Was is self promoting narcissism? Desire to share the most boring mundane details of your life with others (wake up, make coffee)? Or something else.
Sarah Faye Cohen shares why she didn’t participate and she’s wondering why others did. A legitimate question, actually one I’m curious about myself. The first two rounds of Library Day in the Life were small, I think less than 30 people total, then somehow this one took off, I’m not sure if it was David’s post or the mention on LISnews or what, but all of a sudden there were loads of people I’d never interacted with doing it (over 200 last count). Whoa. Awesome. Scary. Exciting.
I can’t speak to why everyone did it but I can speak for myself.
“who we are writing these memes for.”
Well, the whole thing started because I look at my blog stats and the search terms used to bring people there, the most popular ones were: librarian’s day, what it like to be librarian, what’s it like to work as a librarian, you get the idea. I assumed, because how could I know, that these were searches done by people considering librarianship or just curious. So I thought I should blog my days, give the people what they want right? But there are so many of us doing so many things, my days wouldn’t be a good representation, so I tried to start the meme. I didn’t give it a lot thought, I just picked some people doing new and interesting things and linked to them. I hoped people would share what they did and give insight into all different aspects of libraryland and they did!
So I wrote this meme for the people who wonder what a librarian’s day is like. Who are those people? I don’t know, I generally don’t ask patrons why they want information, I just give it to them.
I wrote the meme for myself too. I wanted to know what other librarians were doing, there are so many new exciting positions out there, I wanted to know how are they spending their time? I’m selfish like that. 😉
After the first round I got a lot of email from professors, librarians and lots of other people saying what a great resource it is. Lets face it if you’re considering being a librarian today there aren’t a lot of resources for you, the last book is from 2003 and my job didn’t even exist in 2003. I’ll admit some of the blog posts are more informative than others and I’ll be suggesting a better format if there is another round. But over all it accomplishes what I’d hoped for; a wide range of library people, not just MLS holding librarians you don’t have to have an MLS to work in a library, writing about their average day.
She next says:
But this meme leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth in part because I don’t see the meme itself having a role in our relevance, or our creativity, or out sociality (is that a word?!).
Who says that was the point? There are a lot of people working hard on our relevance, creativity and our sociality, I like to think I’m one of them. But the purpose of the meme was to share what our average days were like, with each other, with students, with potential library workers everywhere. It did that. Doing this meme didn’t stop me from working on our relevance, creativity or sociality, and in face it might have helped me do those things better. I understand Sarah and Amanda’s point, but you can be talking about something AND doing it at the same time, the acts are not mutually exclusive, but that’s another blog post.
I could go on and on but in I think Meredith Farkas has written a reply that covers most of what I’d say and I’m sure she’s written it better than I could. 🙂
But at the end of the day, in a nut shell, why did I do? Because its my blog and I could.
Librarian by Day 
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