Week 10

My husband has often wondered why my career requires a master’s degree; he strongly believes that I would learn much more from on the job training instead of taking a class. I’ve tried explaining it to him, but he’s quite sure work-based learning makes more sense. I like the idea of work based learning, but only if it’s coupled with traditional classroom based education. The only issue with work based learning is you need to have a rich environment to take advantage of. If the area is based on a county structure a student would have to make sure to go outside of the county to get additional input. I don’t think it would serve very well to focus all learning from the exact same library system. Why flit around to the different branches in my system to learn about collection development when 95% of our material is handpicked by 2 bibliographers who are in the administration wing at the Main library? So I think a hybrid program would be very beneficial, as long as there is a good sized pool of libraries to observe.

It’s not a shock to anyone when they hear that the library is a female heavy occupation and then within the library there are naturally different areas that the male workers gravitate towards. Our Business and Technology department is primarily men, our IT team is primarily men, our “big wigs” are primarily men, and we only have one male children’s librarian in the entire system.  So why aren’t there that many men in the library field? Do they not want to work in a field that is filled with women? Do they not like the idea of the stereotypes that are attached to librarians (male and female)? Or is it simply because the library is a service industry and even worse it’s a service industry where the workers do not reap high monetary rewards? I think it might be a little bit of all of those, but I think the income plays a huge role. Librarians aren’t out to get rich, we go into it knowing that our cost of education does not mean we’re going to make the big bucks and I think that scares men. We’re still in the age when many men feel they need to bring in more money and $45,000(if you’re lucky) is not a high salary to many people.  My friends and family still think I’m crazy that I gave up a career of $60,000+ and decided to become a librarian. They didn’t understand that I wanted to be happy in my career, not make a lot of money.