Which Side Are You On?

Posted February 18, 2019 by Megan Ondricek

Do holidays completely de-rail anyone else’s week, or is it just me? One of the harsh realizations I have had as a mom is that holidays and celebrations all come down to you. All those fun and magical things you expect to happen on special occasions have to be planned, shopped for, carried out, and cleaned up by somebody, and that somebody (in my family) is me. So thanks to Valentine’s Day (or week, as it felt like), I’ll be playing catch-up this weekend.

I’ve realized something interesting about the work I’m doing this semester and about the library profession as a whole. My metadata class and my reference/instruction internship are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of librarianship. Metadata belongs on the “technical services” end, along with cataloging, circulation, inter-library loan, database management, etc. This side is known for its back-end, back-room work and lesser degree of human interaction. My internship belongs on the more public facing end, with reference, instruction, outreach, etc. where a much higher degree of human interaction is expected and required. It is interesting to see how this general division exists and how I could probably sort each of my Simmons classes into one side or the other. At the Fairfield University library, this division is made even more explicit by a physical separation of the two “sides:” all the offices and work spaces for technical services folks are on one side of the building, while all the reference, instruction, and outreach librarians live on the other side of the building!

To be clear, these two sides of librarianship do NOT need to be mutually exclusive. There are plenty of places where boundaries are fuzzy and the librarians wear many hats. I have worked in a small academic library where my job as a library assistant was a good mix of both. But even there, we had a dedicated cataloging person who almost never interacted with patrons and a reference/instruction person who was very much the “public face” of the library. It’s probably worth thinking about which side you might be more interested in and suited for, because as I noted in my last post, we each have to take responsibility for creating our own specialized librarian identities. I am loving my internship so far and if I decide to pursue this route toward instruction and reference, I wonder if I’ll ever really need or use anything from my metadata class (which is very interesting and instructive nonetheless). It’s increasingly beginning to seem like I can’t have both. So which side of the library do I want to live on?