Librarian's Day at the Bristol Renaissance Faire

Was it Librarian's Day at the Bristol Renaissance Faire on Saturday, August 6? Bonnie and I went with our friends Nancy and Glenn. That's four librarians. We parted for a while, and Glenn later reported seeing three librarians that he knew from the suburbs of Chicago. At home in the evening I verified another wearing a T-shirt stating "librarian" in a photo of the Moonie show. I wonder how many more there were.

So, what draws librarians to a Renaissance fair? My first thought is fantasy. We read lots of books that take us to other worlds and enjoy going beyond the pages for a bit of magic and make-believe. What better place than the BRF? The performers, vendors, and much of the paying public are decked out as lords and ladies, knights, vikings, monks, witches, wizards, minstrels, and peasants from the time of Queen Elizabeth I. You also get a stray Klingon or hobbit, but no one seems to mind the disconnect. People speak like Shakespeare and pledge their loyalty to the queen. They even get up on horses and joust. What librarian would not want to be a part of the fun?

Knowing librarians, they are probably also drawn by the food and drink. Turkey legs, tempura, crepes, calzones, shepherd's pie, garlic mushrooms, fruit ices, and many confections are sale, as are all sorts of wines, beers, teas, and soft drinks. Servings are often good for sharing so you may try several dishes. I never go away hungry.

What I used to go for was the music. There used to be half a dozen stages at which musicians traded places every half hour. Madrigal singers wandered the fair. There was also a long table loaded with all sorts of recorders, crumhorms, lutes, whistles, and such under shady trees; musicians jammed all day. I would often spend most of my day listening to dance music and folk songs. That all seems to be gone, and I attend less regularly.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a shop with a great selection of early music compact discs, many of which were imported from the United Kingdom. There were entire shelves devoted to music of particular countries, periods, and instruments. I purchased discs on madrigals and consort music. The shop also had a big selection of board games based on events from history. Medici anyone? How about Armada?

Summer afternoons at the BRF can be rather hot, but there are many shady trees. Even the stands at the jousting field now have canopies. Cold drinks are readily available. With just the slightest breeze, it is a fine place to be.

Tough Times: Thoughts on the Library Job Market from a Department Head Who Just Hired a Reference Librarian

Library funding news has been bleak for the last couple of years. Municipal budgets are flat or declining, and loss of funding from state governments is hitting all types of libraries particularly hard. Not many full time library positions are being offered on the job lines. Knowing all of this, I was still surprised by the huge response to the posting of a full time reference librarian's position at my library. In the past, we had never gotten more than about forty applicants for a job that we posted, and even then a third of the job seekers were people from other fields thinking that they could bypass the requirements for library training and experience. After I posted our position in April, I received seventy-eight applications with resumes from fully qualified librarians or library students close to qualifying.

Reading through over seventy letters (a few foolish applicants failed to send cover letters), I got a look into the very deep pool of library talent that is currently available for hire. Many qualified, experienced, and creative librarians are currently either unemployed or under-employed. From my reading of the letters and resumes, I sense that under-employed is the new norm for young librarians. Quite a few have been working in part time library positions for several years, perhaps supplementing that employment with work at restaurants, discount stores, and such. Many have been volunteering at libraries or social services agencies that they feel translate into relevant experience. A fortunate few are making ends meet with two part time library jobs. Many get glowing references from employers who wish they could give them full time hours. New graduates from library school have these now experienced librarians competing for the same few jobs.

While I did not sense despair from the letters, there seemed to be a heightened urgency to get a library job that actually paid a living wage. The applicants are ready to work. Several expressed that the open position was just what they had been seeking – a position that sparked their imagination. They were sure that they were perfect for the job. I am sure that many of them would have done well. My first call folder was rather thick.

It always stings not to get a job for which you are qualified and enamored. Nothing I can write here can lessen that sting for the many hopeful applicants that did not even get an interview. At this point all the applicants know the outcome, for I did contact them to announce the position was filled.

A second round of surprises came after my carefully worded closing letters. Around a dozen applicants thanked me for letting them know that the job was filled. While the news was not good for them, it was an acknowledgment of their offering themselves to my library and ended any doubt that they had as to their status in the process. Another handful of applicants asked me through email or even by phone call what they had lacked to be considered. Here I answered carefully, saying what I had sought (a reiteration of the job announcement) instead of dissecting what the candidates lacked. They could then make their own analysis. By doing this, a potentially awkward question (which I would not deny them) became a more positive conversation.

I have spent weeks thinking about the experience and have a few observations for people applying for jobs.

1. Send a well-written cover letter of no more than three paragraphs that covers about three quarters of a page. Address how you meet the job criteria. Don't stray into your irrelevant (to the job) interests and activities. Be positive without boasting.

2. If you are sending cover letters and resumes by email (which most people do), be very careful to send the right ones specific to the job for which you are applying. Sending letters addressed to other parties does not engender any confidence in your ability to do good work. If you are applying to a public library, do not state on your resume that your objective is to work in a government archive. This seems pretty obvious, but I saw six or seven cases of incompatible objectives.

3. For the benefit of the prospective employer, who might be collecting Word documents or PDFs in a folder, put your name in the document name. It saves the employer from having to rename dozens of documents named "resume."

4. If sending paper letter and resume, be sure to include your email address so the prospective employer can quickly verify that it was received. Not including an email makes you seem out of touch.

5. PDFs often look better when opened by the prospective employer, whose Microsoft Word might have different margins than the applicant's Microsoft Word.

