If a librarian were able to spy on my elementary school self and the countless stacks of books that I regularly piled up on the circulation desk over the years (and maybe one of them did), I think there’s a strong chance they’d say “There goes one of us! Give him 15 years and he’ll be submitting his resume!” Bibliophilia – at times verging on bibliomania – came to me at an early age. I won most of the reading competitions in elementary school, and at certain points my reading “level” was ahead of my age, probably just because I’d worked my way through all the books assigned to my grade level. It’s hard to plumb all the depths of this proclivity (the therapy bills required to pinpoint its origins might be expensive), but a love of stories and language and a tendency toward escapism were among the most salient – even if I couldn’t have put names to any of those things until much later in life. A fairly shy kid, books sometimes provided substitutes for the friendships that I found difficult to make. That said, though it was a long time ago, I know I derived a lot of enjoyment from books even as friends came and went. Thanks to a deep and hereditary sense of curiosity, I have held many interests going back as far as I can remember. As an adult, I have tried to make a living from a handful of them, though not the ones I had as a child. Even so, it’s not an exaggeration to say to say that some kind of library career – of undetermined specialization – has always felt closer to my personal manifest destiny than anything else I could name. It has taken me a few decades longer than I wish it would have to come around to what I hope will be a late life rendezvous with fate in the form of finding my vocational calling as a librian. While I did work for about a year and a half at a public library in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina soon after graduating college, it’s taken me roughly 25 years to circle back to the field. My feeling is that after all these years, I’m essentially coming to the field for the first time. Regardless of the long delay and later-in-life start, it occurs to me that things couldn’t have unfolded in any other way, and now I’m finally in just the right position to embark on this new chapter of my professional life.
Shortly before I enrolled in the SJSU MLIS program, I was seeking a path that would lead to a position in a museum, ideally as a curator curating contemporary art shows and events and / or writing texts for exhibit monographs and longer form books (artist retrospectives, etc.). In hopes of enhancing my resume I began volunteering at the Oakland Museum of California, albeit in the humble capacity of storing visiting kids’ lunches in lockers and asking them not to run, scream or touch things. As it turned out, I was too late to apply to the two local Museum Studies programs that started in the Fall 2019 semester. However, after days of deliberation, at some point it dawned on me that one of my original inspirations for curatorial work was the special collections department in the library of my alma mater, Amherst College. I remembered discovering what to me were exceptionally interesting collections – of authors’ manuscripts and rare materials, of topical content, of texts and artworks – through exhibits mounted in the library. In a few cases these shows dovetailed with writers or literary schools that I was already interested in, which only further lodged the whole scene somewhere in my psyche as memories that I didn’t re-discover until some 25 years later.
Another catalyst that pulled me in the direction of library work was a recommendation of “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean. Ostensibly about a major fire in 1986 at the downtown Los Angeles library branch, it was actually about so much more than that. While the Library Book was a compelling whodunit about the fire – was it arson, and if so, who set the fire? – it was also love letter to the libraries of Orlean’s youth, an exploration of the practices of preservation and conservation, a history of libraries and librarians in Los Angeles, and a paean to the eccentricities of library staff and patrons among other highly entertaining threads. Orlean’s enthusiasm for her subjects is contagious, and for me engendered an old familiar affection I have for librarians and the spaces they inhabit. The Library Book’s overall effect on my ruminations about changing careers was to put a library career into play as a leading possibility.
Meanwhile, in a bit of welcome serendipity, I met someone who is a librarian in Oakland (my hometown) who had gotten their MLIS degree at SJSU six years ago. I was happy to find out that the deadline to apply was still a few weeks away. While there weren’t any classes that focused on contemporary art libraries or art curation per se (unlike digital curation, which was well represented), there were enough courses that piqued my curiosity, and some that conceivably overlapped in substantive ways with my desire to pursue a career that entails curation, exhibition, and related writing. As it turns out, one of the last courses I took was on staging exhibitions from special collections, which felt like I’d come full circle from the days I spent research Museum Studies programs in the Spring of 2019. Another key piece of information I picked up along the way is that a fair number of museums – unsurprisingly, more often these are large ones – have libraries of their own. Of course, there’s no guarantee that I’ll discover a path towards gainful employment as an exhibit curator in a museum, library, or some other type of memory institution, but I do find it encouraging to know that these jobs do exist. While their scope may be more limited than the possibilities I want to explore, I take further succor knowing that there are professional organizations like the Art Libraries Society of North America dedicated to the people that work within them.
My journey in pursuit of an MLIS degree at San Jose State University’s iSchool has been guided more by scattershot curiosity, an exploratory spirit, and program requirements than by premeditated planning oriented toward a specific career track. While it offers only incomplete documentation of my studies over the past two and a half years, this portfolio attempts to survey the work that I completed during this time period as it relates to the program’s predefined learning objectives. For better or worse, my approach was generally at crosscurrents with the suggestions of advisors and program architects, who recommended adopting a structured, goal-oriented strategy to choosing a cluster of interconnected courses related to a given career specialization as early as possible. Looking back with as much honest as I can, I feel degrees of both satisfaction and regret about my rather messy path. I was always cognizant – often painfully so – of the excessive number of academic subjects and career possibilities and that spoke to my interests. Despite the dangers of not having a firm grasp on what librarian career pathway I wanted to pursue, I’ve opted to keep my options open, and in so doing have created a situation in which I find myself still reflecting on and trying to make sense of my next move even as I’m on the verge of graduation.
