Our last class with Professor Lankes was last Wednesday night. He did a very nice job of giving us a few more motivational speeches to remember him by, and we are all sad to see him go (off to Italy, no less! Very jealous.) He let the class ask him anything we wanted to, and one of the tangents he went on got me thinking about how I arrived in this field in the first place.
When a classmate asked him how to broach the situation of the old librarian views vs. new librarian views as we begin our careers in the field, he mentioned that old-fashioned networking is a good way to get people to appreciate your new ideas. He suggested that finding out people’s “Aha” library moments, the moment they knew they wanted to be a librarian or the moment they knew they were in the right profession, was a good way to establish a relationship with your new colleagues.
That made me wonder, what is my “Aha” library moment? How did I know that I wanted to be librarian? People ask me this question all the time, and I’ve found myself stumbling over the answer somewhat. My usual answer is something along the lines of “I always loved being around books, and being in the library, and volunteering at the library and my mother was a librarian, so it just seemed natural!”
I think that answer is a little stilted and artificial-sounding. Becoming a librarian did not always seem “natural” to me. If I’m being quite honest, I wavered over my decision to move to Syracuse and start the LIS program only days before I left. This was mostly due to fear of the unknown, but I also found myself wondering if becoming a librarian was really what I wanted to do with my life.
Thankfully, I forced myself to come, and doing so led me to what I think was my “Aha” library moment. No, I didn’t discover that my passion in life is MARC codes or FRBR. What really made me realize that I wanted to be a librarian was that sense of fitting in. In the LIS program at SU, I’m surrounded by people who like the same things I do, and actually find things like learning HTML, how to market a library, and mending books interesting! It’s refreshing to know that I’m surrounded by people who so strongly believe in things like the freedom to access information, and share other beliefs similar to my own.
I fit in with all these librarians and librarians-in-training around me. I think that’s my “Aha” library moment.
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