What's your story?

So, you may be detecting a recurring theme in my blog - other than libraries, that is. And that is the challenges of career planning and ways of overcoming them. In fact, this is at the foremost of my mind, not only because I'm at something of a crossroads in my career, but because I am presenting a paper on this topic at the ALIA National Conference in September.

As a professional who has, several times, ventured away from Melbourne and away from the industry, to gain valuable experience and bring it back with me, I originally entitled my paper "There and Back Again" - an obvious Tolkien reference.

However, upon the release of the program, I found that some other librarians had also entitled their presentation "There and Back Again". Furthermore, in a fitting twist of fate, I have also accepted into a program that will be sending me to work in a knowledge management role with an NGO in Hanoi for the next couple of years.

And so, I have renamed my paper, "The road goes ever on and on." Yes, another Tolkien reference. It's an interesting one, because it is a song that Bilbo Baggins sings several times in the books. The first of these is when he returns to The Shire after his awfully big adventure to Lonely Mountain and back, and it speaks of a circular journey that takes him "there and back again" (the alternative title to "The Hobbit")

However, by the time we meet Bilbo again in "The Lord of the Rings", the lyrics have changed. In something of a Wordsworthian transformation, it no longer resolves in the return home, but takes more of a linear narrative, looking forward to the unknown: And whither then? I cannoy say.

Whilst at the time my choice of title was something of a literary conceit, now I'm starting to consider which narrative modes our own career choices take us as professionals. Are they circular or linear?

Does our story take us there and back again, or do we take the road that goes ever on and on?

The beauty of librarianship.

One of the greatest strengths of the library and information profession, particularly compared to other professions, is the breadth of its field. Having worked across public, school, university and state government libraries, my work has intersected substantially with other sectors, namely:

- Education
- Literary Festivals

- Cultural Heritage

- Genealogy
- Parliamentary Services

- Academia

- Community Development

- Museums

- Early Childhood Development

- Authors and Bookselling industries
- Non-Government Organisations

- Archival Services

- International Development

And there are undoubtedly others, such as courts, legal and medical sectors, which I have yet to experience!

In an industry where it is seemingly more difficult to move up, and some sectors are slashing their staff numbers, why not move sideways?

Trading in your Red Paperclip.

I was recently thinking of the One Red Paperclip project. For those of you unaware of it, about ten years ago, Canadian blogger Kyle Macdonald started with a red paperclip, and started trading it - first for a pen, which he traded for a doorknob, and so on. Within a year, he finished with a 2-storey house.

Of course, this has been a common storyline in gaming, where you find a seemingly-useless item, and then find somebody who needs it, so you trade it for something of value, and before you know it, you've got a heart container or a magic sword that you need to defeat the boss.

But how about when it comes to career planning? Traditionally, the plan has basically been:

1. Get a job
2. Get enough experience and knowledge so that you can do your direct supervisor's job
3. Move up
4. Repeat.

Naturally, this process can be frustrating, as you will always be competing for higher roles, and sometimes people just don't leave.

Then there are the times when you think your opportunity is there for the taking. A vacancy comes up for the job that you know you were born to do, and have been doing your time in the organisation, grooming yourself for the role.

And it goes to somebody who has appeared out of the blue, without the traditional qualifications, to everybody's chagrin.

That person has traded in their Red Paperclip.

So, what are you going to do with yours? Will you try and wait to trade it for another coloured paperclip, or a slightly bigger one? Or are you going to go for something completely different?

Dream jobs are made of these.

So, following from my previous post, if you didn't become a librarian because you "really love books", then why?

Maybe it's because:
- you like helping people learn
- you're passionate about making a contribution to the community
- you want to work to close the disadvantage gaps in society, through the democratisation of information
- you're excited about technology and want to work with innovative information tools
- you like working with youth and children
- you're obsessed with the curation, organisation and dissemination of online information, particularly using social media
- you're very particular about classifying things and putting them in order, and a library job values such an eye for detail
- you're fascinated by information seeking behaviour and the research process and want to help people with theirs.
- you want a job that doesn't involve potentially destroying anybody's lives
- actually, to be honest, it is because you really love books; everything else is just a means to being surrounded by them at work.