Throughout my time in the SJSU MLIS program I’ve tried to learn from fellow students whom I crossed paths with who were either currently working as librarians or information professionals, who were writing theses, or who had just finished their undergraduate degrees (among others). In truth, I admired and was even envious of these members of my cohort for different reasons. If I could distill these reasons into a few common denominators – albeit ones that were not applicable to every individual – it had to do with their focus on concrete goals, their ability to relate their academic work to their day jobs, and the way they had organized their studies and creative work around topics that were of the most passionate interest to them. I struggled with a nagging sense that I lacked any of these qualities, though through ongoing reflection on what was best for me in the given circumstances, I felt that my best course of action was to continue to take courses that exerted a pull on my interests and imagination. Where possible, and where I felt compelled to, I enrolled in courses that might be related to others I’d already taken in subjects that interested me. Among these – many of which could themselves be broken down into more narrow areas of expertise – were curating special collections and staging exhibitions, performing archival and preservation / conservation work, academic librarianship (collection development, digital curation, digital humanities, etc.), and public library programming and outreach.
Over the course of my studies, the core principles that were most frequently invoked and applied to the philosophy, policies and practices of librarianship were diversity, equity and inclusivity. This ethical and administrative framework informs nearly all institutional mission, vision and values statements, and now foregrounds the theory and practice of all manner of programs and services from collection development to community outreach. These criteria form a hub from which many spokes of library practice extend. Outcomes aren’t guaranteed, of course, but best practices related to achieving desired results are well established by now. A close second in terms of another clearly articulated, widely referenced and utilized set of related concepts can be found in the ALA’s Bill of Rights, which address intellectual freedom, censorship, provision of materials for all points of view and all users, privacy, rights to access content and space, and more. I will elaborate on the former rather than the ALA Bill of Rights, however. As someone who is driven to help people connect with information resources that might make a significant difference in their lives, I find the diversity, equity and inclusivity paradigm quite motivational. It’s not at all difficult for me to imagine deriving a great deal of personal and professional satisfaction working in positions shaped by these ideals. And yet there is a paradox, or wrinkle of sorts, which is that the draw of these ethical principles can be so strong on my conscience that it forecloses on other areas of interest that aren’t so directly permeated by them. For example, I’m still interested in curation and exhibition work, preservation and conservation, archives, digital curation and other topics that are only obliquely illuminated by the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusivity. My initial reaction to this situation is to say that I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. There were many technologies and practices I learned about in various courses which, viewed outside of the context of their usage or interaction with the public, were of interest to me in their own right. I also think that it might be the case that various specializations in library science are still catching up with the values that institutions have committed to, or vice versa. It may well be that given a few more years of concerted efforts by academics and other experts, the threads connecting, say, preservation work and diversity become obvious enough to garner attention from information professionals.
Though I’m writing this in November 2021, on the verge of completing my degree, my career has in a sense already begun with resumes sent to a couple of local libraries. Though I have a few dream jobs in my mind – including some I already mentioned – regardless of the type of library or position I’m offered, I hope it’s from an organization that offers its employees professional development and instruction. I believe that a concerted effort to pursue such programs could go some distance toward “correcting” my perhaps overly broad selection of courses and put me on a more focused track with the goal of becoming an expert in a particular subject over time. I would like to give myself the possibility of performing original research at some point down the road, among other professional aspirations. I participated in a summer 2021 internship at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area’s archives and records facility. Overall it was a fabulous experience and the supervisor did an wonderful job of introducing us to the archives and walking us through the kind of work she needed our help with. The problem from my point of view was that there were only two employees for an organization – funded, incidentally, by the presumably deep-pocketed National Park Service – that maintained a collection of over six million documents and artifacts. The employees were apparently somehow managing to attend to the critical things they had to attend to, but I felt there were still a few disappointing or less than encouraging takeaways. For one thing, there were no other jobs in that organization, though there clearly there were massive amounts of more work that needed to be done that two people could not do. The conclusion there was that the two GGNRA employees were probably very stressed out, and that there was probably no one that the supervisor might refer us to for positions at other NPS organizations in the area. More importantly, I think, I learned that archival work can be extremely tedious and repetitive. While there were aspects that I legitimately enjoyed – working on oral history transcripts and particular collections of 100+ year old correspondences – I was also always aware of the massive amount of backlogged work that apparently no one really wanted to touch. The GGNRA archivists made no bones about how far behind they were, how uninteresting yet necessary much of the work was, and how complex the entire archival architecture and its operation were. At the end of the day, it was good to be presented with an unvarnished view of the day-to-day work that goes on in a large archive. It stands to reason that it’s better to know what paying dues looks like in an archival setting rather than being profoundly disappointed down the road after having passed up other opportunities to specialize my skill set. Because of this risk it seems to me like it would be invaluable to interview someone working in the kind of organization / field / position I’m interested in. I think this insight will serve me well in the next couple of years as I navigate various professional possibilities that may arise and make the sacrifices necessary to pursue them.