more about prison librarians

I did my class project in my Library Services to Special Populations class on prison librarians. I took a trip out to the medium security prison and got to spend some time with the librarian there and learned a lot about both prison libraries and the odd and unique role that libraries have within prisons. This week my landlady’s son is visiting. He is a prison educator. He said they are trying to hire some librarians. I dug up a few links for him in my “Oh have you tried PRISON-LIB, the prison librarians’ listserv?” way and figured I’d drop them in here as well.

want to be a well-paid librarian in Vermont?

This is the job my old boss used to have. The library is amazing and 50K will go a long way in ruralish Vermont. I made their website. If you’re at all Vermont-curious, think about applying; I’ll be happy to tell you what I know about the area and I’ve already done a community analysis of the population.

library careers – two national organizations

I’m looking around at library careers sites this week after the interesting story about the IMLS grant from a few days back. I was sent a link to the Canadian Library Association’s recruitment-type site, InfoNation. ALA launched their own site at LibraryCareers.org which, given that it’s the ALA website, redirects to http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdr/librarycareerssite/home.htm which is the URL you’d bookmark, no matter what the website says. Check out CLA’s library blog page with its subtle use of RSS feeds (and the inclusion of ALA employee Jenny Levine’s blog, how collegial!). Check out this competencies page that looks like a tag cloud and this page with desktop wallpaper. And who is this handsome man who says “I first became interested in librarianship due to my desire for world domination.”? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Canada has actually published research about the current and future human resources aspects of librarianship in the The 8Rs Canadian Library Human Resource Study. Their work is something of a response to what we think we already know which, as they put it “the existing literature on recruitment, retention, and leadership in the library profession is based on either anecdotal evidence or aggregate statistics, most of which are American.” You can read the reports they have published here. The woman who emailed me about this sums up one of the results

while there’s no imminent crisis in numbers of recruits, there are issues around competency match between grads and workplace needs, need for leadership and management, etc. In other words, it’s more about personal / professional qualities than the panic about needing “bodies” for our libraries (as was expressed over & over in the literature a couple of years ago).

are you a consultant or an international school librarian

Priscilla Shontz from LISCareer is finishing up her book on librarian careers. She’s stuck on a few chapters. If you are a library consultant or an international school librarian, would you mind writing a quick and not terribly long summary of what you do? Slightly more details here. Tentative Table of Contents here. Yes, that’s me writing the introduction.