weeded but it also gives me great pleasure to rid the library collection of documents that are of no value to our users. These are the titles of which I am most proud to say are no longer a part of the Reference Collection :

New Career Options for Women : a selected bibliography (1976),

Personnel des Commissions Scolaires et des Cégeps (1978-1979),

The Black World in Literature for Children Vols. 1-3 (1975)

Christopher Marsden speaks on Net Neutrality at McGill January 22, 2010

Last week, I attended a fascinating talk on Net Neutrality hosted by Media@McGill featuring Christopher Marsden. Christopher Marsden is a professor at the School of Law at the University of Essex and a guru on the legal implications surrounding information transfer.

Net Neutrality is a term that I had heard thrown around a lot recently and I was interested in attending the talk because I still did not have a clear idea of how to define the concept and I was curious to learn more. I assumed that Net Neutrality referred to the opportunity the web provides to obtain Open Source software and applications such GIMP 2  and Open Office or the possibility the web offers to consult material made available through Open Access publishing. This talk, however, focused more on the pricing of Internet Service Providers and the regulations in place in Europe and in North America to ensure that consumers have a right to basic internet service. When I first walked into the room, I noticed that it was packed with students and faculty none of whom I recognized as being from SIS. The Power Point Intro Slide read “Medium Law and Network Neutrality – History, Common Carriage, Bottlenecks and Oligopoly “, “Oh my God!” I thought; I had no clue what that title even meant! Since I knew the speaker taught at a faculty of law, I was concerned that I had unknowingly walked into a talk directed at law students and that I should leave while I still had a chance. Luckily I stayed and learned about network capacity and the hidden costs of the internet. Most of the students and faculty present were from Communications or Media Studies. However, these issues have huge implications for Information Professionals such as librarians and I wish some of my fellow SIS students had attended.

It is fascinating to think of how fast the internet evolves and one of Chris Marsden’s points was the difficulty of Internet Service Providers to predict the changes in consumer needs and wants. Originally the internet was primarily text based and therefore basic internet service was more than adequate. However, with arrival of Napster, consumers demanded much faster network capacity (do you remember how exciting it was when a song took less than twenty minutes to download?). Now consumers want to upload photos and stream videos to their hearts’ content which requires extremely fast networks but they don`t want to pay more than they did for the basic service. The most alarming concept for me as an information professional is the idea of price scaling which means that network providers could charge more for different types of service (websites with more applications). In a tech-based society where so much information is shared on the web, especially through Web 2.0 technologies, having network services with differentiating prices would reinforce a tier-society of those who could access online information and those who could not. From Chris Marsden’s talk, I took away the idea that since network providers are companies seeking to make a profit, as librarians, we must fight to keep the information highway open to everyone by lobbying for Net Neutrality and for striving to keep our users information and technology literate through open technology in the library and programs like workshops that users to develop the knowledge and skills crucial for their advancement in our internet-based society.

Chris Marsden also took the opportunity to promote his upcoming book on the same subject as his talk Net Neutrality: towards a co-regulatory solution The book is not yet available in print but while waiting you can also pick up Chris’ previous publications Regulating the global information society (2000) and Codifying cyberspace : communications self-regulation in the age of Internet convergence (2008). I cannot say that I completely agreed with everything that he said on the topic of Net Neutrality but he is incredibly knowledgeable man and I count myself fortunate that I could attend this talk. Thank you Media@McGill for hosting this great speaker! In the future I will consult their list of events with greater interest.

Advice on how to get a part-time job while completing a MLIS January 16, 2010

You asked me for advice on how to find a part-time job in libraries while completing an MLIS and here it is! I discussed in a previous blog post How Valuable is Library Experience to MLIS student? the advantages of gaining important experience while still in school. I hope the advice from that post along with the tips listed here will be useful for those of you confident enough to take on both studies and a job. Good luck!

Talk to people about your job search

This may seem extremely self-explanatory but I cannot emphasize the importance of discussing your job search with other people. This begins with other students in your classes who perhaps already have a part-time job and know that their boss is looking to hire more staff. This also includes your professors who might need students as research assistants or know of other job possibilities. Even though working as a research assistant is not specific library experience, it will demonstrate that you have strong research skills, which looks great on a librarian’s C.V.!

Talk about your passions

If you are passionate about a particular area of librarianship, let people know! If you can establish your reputation as being an expert in an area then people will want to tell you about available positions that would interest to you. This is how I got my job at the Montreal Children’s Library last year. I am so obsessed with children’s literature and everyone in my program knew that about me from almost Day 1 of the program. When a paid part-time position at the Children’s Library was advertised, I had several people email me with the information encouraging me to apply for the job saying that it sounded perfect for me.

