Section: Features

Gain technical skills, since those can give you an edge over job candidates without those skills. Gain an overview by joining relevant email lists and reading blogs and journals. Meet practitioners and talk with them about your interests. Serials work requires a tolerance for ambiguity and an ability to see the whole and the parts. Assess your strengths, aptitudes, and joys: pick a specialty that you can love and the rest will follow.

What do I find rewarding in my career? Helping others do their jobs better. Having a project, seeing it through, and witnessing it in action as a finished product. What do I find challenging in my career? Managing a group of diverse individuals. People are hard!

For rare book cataloging, you have to have knowledge of the standards, rules and best practices for describing special collections materials. In addition, it’s crucial to have an understanding of the historical context, some understanding of book history and the history of book production, as well as languages.

My position requires constant intellectual curiosity, a willingness to look into fields outside of my expertise besides just the ones that already interest me. It requires working with a team and within the boundaries of a system that’s over 100 years old. Are there areas of the classification we could make better if we just started them anew? I think so, but then you’ve made thousands, maybe millions of library materials out there that have completely outdated numbers! So we need to balance growth with what might be called backwards compatibility.

My eyes were opened in my advanced cataloging class to the intricacies and depths of information management and organization. I was originally hired for my cataloging expertise. I then worked on learning about the specific topics in the StreamNet collections: fishing, ecology, wildlife, water quality.