So with this in mind, what is your "dream job" - that is, the ultimate job that perfectly satisfies your personal and professional career objectives? Is it working as a library manager? Or could your dream job be working as a:
- school teacher
- community centre manager
- literary festival director
- communications officer
- arts administrator
- youth programs coordinator
- web designer
- education writer
- historian
- international development worker
- archivist
- social worker
- museum curator
- children's entertainer
- bookseller

Yes, libraries are awesome, but other jobs might be better suited to fulfil your potential and help you "live the dream".

So, what's your dream job?

Do you really love books?

I often find Seth Godin's blog to be a source of inspiration, and a recent blog post of his struck a chord indeed;

"The people who started Staples didn't do it because they love office supplies...
You shouldn't become a middle school math teacher because you love math. You should do it because you love teaching."

This reminds me of pretty much every time somebody has said, "Oh, you're a librarian? You must really love books, right?"

Of course, it does help to like books if you work in a public or school library, since one of the main reasons to work there is to spend time connecting people with books and nurturing their love of literature. Which is why much of information management courses are about understanding the information seeking behaviour of people, and empowering them with information literacy skills and knowledge. And not so much about books and reading.

Whilst this is obvious for anybody who has worked as a librarian, it's not so obvious to everybody else. Especially the ones who think that librarian roles can be easily replaced by somebody with a lesser qualification, and lower pay, who can happily process and catalogue books, and issue them to patrons.

In which case, they may as well just get somebody who really likes books.

How to get people to read your library blog...

So, when I was writing last night's post, something caught my eye - the reader statistics for the last week. One advantage to blogging every day is that you can make some observations on which posts are getting more attention.

Anyway, I noticed that last Friday's post "When it sucks to be a librarian..." has had a substantially greater number of hits than any of my other posts! So, I've been pondering the possible reasons for this:

1. Retweets. I tweet a link to my blog every time I put up a new post. When people retweet my link, then there's more potential to reach a wider audience.

2. A provocative title. Most librarians out there would have their suckier moments in their job, so they're possibly curious about which aspect the article was addressing.

3. Political / industrial issues. Whilst self-indulgent naval-gazing, and banal details of life can make for semi-fascinating reading, it's the more hard-hitting issues that get people's attention. And the post was outlining some of the changes that the industry is currently seeing through the overhaul of professional workplaces.

4. Day of the Week. Are more people procrastinating / tweeting on a Friday afternoon / evening? Does a post on Friday have a flow-on effect onto the weekend, when they have more time to catch up on reading blogs?

5. Just lucky, I guess? It's possibly some combination of all of the above. Or maybe some other factor? What do you think?

The best-kept secrets...

Last night, I finally made it to the MSO Secret Symphony. I've been wanting to go for a while, but up until now I've always had a clash or been overseas at the time. The premise is simple; the MSO Secret Symphony twitter account announces that there will be a secret concert in the near future, and posts clues on the composer, work, and performance location. Twitter followers then get to guess these details, and can win prizes, as well as priority access to the event. A day or two beforehand, the location and time is announced.

What ensued last night was a performance of J.S. Bach's "Coffee Cantata", at 10pm in a warehouse space behind a popular Melbourne cafe/bar. Glancing around, there would have been around 200 people - not bad for a Wednesday night with under a week of purely social media marketing. I overheard one of the organisers mention that they've had to scale back the level of promotion to solely twitter-based marketing because they don't want to risk having to turn people away at the door!

So, what makes this work? Yes, it helps that the MSO have a strong brand for quality music, but it's possibly more the obscurity of the work combined with the short and limited lead-up that taps into people's FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out! And Melbourne's full of well-kept secrets that we only hear about after it's been and gone

Also at the heart of this is the notion of scarcity. The MSO could reach large crowds through widely-publicised free concerts, but they tap into a very different crowd by creating a "secret gig". Of course, the beauty is that nothing spreads more like wildfire than a "secret". And whilst nobody wants to go to a free concert that will take just anybody, the more obscure a "secret" performance, the more special it becomes!

Of course, the trick is to find that fine line between being a little too secret - i.e. nobody knows that it's on - and broadcasting a little too desperately and putting people off. "Free" for some means that it's a special gift for those in the know, whereas "free" can also mean "nobody would actually pay money for this!" This can certainly be a challenge for public libraries. In my public library role, an upcoming event was recently booked out, and the resulting email was, "Can everybody please remove all promotional material, because it's full." Frankly, I can't think of better promotion for an event than telling everybody that they've missed out on something even before it's happened! It'll make sure they keep a keen eye for the next time a similar event comes around.