Subscribe to Job ListServs

McGill’s School of Information Studies has an extremely active Job ListServ for students and graduates. Every week I receive emails regarding job postings for libraries looking to hire. Although most of these postings are for full-time positions for which I am not yet eligible, from time to time, we do receive part-time job postings that are suitable for students. Some people wait until they are closer to graduating before subscribing to the Job ListServ because they figure that the job postings are all addressed to candidates who already have obtained their MLIS, This is a mistake because in the meantime they are missing out on part-time postings that would provide them with valuable experience.

Get Involved

Employers are impressed with students who are involved in extra-curricular activities. Getting involved in various associations and the planning of events also allows you to meet a larger circle of professionals who could become valuable contacts. My job at Westmount Public Library is a perfect example of how getting involved is the best way to impress employers and find a job. Last year, I applied for a part-time position at the library and although I thought I’d put together a convincing cover letter and professional-looking C.V., I lost hope when I didn’t get called for an interview even after I performed a “friendly follow-up call”. However, things changed in my favour when I co-organized Web 2.You 2009, a conference on the implications of Web 2.0 technologies in libraries, and the entire professional staff of Westmount attended the event. My boss remembered my application and at lunch time asked me to sit down and talk with her. Although I had an official interview afterward, I know that our lunch time discussion at the conference was the real interview and that I impressed my boss by being having organized of such a successful event.

Attend Job talks and Career Fairs

The most obvious place to find a job is at a Career Fair. However, it is not as easy as it seems. You must know how to talk to the right people and to be able to sell yourself a necessary asset to their library. Last year, at the McGill Career Fair very few of the libraries there actually had vacant positions to fill, but if you managed to impress the right person, it was well worth the exhausting afternoon of going around introducing yourself to everyone you met. It was at the Career Fair last March that I met Maya, a liaison librarian from McGill’s Education Library, and we talked about my previous experience working with teachers. Although there was no open position at the Education Library at the time, she thought that I would be a great addition to their team and I was hired on in September to work at the Reference Desk.

Never be afraid to sell yourself

If you want to be hired, people need to know what you have accomplished in the past as well as your strong qualities. Even if you are by nature a humble person, learn to speak up about your strengths! In this economy it is unlikely that anyone simply hand you a job on a silver platter. You will have to demonstrate that you are the best candidate for the position, so learn to speak with confidence about why you should be hired!

Good luck, I hope this is useful!

Web 2.You 2010 January 6, 2010

I have the honour this year of co-organizing the 3rd annual Web 2.You conference. Web 2.You brings together information professionals and MLIS students for a day of learning and exchange on the implications of Web 2.0
technologies in professional information settings. This event was originally organized in 2008 by Amy Buckland and Jan Dawson who, at the time, were both MLIS II students at McGill University. The first conference was a huge success with speakers like Jessamyn West and John Dupuis. One MLIS I student who attended of this first conference, Graham Lavender, was inspired by John Dupuis’s presentation to start a blog and went on to co-organize Web 2.You 2009 the following year. Well, this year it is my turn, luckily with Adrienne Smith, a fantastic MLIS I student, at my side, and we have had quite a learning experience! Organizing a conference is hard work! From finding speakers, to securing a venue, to applying for grants, this year’s organization has been full of ups and downs. This is why I am SO proud to announce that registration has now begun and we have an amazing line up of speaker: Michael Porter, Jenica Rogers, Graham Lavender (I am aware that this leaves me open to accusations of favouritism) and a panel discussion group featuring Michael Lenczner, Patrick Lozeau and Michele Ann Jenkins.

Web 2.You 2010 will take place on February 5th 2010 at McGill University’s Thomson House. I hope to see as many of you there as possible!

For more information on the event, our speakers, or registration, visit the Web 2.You Wiki.

Published in ABQLA December Bulletin! January 4, 2010

I was extremely excited today to receive in the mail my new ABQLA Bulletin. As I’ve mentioned, I am the president of the McGill Student Chapter of the ABQLA (Association des Bibliothèques du Québec/Quebec Library Association) and, in September, I was asked to write a contribution to the next bulletin. My article is entitled “Why Get Involved?” and it focuses on the importance of students and informational professionals getting involved in extra-curricular activities such as the organization of social events and professional development opportunities. I wrote this text months ago and I’m so excited to see it published! You can access the PDF version of the Bulletin from the ABQLA’s website.

