Other Blogs About Academic Librarianship

This week's assignment was to find a blog related to my area of interest. Since I am wanting to learn more about academic librarians and what they do on a daily basis, this is what I decided to search for. I used Google blogs: http://blogsearch.google.com/. The first search terms that I used were "academic libraries" and "academic librarian duties", which surprisingly did not provide me with what I was searching for. The former gave me specific blogs created by colleges and universities. The latter listed job postings. I was looking for something more personal dealing with the experiences of actual academic librarians. I then decided to use just plain old "academic librarians" which lead me to finding two wonderful blogs.

My "academic librarians" search brought me to ACRLog: http://acrlog.org/. This is a blog maintained by ACRL which is an acronym for Association of College and Research Libraries. The blog covers any topic of interest concerning academic and research libraries. This blog actually has a list of categories. The categories that caught my immediate attention were "First Year Academic Librarian Experience" and "Library Careers." These categories contain postings about real-life experiences working in an academic library, issues that can be encountered, and the joys. One posting titled Onellums’s last FYALE post, short and sweet, was written by Olivia Nellums after completing her first year as an academic librarian. Her blog contains lists of qualities that librarians should have, some hard lessons learned, and her future goals. Here is Ms. Nellums' list on hard lessons learned:

Then I thought of some more personal advice I would give (that I learned the hard way):

1) A workplace is a political minefield. Best do your homework before putting your foot in it.
2) It is better to be flexible than cavalier. Youth and energy are not endearing to everyone.
3) Leave your desk to have human conversations every once in a while. Librarians are perhaps more prone to use email and other text-based media, but I cannot count the number of times a solution has been more forthcoming when I approached people directly. (Nellums, 2009)

She ends her reflections with a link to her personal blog about her career as a community college librarian, which leads to my second great blog finding. Without much ado, I invite you to follow The Librarian's Commute: http://librarianscommute.blogspot.com/.

The Librarian's Commute is Olivia Nellums' personal reflections and experiences while working in a community college library. This blog is fascinating to me because I always assumed that the community college library was very similar to a college or university library. However, Ms. Nellums describes it as a cross between a public and academic library in that you can deal with the highly educated one day and the illiterate the next. Also, I learned from her that some schools are now adding mandatory courses to their undergraduate curriculum about using the library and conducting research. These courses are taught by librarians, last a full semester, and serve as credit towards the student's degree. All of her blogs are short and sweet and have various themes from how to reach out to your patrons to the new technology that her library is using and the response to that technology. Each post ends with some exquisite philosophical thought about her work. In Is Using the Library Like Cleaning the Bathroom?, Ms. Nellums talks about motivation and procrastination and ends with:

To return to the title of this post, it's very easy for librarians and regular users to forget that many students turn away from the library because they perceive using it to be a chore. This is worth keeping in mind when we try to win them over. (Nellums, 2010)

Both blogs have RSS feeds, so I have already subscribed to them.

References

Nellums, O. (2009). Onellums’s last FYALE post, short and sweet.http://acrlog.org/2009/07/02/onellumss-last-fyale-post-short-and-sweet/

Nellums, O. (2010). Is using the library like cleaning the bathroom http://librarianscommute.blogspot.com/2010/01/is-using-library-like-cleaning-bathroom.html