STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Hey, this is so awesome. I'm always encouraging people to explore librarianship as a career. I've been a librarian in a law firm since I got out of college. I did get an MLS but it's not always necessary. I think if you decide you are interested in the field it is definitely a good idea to get one fairly early on though because you'll earn more money and have more mobility. Lots of employers will offer some tuition reimbursement so it might be a good idea to try to get a job first and then start school.

My undergraduate background was history and art history so that really doesn't matter at all. It gave me a great foundation for doing research and would be helpful if I worked in an art or academic library but your undergraduate degree shouldn't matter at all. Most MLS programs have both basic and field-specific classes (legal and medical research, children's librarianship etc.) plus you'll learn most stuff on the job anyway.

I definitely think it's a good field and being a librarian is absolutely the perfect job for me. My main complaint would be that I didn't really like the graduate program (almost all of them are pretty much practical classes and I would have preferred some more "academic" theory and history sorts of courses) but it was really easy and it was helpful in terms of improving my database skills.

Let me know if you have any questions. I think it would be a good idea to try to figure out what sort of library you would like to work in and then see if you can contact people to talk to. I interned in this same law firm library in college and talking to the librarians here helped me decide that I did want to become a librarian and that law librarianship was a good field for me.

jacL wrote:

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Can either of you two help me out here?  I have always known that a librarian does more than just locate and stock shelves, but what?! 

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It really depends. There are some libraries in which the librarian might spend the bulk of the day looking for books in the catalog and directing people and selecting what books to add or remove from the collection but there are a lot of libraries in which the librarians are actually doing research. In my law firm the librarians do legal research for attorneys. Sometimes people will just want books on a particular topic but most of the time they want us to provide them with an answer to their question. We find relevant cases, compile histories of laws, try to figure out if a party could be held liable for something, find foreign laws, dig for information on companies, track down addresses of people who are being subpoenaed, etc. So a lot of law and business librarians (e.g. librarians who work at investment banks) do in-depth research.

Often to be a librarian you need to have a second graduate degree. Almost all law school librarians have a JD in addition to a MLS and at most colleges you need to have a subject master's too.