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Are Librarians this depressed?

Intersting posting over at InfoMatters. Read “Depressed Librarians” here.
Are Librarians this depressed? Or is a representative symptom of another disease?
Stephen

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Posted on: May 29, 2008, 10:36 am Category: Uncategorized

2 Responses

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  1. I had been thinking about getting a MLIS- kind of important to get anywhere in this field. Anyway, I subscribed to a whole bunch of library-related blogs. DEPRESSING!!!!
    I wanted to get myself psyched to go for it, like one can do with diet and/or exercise blogs. Instead I came away feeling the MLIS is little more than a payment to the education cartel and that everyone in the field is pathetically unhappy.
    I couldn’t keep reading most of them. To be frank, I don’t know how your feed survived the purge. And I haven’t done anything about the MLIS since.
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    There are bored and burned out people in every field. There are always people who blame others – the boss. their parents, their education and more – for their own failings or inertia. Your life is what YOU make it. Education always was and has alway been just an entry point. You decide if you’re going to be great or not. Keep trying.
    SA

  2. gen y said

    I’m only new to the library (an academic library). Have an IT qualification and from next week will be the only gen Y from over 100 staff. Depressing? Definitely at times… Considering the next oldest person will be 10 years older than me, conversation wise, managing change, bringing the library into the 21st century can be infuriating, depressing, frustrating…I could go on. The role of a library has changed so much in the last 10 years that I’m not sure you actually need a library degree to be a librarian (ready for stuff to be thrown at me). Or maybe the library degree needs to be changed to adapt to the new role of the library for society today. But then to a gen y a library is so old school 🙂 Maybe a big marketing campaign needs to be undertaken worldwide to change the image of the library to the gen y’s (or even public in general)…
    Maybe librarians are depressed because of the public perception a librarian has… When I first moved to the library from the IT dept (where a majority of staff are gen y’s), the comment most often aimed at me was “when are you getting your wardrobe makeover to include cardigans?”
    I could write a thesis on this, maybe I should do a phd on this topic 🙂