Library Path

How is everything? I'm coping relatively okay, I think. I'm writing this on day 7 of my first week on lockdown with both children at home, and it's been a bit fraught this morning (I think we're teething again, which is an unpleasant experience for all involved). But never mind - let's think about libraries!

Today the prompt is library path, which I'm interpreting as how I made it into libraries and this library in particular. It was in hindsight a fairly straightforward path, if a little accidental.

Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay

I'd finished a music degree, with no idea what to do next - no one was suggesting I carry it on any further, although at the time I think I would have liked to without any particular idea how. Now I feel like I've forgotten everything about it except the opening bars of Puer natus est, which began our Melody as Ritual lecture series.

I ended up doing a music PGCE, which was very challenging. I enjoyed the work at one school, but not the second, and while it equipped me with lots of skills, it really wasn't what I wanted to do at the time. However, it had got to June and I was just finishing up some of the written work. I was in the UL looking up resources on one of their catalogue computers, and just happened to think, "let's just quickly check the careers website, not done that for a while," and saw an opening for a library assistant at the Pendlebury Library of Music...

Reader, I got the job.

It was tedious work - the library was in the process of moving online, and my day was spent literally scanning hundreds of barcodes, but I got my in. A few months later, the librarian changed jobs and the rest of us were bumped up a bit with responsibilities while they hired a new librarian, so for 12 weeks I got to find out what the rest of being a library assistant was like. And clearly that didn't put me off, because when the contract finally expired and nearly everything was online, I moved to the Squire Law Library, then four years later to the Fitz.

I'd just started my distance learning library degree with Aberystwyth then, and that carried me through the next 6 years. In that time, the other staff at the Fitz library took early retirement and left me mostly alone, so I took over most of what they did for a modest promotion: my official job title is now "Chief Library Assistant".

I'd never considered being a librarian, or working in libraries, up until that fateful day in the UL. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd not seen that posting. Where would I be? Would I have left Cambridge entirely? Sucked it up and been a teacher though I know I would have hated it? It's funny, but I clearly didn't know myself at all, because when I found library work, I found something I enjoyed and was pretty good at. So the library gods were truly smiling on me that day.

(Image of Wiborada, patron saint of libraries in Switzerland. Deutsch: wahrscheinlich Friedrich ColnerEnglish: probably Friedrich Colner / Public domain)