Greetings and felicitations

Hello. My name is Catherine, and I am a smart rat.

It was David Gerrold, of The Trouble with Tribbles fame, who dubbed me a smart rat in the mid-80s when I attended one of his writing workshops. Being a smart rat is something I have been thinking about a great deal recently.

You see, late last year, having been made redundant (yes, I'm a victim of the global financial recession) and having returned to Australia after nearly 16 years in the UK, it occurred to me that I had considerable skills that would transfer quite nicely to librarianship. So this year I started studying for a graduate diploma in said field (at the rate of one subject a semester so it's going to take a while). And having started my studies, I have become keenly aware of my "smart rat" status - whilst uni has been teaching me and my fellow students stuff like search strategies, information sources, customer service skills, and how do to reference interviews, I realised that I already knew all of this stuff. There's not actually been much new stuff for me to learn.

So whilst my fellow students are at the beginning of the information maze, exploring all the possible routes, I've taken not so much a short-cut as (to use a gaming term) the golden path to the end of the maze. Whilst they're still thinking about the reference interview, I'm exploring issues of neutrality of information, the statistics of reference and other queries at public libraries with Pareto's Principle, the Long Tail and the 98% Rule banging away in my head with all the implications they carry for libraries and librarians (both positive and negative), and the symbolism and mythology of libraries.

As a result, I now find myself struggling with meeting the academic requirements of the subject, of proving to the examiners that yes, I do know this stuff and yes, I'll actually make a good librarian. And I've realised that I need to step back, back-track and unpack all the experience and skills that I've gained during the course of my education and working life and demonstrate how they tie into the library setting.

But word counts for assignments limit how much of that I can do, hence this blog - a place where I can cogitate on libraries and librarianship both practically and - romantically, for want of a better word.

Perhaps you'd care to join me.

Cheers!


Catherine