Post contributed by Matthias Ammon, Modern and Medieval Languages Library (@DrMammon)
Matthias works as Research Support Librarian in the Modern and Medieval
Languages and Linguistics Library, where he also manages the German and Film
Studies collections. He was previously Project Coordinator in the Office of
Scholarly Communication and has worked as an invigilator and Library Assistant
in several faculty libraries. Matthias recently submitted his final assignments
for a Postgraduate Diploma in Information and Library Studies at Aberystwyth
University. He tweets @DrMammon
I would like to thank the
Cambridge Library Group for giving me the opportunity to talk about my
experience of library school. For me personally, in hindsight doing the degree
was probably not the right decision. I started it out of a desire to learn more
about librarianship and in order to qualify for higher-level positions. About
halfway through my course, when I had worked in library assistant roles for
about five years, I got a (higher-level) job in Cambridge’s Office of Scholarly
Communication (what one might call a library-adjacent position) on the strength
of having done a PhD and some voluntary PPD. This then turned into my current
role as Research Support Librarian in the arts and humanities. Working in this
area, I would have liked at least the opportunity to learn more formally as
part of my degree about some of topics that I had had to learn ‘on the job’; a
non-comprehensive list would include teaching (in its broadest sense), digital
humanities, scholarly communication (for instance the academic publishing and
rewards system), data management, data visualisation etc. These are all
perfectly viable topics for a mostly academic Master’s course and are all
librarianship issues of increasing importance – without wishing to sound
heretical, it is perfectly possible today to be an academic librarian without
knowing how to catalogue or how to write a collection development policy.
My scepticism may in part derive
from my own experience on my distance-learning course at Aberystwyth which
included a lot of course material that felt outdated, but I would encourage
anyone interested in a career in academic librarianship to at least consider an
alternative qualification path by for instance working towards CILIP
certification and chartership first and figuring out which area of
librarianship you might want to go into and then doing a more focussed further
degree relating to that area a bit later, whether it is in teaching, special
collections or scholarly communication. Of course, it may not be possible for
everyone to get a foot in the door in the first place or to get a position
where it is possible to experience a variety of aspects of librarianship but
the broad ‘library degree’ may not be the best kind of preparation for your
dream library job.