I have been on leave for most of the past three weeks and my life has been very busy ( as always!) so I have a lot of catching up to do! I'll (quite randomly!) start with Thing 10: my route into librarianship.
I am originally from Belgium, where I obtained my degree in English and Dutch Literature and Linguistics. Like many others, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated. As I had obtained a PGCE during my studies (you can study part time for a PGCE alongside your undergraduate/postgraduate degree course in Belgium) and jobs in education were literally up for grabs, I decided to see how I liked working as a secondary school Teacher. After a three-year stint as an English Teacher in the Netherlands, I decided it was time for a career change and a change of environment. I had never really given much thought to what I really wanted to do, and realised that if I did not do so now, I would end up as a depressed and frustrated teacher in twenty years' time (like so many of my colleagues!) , wondering how I had ended up in that profession and why I had never tried something else.
Whilst searching for jobs in the UK I came across an advertisement for a Graduate Library Trainee post. Somehow I had never considered librarianship as a career before (to be honest, I had never even realised that it was possible to work in a library as something other than a Library Assistant), but the description of the post sparked my interest. I read up on the library and information field, and I visited one of the subject librarians at my local university to gain more insight into the job. I soon became convinced that this was the right career for me. After applying for several graduate trainee posts and attending numerous interviews, I was thrilled to be offered the Graduate Trainee post at the University of Surrey.
During my trainee year, I gained tremendous insight into how an academic library operates, as I have been part of every step involved in adding an item to our collection, from the time a book or a journal is ordered until it appears on the shelves or on the website and reaches students and staff. I worked in every department (User Services, Journals and E-Resources, Cataloguing, Acquisitions) and was also able to assist the Academic Liaison Librarians at their information literacy sessions, attend meetings and work on the Library website. Everyone at the University of Surrey has been very helpful and supportive. I especially appreciate the flexibility of the traineeship programme. As my interest lies with rare book librarianship, I was given the opportunity to catalogue a few 18th and 19th century books, and I arranged to work at the EH Shepard Archive (which is housed in our library) one morning every week to learn more about preservation and to gain experience of handling old and valuable material. I have also attended several library visits, training sessions and CILIP events, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed.
So what’s next? I am staying on at the University of Surrey as a part time Library Assistant, and I am going on to UCL to study fulltime for an MA in Library and Information Studies, where I will focus on rare book librarianship. I am very much looking forward to it, although I am a bit apprehensive about returning to university after four years! I think that studying for a vocational qualification will be very different from my experience when studying literature and linguistics, and I hope I will be able to quickly adjust to this. After obtaining my MA I am hoping to find a job as a rare books cataloguer, but that still seems a very long time away!
