Year in the Life: Adriana Flores, Pt. 5

Adriana Flores is one of our participants in our Year in the Life series, which follows new archivists in their first professional position. We will be following Adriana for a year. You can read her previous posts here.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my two-year work anniversary at HGARC was this month. With that anniversary approaching, I gave a lot of thought to my professional and personal goals when the New Year rolled around. Most of my family lives in Washington State, as well as my boyfriend, and being away from them has been difficult for me over the past three years. With two years of professional work under my belt, I was hopeful that I could find a job closer to my loved ones. I made a resolution to find a new job this year and was fortunate enough to have that happen. This post is all about my job search, application, and interview process and I hope it helps other early professionals prepare for the crazy process themselves.

Year in the Life: Elizabeth Shulman, Pt. 3

Elizabeth Shulman is one of our participants in our Year in the Life series, which follows new archivists in their first professional position. We will be following Elizabeth for a year. You can read her previous posts here.

Greetings again from the Mallbrary!  I figure with it being graduation time for library students, I want to write a bit about the application and interviewing process from the perspective of someone who both just got a job and someone who was involved with the hiring process. That’s right, I was recently on a small committee to hire a part-time librarian to work in the North Carolina Collection, particularly on weekends and for our evening hours. This will take a lot of weight off of myself and the Adult Services Librarian as our schedules are fairly inflexible at the moment. The Adult Services Librarian does programming every other Monday night and every other Saturday meaning he cannot switch Saturdays with me if I need to switch. It will also be nice not to run the risk of being in the mall space at night by myself on Mondays.

Anyways, back to the job application process! For those of you who are currently applying for jobs or students who just completed their first year and that job bug is crawling into your head, I know how you feel. I applied to a ton of jobs and did not start my job until five months after I graduated from grad school. I remember the annoyance and anger I felt, feeling like my applications were going into an empty void of nothingness where they disappeared and how I never would hear back from that institution. It’s frustrating and stressful and not a lot of fun. While I have very limited experience on the other side, I am happy to give a few pointers.

Year in the Life: Adriana Flores, Pt. 4

Adriana Flores is one of our participants in our Year in the Life series, which follows new archivists in their first professional position. We will be following Adriana for a year. You can read her previous posts here.

I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary as a full-time staff member at Boston University, and with that comes a good deal of reflection. One of my favorite parts of working at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center is the close-knit office environment. I know that many people develop close relationships with their colleagues, but I feel very lucky to have met my amazing group of coworkers at Boston University. Thus, I’m dedicating this post to them and reflecting a bit about the importance of building strong office relationships.

Year in the Life: Adriana Flores, Pt. 3

Adriana Flores is one of our participants in our Year in the Life series, which follows new archivists in their first professional position. We will be following Adriana for a year. You can read her previous posts here.

In our office, education and outreach programming is a huge priority. Serving our student population is always at the forefront of our minds and we are constantly brainstorming new ways to reach them. Although planning and executing education and outreach projects is not one of my primary job responsibilities, each archivist in our office is expected and encouraged to help plan these events. March was a busy month for outreach and I was lucky enough to have a hand in two exciting programs: a student discovery seminar on ‘Old Hollywood’ and a specialized classroom session focused on the theme of adaptations.

Participating in and planning student discovery seminars is one of my favorite job responsibilities. These seminars are one-time events that are designed to hook student interest by presenting an assortment of archival materials and rare books based on a common theme. For these events we pull materials from an assortment of relevant collections, arrange them in our reading room, give a quick overview and history of the materials to the students, and then we welcome the students to explore the items for themselves. We also invite a faculty member or local expert who can provide another perspective on the materials. These events allow us to explore our collections further, connect with the student body and their interests, and form connections with faculty members who often bring their classes back or return for their own research. Although I was not in charge of this month’s ‘Old Hollywood’ seminar, I thoroughly enjoyed helping my co-worker Jane set it up.

Year in the Life: Elizabeth Shulman, Pt. 2

Elizabeth Shulman is one of our participants in our Year in the Life series, which follows new archivists in their first professional position. We will be following Elizabeth for a year. You can read her previous posts here.

Greetings from the Mallbrary! That is what I have taken to calling my new location as the North Carolina Collection at Northgate Mall is a mouthful. When I last wrote, I was finishing packing up the North Carolina Collection to have our belongings brought over to the mall. In early February, I came over to the mall and supervised the movers as they brought over our furniture and put books on the shelves. During that week and a half, I felt more like a construction site foreman than a librarian. Once the books were on the shelves, I unpacked the archival materials and found new homes for them. Most of our archival materials are living on top of filing cabinets or on wire racks along the back walls of the reading room. The North Carolina Collection also became home to a small circulating collection called the Lucky Day Collection. This is a collection of non-renewable popular books that customers can check out for one week. As of March 3rd, we have been serving the public out of the Mallbrary. While I still do not have a supervisor and my part-time librarian took a new job at another branch in the system, I have a wonderful Adult Services Librarian who is working full-time with me. This will hopefully give me more time off of the reference desk so I can process more collections and do some collection development work.

Year in the Life: Adriana Flores, Pt. 2

Adriana Flores is one of our participants in our Year in the Life series, which follows new archivists in their first professional position. We will be following Adriana for a year. You can read her previous posts here.

As a university employee, the ebbs and flows of campus life drastically affect my day-to-day duties. Coming up on spring semester and graduation is always an exciting time to be on campus; unfortunately, seven of our student workers will be graduating this year. We usually employ twelve to fifteen student workers in the Acquisitions department, so losing seven of them, especially seniors with years of training, will be a tough adjustment. To soften the blow we hired five new students, which means February has been a training intensive month. Since student training and supervision has consumed my professional life this past month and a half, I thought it was an appropriate subject for my post.

When I was originally preparing to start my full-time position at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, I was terrified of supervising students. Supervision is one of the largest differences between most pre-professional and professional positions and they don’t teach classes on it in graduate school. There is no way to prepare for every bad scenario that can happen, but I’ve found that the more I supervise, the easier it gets. The thing that has helped me the most is having colleagues who share the responsibility and make it fun.

Year in the Life: Elizabeth Shulman, Pt. 1

Welcome Elizabeth, our newest participant in the Year in the Life Series! We will be following Elizabeth for the next twelve months.

Name: Elizabeth Shulman
Position: North Carolina Collection Librarian
Institution: Durham County Library
Years at position: <1
Education: Rice University (BA-History); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MSLS with concentration in Archives and Records Management)

 

Hello y’all, my name is Elizabeth Shulman and I am the new North Carolina Collection Librarian at Durham County Library. Since I was recently prompted to change my county password, I have been here for about 3 months. When I started library school, I never imagined that I would be working in an archive in a public library. I did not consider it an option until I heard a public library archivist from Charleston, SC give a talk about outreach with K-12 children at the Society of North Carolina Archivists. The events and collaboration between the librarians and the archivist seemed really interesting to me and as a result, I applied for a job with the Durham County Library.