ain't no party like a librarian party

I am participating in the Library Day in the Life Project. Library Day in the Life is aproject in which the community shares a day (or week) of their Library life. I am a recent MLIS graduate and a future (hopefully) librarian/archivist. I am one of those archivists that enjoys doing outreach and helping out the public. I would love to become a reference archivist someday for special collections or a museum. 

Since I am still in that limbo-rut called “Job Searching” I don’t really have any stories to share about spending time in a library. Living in Los Angeles I feel downright spoiled about the number of public libraries within walking distance or a short drive from me (Los Angeles Public Library, County of Los Angeles, Santa Monica Public!). 

This week I visited two of my favorite research libraries: UCLA’s Young Research Library on Tuesday (honestly just to print out a job application since I don’t have access to a printer these days) and the beautiful, pristine William H. Hannon Library located on Loyola Marymount University’s campus on Monday. The visit to LMU was also to conduct an informational interview with the Head of Archives and Special Collections. I was privileged to talk to an amazing department head who is open to sharing her perspective with me, offer me great advice, and also sympathize with my current state of underemployment. 

These days I mainly spend applying for jobs, trying to arrange informational interviews, catching up on my reading list (at last) and working at my oftentimes hellish and exhausting part-time retail job and volunteering at an art museum doing archival processing and records management of art exhibition records. Both jobs allow me to exercise the skills I have learned in library school (reference, outreach, archival processing, using content management systems) but I am still waiting for that first job where I can really flex my information professional muscles. In the meantime, I know it takes a long time to find a job (especially in this economy, and especially in California) and I know that I need to be patient, persistent, keep busy (hence the volunteer position and part-time retail job), and be optimistic that someday I will get a phone call for an interview which will lead to my First Real Library/Archives Job.