Pink and Libraries

I’m behind on my reading (OK, I haven’t even started the book I meant to read this week), so here are some very random thoughts (Post-a-Week, remember?):

• P!nk—is awesome!
• Librarianship is often described as a “pink” profession. In my (limited) experience, this is true. Certainly there are a lot of women in the profession.
• If you’re interested in becoming a librarian, there’s a lot of advice you can find online. My advice would be that if you have trouble interacting professionally with women as colleagues or (especially) women in authority, librarianship would probably not be the best profession for you to enter. (Yes, I have seen this.)
• Personality is a factor in library hiring decisions—one person I worked with described it as “looking for people who work well and play well with others.” This is especially important in smaller libraries, because everyone has to work closely with each other. On the other hand, this can be taken too far—it’s not like each and every one of your coworkers needs to be your BFF.
• If you work in academic libraries, you may have noticed that there’s a class division between the faculty and everyone else. Sadly, this class division sometimes seems to occur in libraries when you have a division between the librarians and everyone else. I accept that it may possibly be a misuse of one’s training/education to do certain things (shelving, dusting, shelf-reading, loose-leaf filing), but on the other hand, sometimes stuff just needs to get done. Be humble.
• Some libraries have screening interviews with a set script of questions they don’t deviate from and don’t ask follow-up questions about. There may be good reasons for this, but I always wonder why they bother to have an interview at all—wouldn’t it just be easier to email the job candidates that list of questions and have them all email their answers back?
• Have I mentioned that P!nk is awesome?

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