Officially a librarian

No postings for sometime.  I have been busy getting used to a new position as an Acquisitions Librarian.  I am enjoying the new position and have been getting used to the new procedures and a new subject .  There is plenty of work to do organizing the files and an emphasis on eBooks that is exciting.   Soon I will get to start using Koha for acquisition records.  It should be interesting.

Busy, intersting, summer of change

The summer has been hot, busy and full of changes.  My daughter started middle school.  I learned how to keep student workers busy ( but I was grateful they decided to leave early).  There were office moves and  renovations.   Jobs that changed, jobs applied for and huge changes in the future.  The good has outweighed the bad but I'm ready for fall, cooler temperatures and a chance to get used to a new routine.

HTML, Supervising and other things

So I have been working on HTML and creating work for student workers.  You would think that would be easy, the student workers not necessarily the HTML but it is more difficult than I expected.

Summer Time

So the summer has unofficially started.   My schedule changes so I spend more time in the archive and less time at the library with reserves.  I'm off to a great start.  It only took a week for me to process the reserves.

The final boxes arrived and the collection I am processing is now complete.  I have applied the final labels and updated the latest version of the finding aid. 

I am also learning more about hiring students and saving the right projects for them to work on.  For our second student I actually did most of the work - I need to be sure that makes it on my review.  Now if only I could figure out how to make myself a good job prospect.  I had lunch with friends from my PPOE and it was great.  They assured me that I had done a good job in the past.

The answer is no

Well, apparently it does not matter what I feel my greatest strengths or weaknesses are.  Perhaps, I do need to give up on this dream.  I can not leave the area and that is a huge problem. 

Puzzles

So I guess one of my greatest strengths is that I have a good deal of perseverance and am a good problem solver.  The problem might be to come up with a faster way to create an EAD encoded Finding Aid or to figure out why an instructor says a reading originally uploaded before my time is incorrect.  But I will persevere until I have the best possible answer.

Other note -- processing an addendum to an existing collection -- reference material includes pictures of Johnny Depp -- conclusion counting over 1000 new pieces of material is a little boring but not all bad.

Trying for improvement

So the current job or jobs since it is a split position are OK.  It lacks the perceived prestige of requiring an MLIS and also the issue that the current economy is starting to squeeze the family budget dry.  So I am passively looking for positions, mostly on campus  This has caused me to wonder what I do well.  There is nothing like applying for positions to make you feel unqualified.  They don't exactly want to give a position to a person who doesn't know something now but knows they could quickly pick it up on the job.  And job interviews just are awful when you are a quiet type.   So now I need to figure out what I can actually do and when does being a little familiar with HTML or EAD actually mean something.  Because I don't want this decision to try out the world of libraries to have been the wrong choice.