Steven M. Cohen, of the ad-laden but useful Library Stuff, points to a recent post about the importance of public speaking skills for librarians at the elegant (and eloquent) Caveat Lector. I didn’t get to attend the GSLIS shindig that Kate Marek organized for people to show off their work (no link because I can’t find one in the uninformative GSLIS Student Information Center), but I know there are people doing smart stuff out there. Drop a comment or a line (see e-mail address in previous post, and don’t forget to take out the spaces) and tell us about it. Or, if you don’t feel you’re doing cool stuff, what would you like to be doing? Do you think our courses are giving us opportunities to prepare for giving 20-25 minute presentations? No? Gosh, neither do I. Then again, is that the school’s responsibility or ours? What can we do? All ideas welcome.
A note on privacy: My name is plastered all over this project, or at any rate it’s pretty darned easy to track it to me. If you want to make comments, via Blogger (and yes, despite my devotion to the open source movement, I am using Blogger, spawn of that devilish Google — call it a shortage of energy and cash), you can do so anonymously. If you e-mail me, tell me whether you’d be willing to be quoted and to what extent, if any, you’d like to be identified. Of course, if someone really wanted to dig up whatever you may have said at some point out in the digital world, she probably could — but unless you’re planning to run for office or work for the CIA, I kind of doubt anyone will want to look that hard.
Yikes, are you really up posting at 4A? Well, that LJ article is enough to keep anyone up nights.
I think I may have made a huge mistake by quitting my library job to get the MLS in hopes of advancing my prospects. I probably should have kept the library job and done the MLS part time.
I’m happy to say that I’m not normally up at 4 am–although, as you note, the LJ article doesn’t exactly help one’s insomnia.
I am incredibly grateful that I now have a part-time library job while I’m going to school full-time, since it certainly seems that any library experience is better than none. It sounds as though you at least have had some experience, which can’t hurt.
I’ll be posting some more job resources in the near future. As always, suggestions are welcome.