Anniversary Again: My First Full-Time Job

It's now been thirty years since I started my first full-time job as a librarian.

I wrote this ten years ago for my twentieth anniversary: 

I had a part-time Library Adjunct position at the St. Pete Junior College Clearwater campus off Drew St. at the time.  It was nice, working the reference desk, helping students get on the CD-ROM databases and look for books in the two-story building.  I had just gotten my Masters degree in Library and Info Sciences at University of South Florida (GO BULLS) and was hoping to find a full-time spot at an academic-level library.

While it wasn't an academic library, I got a call from Broward County Libraries to interview.  The county system was this large, spread-out system that used regional libraries as nexus points for the smaller community libraries that dotted the packed urban/suburban landscape.  They were going with a novel idea at the time of sharing the large regional libraries with the Broward community college campuses.  They were building a brand new building for the BCC North Campus, and needed full-time staff to cover the expanding Reference desk (BCC provided two existing librarians to staff the desk as well)...

There was the rush of driving around the county with dad to find an apartment complex I could rent out within a month.  There was the hassle of figuring out what to pack and carry down.  There was the confusion of figuring out which roads to take and which led to nowhere (if Broward County had one thing going for it, it was that most of the roads were in a grid pattern: figuring out intersections became the easiest thing to do).

And then it was May.  My parents helped me move down from Pinellas County.  May 8th was my birthday (and also Mother's Day, which we celebrated at a nice restaurant, I forget where now) that Sunday.  I was twenty-four years old.  And then Monday May 9th I started my first full-time job at North Regional Library...

In those thirty years since, I'd learned a lot about being a reference librarian, and then the technology training aspects of it as our public services switched from finding things to helping patrons figure out their emails and smartphones.

When I wrote the 20-year remembrance, I had just been hired by Bartow Library after a four-year stint on unemployment. I had hoped then to make it a steady career when I got there, as the upheavals of going from Broward County to University of Florida to Pasco County didn't work out too well. 

I've been there now 11 years, the longest stint at one place I've done (North Regional was 6-plus years). Many of the staff who were there in 2013 when I joined have retired or moved on to other jobs. I'm the veteran of the place... which is still an unnerving sensation for me.

I still think of myself as starting out, still 24 years old, still learning the skill sets, still thinking I'm a rookie at all this librarianship when I'm really a 54-year-old survivor of the Midnight In the Garden of Good And Evil / Where The Crawdads Sing Shelf Wars.

My role as a reference librarian is coming to an end. There's little call for research assistance at the public library level when everyone can Google(tm) search it; and yet the need for experience research skills are greater because the information out there is no longer accurately vetted.

Where my expertise matter now is dealing with the adult patrons who still have tech issues and need training on the ever-changing personal devices we all have now (no jetpacks, but pocket phone cameras with computer processing power). We've gone from 3.5 inch floppies to CD-Recordable to USB flash to microSD card to straight-up wireless streaming.

We've even gone to where people would line up for hours to get on the public library computers - I can remember using clipboard sign-up sheets to manager 60-minute usage for patrons back in 1994, and people getting into fights over cutting in line - and then a ton of users getting online during the 2007-08 start of the Great Recession trying to get their unemployment benefits signed up. And then by 2015, the number of computer users just... dropping as the job market steadied, and the demand just... settled to normal.

We're still recovering from the COVID shutdown, it's been 4 years and only now have some of the Bartow regulars returned to check out books again. Sadly, some of the older ones - and our Friends volunteers - have passed on over the years. My awareness of my time as a librarian is drawing near to a close. I'm closer to my own retirement than to my own beginning...