How valuable is library experience to MLIS students? December 7, 2009

Prior to starting at McGill’s School of Information Studies I had no experience working in a library. When I began my studies, I realized that a lot of my fellow classmates had worked in a variety of positions either at public or academic libraries and I was concerned that their experience would put them at an advantage when we applied for jobs after our graduation. Therefore, in October of 2008, I jumped at the opportunity to work as a librarian assistant at La Bibliothèque des Jeunes de Montréal. I love children’s literature and I have lots of experience with kids so I figured that this position would provide me with a great way to get my foot in the door and gain exposure to working in a library. This past summer, I worked at a library at Environment Canada which allowed me to get a feel for what it is like to work for Canada’s Federal Government. Now, at the same time that I am completing my second year of my MLIS, I am working part-time at both McGill’s Education Library and at the Westmount Public Library.

I cannot stress how much I have appreciated my work experience in all of these libraries. Although I have perhaps not dedicated as much time to my school work as some of my classmates, I feel that my real-life work experience is more valuable than getting straight As. In fact, one of my early memories of McGill’s SIS program was being told by our program director that our marks tend not matter when we are applying for jobs. What does matter is that we can demonstrate that we are the best possible candidate for the position. The skills that I have acquired while working on various library projects and while interacting with patrons will hopefully demonstrate my potential to work as a professional librarian.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when working part-time at libraries during MLIS studies is that you can always enrich your experience by asking your supervisor to get more involved. Some people tend to go to work, do their job and then rush to get home. This has never been part of my work ethic, I’m always trying to see what else I can do or I ask my supervisors for additional projects. For example, although I am part-time at Westmount Public Library’s circulation desk, I have also created book displays, hosted the readers-to-readers teen book club, participated in activities like the recent tree-trimming, and written several book reviews on the library’s catalogue. Taking initiatives like these demonstrates my high level of motivation and has provided me with additional learning experiences.

Many first-year MLIS students that I spoke with this fall were hesitant to try and find a part-time job during their studies. It is true that the amount of work in the first semester is daunting and there can be a huge learning curve that requires lots of extra time outside of class to study and work on projects. However, I promise that learning to balance school work and a library job is the best possible way to demonstrate to employers your motivation for working in the field. When an employer looks at a C.V. and sees that you have not only attended school but that you were also working in a library, it shows that you possess much valued ambition and this will help you find a job after graduation more quickly than your classmates who have done nothing but study for two years.

So start networking and get your email address on library job listservs in order to find out about potential positions of interest to you! Good luck and have fun gaining experience at a library, I’m convinced that they are the best places to work!

Job Loyalty- a thing of the past? November 29, 2009

In the past few weeks, I have heard two guest speakers at McGill’s School of Information Studies who have gotten me thinking about the idea of organizational loyalty. Some people of a certain generation (usually grandparents) boast of their life-time dedication to a particular employer/organization. We hear about “30 years of loyal service” and companies creating loyalty incentives to hold on to experienced workers. I actually work with a library assistant who has been at McGill Libraries for 40 years. In her case, the library is trying to offer her a package to get her to leave but she doesn’t want to, she enjoys her job too much! However, it is obvious to me that less and less people, especially professionals, are interested in the idea of being loyal to a single company for too long and certainly not for their whole careers.

One perspective that often keeps people at the same job over time is that it feels kind of cheap to pick up and leave an organization after an employer dedicates time and resources into an employee’s professional development. It’s almost like a slap in the face to that employer for the employee to then take elsewhere their valuable experience and skills learned.

One guest speaker told us how she left her job where she was becoming increasingly unhappy even after her employer had paid to send her to a conference and had big projects for her in the organization. She wanted to stay on good terms with her employer because they had developed a friendship but, understandably, he took it hard when she told him she was leaving. Tough situation! Although hopefully this seems like a no-brainer to most people, if you are unhappy at a job then it’s in your best interests to find another job where you will be happy.

However, a different perspective that our second guest speaker brought up is the idea of never staying too long at one organization even if you are happy with your job. This approach is a bit more difficult to appreciate and I’m sure it will leave people divided. Our guest speaker explained that although she loved and was very comfortable at one library where she worked for 19 years, she felt that she stayed there too long. Her argument was that as professionals we want to continually grow and learn new things which becomes difficult when we grow too comfortable with the status quo at one particular workplace.

We might attribute this to different personality-types. Some people love and need stability in their lives, whereas other people crave adventure and new experiences. I enjoy stability but I can appreciate the need for change in order to stimulate continual professional and personal growth. When I left my job as educational and institutional representative at La Maison Anglaise et Internationale, I had been working there for 4 years. I liked my job, my boss, and my colleagues but I knew that I did not want to stay there forever and coming back to school to do a MLIS seemed like the right choice. I do not regret for one second this change and I know that I am growing more as a person by gaining new knowledge and experiences.

What about you? Can you envision yourself staying loyal to one organization for 10, 20, 30 years? Also, from an employer’s perspective, what type of incentives could you offer to employees who you value and want to retain?