6. Have patience. Looking through applications and setting up interviews takes time. Calling or emailing the prospective employer to ask when your interview will be the moment the application period ends will not portray you as the calm and confident candidate that the employer seeks.

Here are a few thoughts for the profession as a whole.

1. This is not the time to push prospective librarians to attend library school. Only those people who know the current conditions and who either have a job already lined up or are willing to risk spending a few years under-employed should start working for a degree.

2. Library schools need to scale back to survive. If too many degrees are issued causing an overabundance of librarians, the news will eventually reach prospective future students and registrations will fall.

3. Finding satisfying non-traditional jobs for current and future library students is also needed.

Thousands of librarians are meeting at the annual conference of the American Library Association this week in Washington, D.C. I suspect there will be many there seeking jobs. I hope to read how well they did finding them and how the issue of jobs for librarians is address at the conference.

This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson

Having been one of the librarians interviewed for this book, I was eager to read it. I was hoping to like it and was not disappointed.

In a time of economic stress, when librarians are needed more than ever, yet library budgets are being cut, Marilyn Johnson speaks out in our behalf in her forthcoming book This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. Her message to anyone who will listen is that librarians are the "authors of opportunity." She sums up her assessment of librarians near the end of the book thus:

It didn't matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I'm sure it didn't matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I need to know ...

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil Servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

While Johnson extols the virtues of the profession, she points out that it has some members that resist change, usually trying to preserve services and procedures that served well in the past. She also repeats the often heard cry that librarians fail to promote themselves well in our highly contentious world. Her praises, however, greatly overshadow her criticisms. She believes that most librarians knock themselves out serving their clients regardless of pay, institutional support, or appreciation from society at large.

In Johnson's previous book Dead Beat, she attended professional conferences and interviewed leading obituary writers. She immersed herself in the obit world, visiting newspapers and archives in many places. In This Book Is Overdue, she takes a similar approach. She attended the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington in 2007 and select regional conferences, and she visited libraries across the country to learn how they were changing. She even went to Italy to attend the graduation of St. John's University library program for students from developing nations. A look at the Acknowledgments in the back of the book verifies that she met a great variety of librarians during her research.

My favorite chapters tell about the Connecticut Four filing a legal challenge to the national security letter that was issued to their library under the U.S. Patriot Act and about the St. John's University program for international students mentioned above. I also enjoyed the stories about the relationships between librarians and IT staff, about blogging librarians, about Radical Reference providing information to protesters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, about librarians in Second Life, about services to authors at New York Public Library, and about the opening of the new Darien (Connecticut) Library.

Having been one of the librarians interviewed for this book, I was eager to read it. I was hoping to like it and was not disappointed. I enjoyed reading about people I know and subjects about which I have firm opinions, even when I do not totally agree with Johnson. An outside opinion is good to have. She is always fair and reports multiple sides of issues. Many librarians will want to read this long anticipated book which publishes in February 2010.

Johnson, Marilyn. This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. HarperCollins, February 2010. ISBN 9780061431609

Juliette Morgan, Librarian for Racial Equality

In a sidebar in the book that I reviewed yesterday, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, Phillip Hoose briefly tells about white support for the boycott of the Montgomery buses by African Americans in 1955 and 1956. He devotes two paragraphs to librarian Juliette Morgan, who was terrorized by white supremacists after her letter stating her admiration for blacks who stood up against repression ran in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper. Hoose says that after months of death threats and constant harassment through the night, she committed suicide.

Wanting to know more, I found "Juliette Hampton Morgan: A White Woman Who Understood" on the website Teaching Tolerance, A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This article tells how Morgan, a woman with deep Southern roots, began calling for an end to Jim Crow laws in 1939, sixteen years before the boycott. For years she wrote letters to the Montgomery Advertiser and participated in interracial prayer groups. For her outspoken stand, she lost jobs, lost friends, and became estranged from her family. Despite her isolation, the Carnegie Library hired her as a reference librarian. When her letter in support of the boycott ran in the newspaper, the city's mayor demand that she be fired, but the library refused, even when the mayor withheld library funding.

According my calendar calculations, Morgan survived through the boycott and retained her job past the crisis, but the strain must have taken its toll. Interracial violence continued in the city for years after the boycott. Severely depressed, she resigned from the library on July 15, 1957. Her mother found a bottle of sleeping pills beside her body the next morning.

The Reverend Martin Luther King mentioned Morgan in his book Stride Toward Freedom, and she has been remembered with induction into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. We need a librarian's hall of fame to remember brave librarians, such as Morgan and Judith Krug.

That Book Woman by Heather Henson with Pictures by David Small

Last week in the Chicago Tribune book section, which has gotten smaller with the redesign, I noticed a children's book that I had not seen called That Book Woman. Always enjoying a good librarian story, I borrowed a copy of the nicely illustrated book have read it a couple of times.

Through the voice of a boy who helps his father on their dirt poor, rocky, and steep Appalachian farm, Heather Henson tells about the surprise of getting books delivered by a librarian on a horse. Aimed at five to eight year olds, this picture book depicts the true story of the Pack Horse Librarians who delivered books to remote corners of Kentucky during the Great Depression. A note at the end of the book tells that these dedicated librarians were men and women who would ride through nearly any weather to get books into the hands of readers. You have to like a story like that!

More libraries should get this sweet book.

Henson, Heather. That Book Woman. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2008. ISBN 9781416908128