wildflowersoul (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wildflowersoul) wrote2008-04-28 06:40 am
wildflowersoul) wrote2008-04-28 06:40 am
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I had a weekend!
First, Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay: I was kind of disappointed. Possibly only because I have been looking forward to this movie SO MUCH since a trailer first appeared on the internet. I felt like the humor was less clever and subtle. But then again, I am talking about Harold & Kumar, and I'm not sure how subtle the comedy really was in the first one. Christopher Meloni's cameo should have been longer. But it was funny. Not as funny as Strange Wilderness.
Second, Saturday was packed full with an amazing engagement party for two very lovely people, and a Metafilter meetup that was tons of fun. Meeting new people is fun! I spent some quality time with Miss T-Po yesterday watching Coupling (the British one), and it was entertaining.
And now, I have a librarian rant. But I'll cut it for you!
Ok, I went to this "Next Generation of Librarians" meeting Friday. It was a meeting of the Law Librarians of New England, and as I previously posted, I was the youngest one there. Which is nice, because the day that I realize I'm markedly not the youngest one at these things is the day that I'll realize I have become old. So I'm not old yet. But they were talking about working with different generations, and it wasn't that bad, but there were moments when they fundamentally did not seem to "get" kids these days.
Point 1- "Millenials never show up on time! They are easily distracted!" This seemed to be the consensus among the boomers shaking their sticks at the kids on their lawn. Almost everyone I know around my age is very hard working and shows up on time. I'm punctual as hell and consider myself borderline late when I show up exactly on time, I'm usually 10-15 minutes early.
Point 2- Complaining about how new librarians are disenchanted with the job market and how they'll just have to settle for their first job and work up from there. I... have a lot to say about this. Now, to be fair, I got my first professional job with a minimal amount of hassle, and it didn't take long. But finding paraprofessional jobs while in library school was a nightmare of epic proportions. While I agree that if you want to stay in a city where the job market for librarians is pretty saturated (Boston, Chicago) you may not be doing exactly what you want to be doing at first, I take huge issue with the amount of scoffing in the room when they were talking about new librarians wanting to make "50 thousand dollars" right away. This is a profession that demands a master's degree for any meaningful advancement, and master's degrees these cost exponentially more money now than they did decades ago when these people went to library school. Oh, and we all have student loans from undergrad to deal with as well. So yes, if you want us to be educated to your standards, we're going to need to make more money when we come out so we can pay back those loans. My student loan burden right now is more than my yearly salary. I'm not even going to get into whether Simmons is worth any money at all, because the more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm less educated about library science than a lot of my non-Simmons peers. But luckily, almost everyone in the Boston area got the same lousy education from Simmons. Also, living in certain metropolitan areas dictates that we need higher pay than people working comparable jobs in areas where it doesn't cost so freaking much to live.
Point 3- Along the same lines as point 2, the speaker said "well, young people who want to get into publishing know that they're going to have to move to New York and live in an apartment with 6 other people and work their way up." I'm sorry, as much as I love librarianism, it does not have the glamour cachet (nor the promise of future crazy richness) that the publishing, movies, and music industries lay claim to. If I wanted the hard-scrabble, work crazy hours and live on ramen lifestyle, there are certainly other careers I'd be just as good at that might make me considerably wealthier some day. But I don't want that lifestyle, and I don't think librarians can rightly compare themselves to such dissimilar industries and expect the same thing from its newcomers.
But for a non-ranty thing, I was talking to a Mefi librarian Saturday night, and he told me about this open-source catalog he's been working on, and it looks pretty sweet. It's called Scriblio, and I'm really interested in seeing how it's been implemented in other libraries. I can't tell just yet if it conveys the level of sophistication that I'd need for my library's purposes. For the whole handful of attorneys who ever use our catalog. But I'm intrigued, and I want to share this with my fellow librarians.
So that's that.
Second, Saturday was packed full with an amazing engagement party for two very lovely people, and a Metafilter meetup that was tons of fun. Meeting new people is fun! I spent some quality time with Miss T-Po yesterday watching Coupling (the British one), and it was entertaining.
And now, I have a librarian rant. But I'll cut it for you!
Ok, I went to this "Next Generation of Librarians" meeting Friday. It was a meeting of the Law Librarians of New England, and as I previously posted, I was the youngest one there. Which is nice, because the day that I realize I'm markedly not the youngest one at these things is the day that I'll realize I have become old. So I'm not old yet. But they were talking about working with different generations, and it wasn't that bad, but there were moments when they fundamentally did not seem to "get" kids these days.
Point 1- "Millenials never show up on time! They are easily distracted!" This seemed to be the consensus among the boomers shaking their sticks at the kids on their lawn. Almost everyone I know around my age is very hard working and shows up on time. I'm punctual as hell and consider myself borderline late when I show up exactly on time, I'm usually 10-15 minutes early.
Point 2- Complaining about how new librarians are disenchanted with the job market and how they'll just have to settle for their first job and work up from there. I... have a lot to say about this. Now, to be fair, I got my first professional job with a minimal amount of hassle, and it didn't take long. But finding paraprofessional jobs while in library school was a nightmare of epic proportions. While I agree that if you want to stay in a city where the job market for librarians is pretty saturated (Boston, Chicago) you may not be doing exactly what you want to be doing at first, I take huge issue with the amount of scoffing in the room when they were talking about new librarians wanting to make "50 thousand dollars" right away. This is a profession that demands a master's degree for any meaningful advancement, and master's degrees these cost exponentially more money now than they did decades ago when these people went to library school. Oh, and we all have student loans from undergrad to deal with as well. So yes, if you want us to be educated to your standards, we're going to need to make more money when we come out so we can pay back those loans. My student loan burden right now is more than my yearly salary. I'm not even going to get into whether Simmons is worth any money at all, because the more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm less educated about library science than a lot of my non-Simmons peers. But luckily, almost everyone in the Boston area got the same lousy education from Simmons. Also, living in certain metropolitan areas dictates that we need higher pay than people working comparable jobs in areas where it doesn't cost so freaking much to live.
Point 3- Along the same lines as point 2, the speaker said "well, young people who want to get into publishing know that they're going to have to move to New York and live in an apartment with 6 other people and work their way up." I'm sorry, as much as I love librarianism, it does not have the glamour cachet (nor the promise of future crazy richness) that the publishing, movies, and music industries lay claim to. If I wanted the hard-scrabble, work crazy hours and live on ramen lifestyle, there are certainly other careers I'd be just as good at that might make me considerably wealthier some day. But I don't want that lifestyle, and I don't think librarians can rightly compare themselves to such dissimilar industries and expect the same thing from its newcomers.
But for a non-ranty thing, I was talking to a Mefi librarian Saturday night, and he told me about this open-source catalog he's been working on, and it looks pretty sweet. It's called Scriblio, and I'm really interested in seeing how it's been implemented in other libraries. I can't tell just yet if it conveys the level of sophistication that I'd need for my library's purposes. For the whole handful of attorneys who ever use our catalog. But I'm intrigued, and I want to share this with my fellow librarians.
So that's that.
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