My quest for graduate schools is, yet again, proving to be a challenge. Preservation and Conservation of Texts falls into the same category as Archives Management, and every program wants to make me a leader in the field of records management.
I do not want to be a leader. I have never wanted to be a leader. It's work and it involves administrative stuff. No. Really. But thanks for the opportunity.
I missed a phone interview yesterday with a woman who may just have every qualification that I want to have (including the part about working to restore and repair library bits). There is frustration, and there is time.
It is no longer a story of discovering my life's goals and interests. It is story of what skills need to be developed, what experiences gained, what understanding and resources discovered in order to achieve those goals and live a life that is involved and communicative and active and creative.
Libraries exist in several planes: the physical collection of materials - of books and artwork and photographs and maps and directories; the physical catalog of information that is stored and accessible in that physical collection - Librarians and card catalogs; the aether based collection of materials - digitized works of literature, reference works and artworks; and the aether based catalog of information; and the physical and aether presences of the library itself - the places where people go, the destination.
All of these presences and functions relate to the function of Library in community as a resource to meet immediate needs (entertainment, job seeking, completion of assignments, paying bills) and as it meets longer term community needs, needs that relate to the definition of a community, to its legitimacy in the larger world, to the survival of a community in times of need and emergency whether it such an emergency is caused by nature or humanity.
My personal goal is to become a person who is a trained academic librarian, and a trained bookbinder and a trained restorer and repairer of books and other texts. Librarians provide support to communities in chaos, and yet there are few who provide support to them.
Time spent behind the front desks at various government supported institutions, universities and libraries, taught me that people have the most incredibly varied sets of questions. I have witnessed the difference between a question that can be only partially answered by the person behind the desk, and one that can be fully answered. That difference usually lies in the training and abilities of the person behind the desk. Administrative encouragement also plays a large role.
I do not believe that I would have learned to be as brave and persistent in following up on questions were it not for my supervisor at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln who believed that every person who called, even the people who called by mistake, had valid questions and those questions ought to be answered if we could. If we could not, we had the responsibility to get that person as close to an answer as possible. It was a tremendous lesson in public service. It meant that I interacted with people for longer as I learned what they were asking, what I could do to help them. It meant that I began to see conversations as more than small talk. I learned to understand the nature of questions.
At the Bennett Martin Branch of the Lincoln City Library, I witnessed the power of parsing questions into easily (or at least directly) answerable segments. That was the place that taught me about the power of loving your job. I have never worked in an environment that was so administratively negative or micromanagerial in my life. I have never seen such talented and dedicated and competent people so disregarded and marginalized. I had never been witness to the destruction of departments and collections and careers.
And yet, I loved my job. I was happy there. The three years that I worked as a shelver, and the 12 or so months that I was employed as a temporary Library Assistant II changed my life. I respected and enjoyed my co-workers. That was the place that showed me the person I want to be. I realized that I would not be able to be that person, with that set of skills, without further training and that would only be found in graduate school.
A short stint in the Binding Department of UNL's Love Library, a history of making leaded glass windows, jobs making pizza and sandwiches, work dissecting thistle heads and working on thistle crew, reading the Ink Trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the One Book, One Lincoln selection from 2009, The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, as well as a life long love and pursuit of ceramics and knitting and crochet and cooking: these are my inspiration and motivation to learn bookbinding and book preservation. A sense of the world as my home, and my place in it as requiring community involvement leads me to seek out an academic foundation in the history of libraries and their destruction and restoration and repair. It also leads me to build a history of volunteerism and to pursue a career in being present where libraries are damaged by human and natural causes. To be an aid to recovery and survival with two competent hands, a good sense of humor, and an even better sense of the place of library in the world and in human history.
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