Not to be the guy who "um actuallys" about a funney joak post but there are so many people in the notes who seem to be genuinely upset that you need a master's degree to sit around and smell books all day, and that's also the reaction i get from certain people IRL when I tell them about my degree. The whole "hot repressed lesbian who wears glasses" thing is also pretty objectifying and not cool considering the sexual harassment that librarians and library workers absolutely do face.
There are definitely issues in the profession with the MLS/MLIS degree - it's an incredibly broad field that encompasses things ranging from early childhood education to computer science, and it absolutely is a classist barrier to promotion that keeps people out of jobs they are otherwise qualified for.
But my degree is not like. A degree in shushing people. Library & information science is a complex field, and a lot of the topics covered in my degree are things that you really *couldn't* learn on the job because they're so theoretical and abstract. I personally focused a lot on issues such as information access, mis/disinformation, and the ways in which libraries can challenge or reinforce structural inequality. I'm trying to be brief, but there's sooo much I could talk about here. It's an important field!
I think that writing librarians off as "looking sexy and mysterious while holding a book" and saying "lol why do you even need a degree for that" contributes to the undermining we already face. Libraries and librarians provide an incredibly important service that has only increased in importance as our information landscape has become infinitely more complex, especially since conservative wall street types want to do away with libraries altogether because "nobody reads books anymore and you can just use amazon anyway." You don't need a master's degree to work in a library, but being *a librarian* is different than doing paraprofessional library work, and there is a lot more to the degree than just sniffing books.
Also, if you *do* want to just sit around and read books all day, the MLIS degree is absolutely not for you! At its core, library science is about connecting people with the information they need, so the vast majority of library jobs are, to an extent, customer service jobs. If you like books more than you like people (which was the case for many of my classmates, unfortunately), you will not have a good time working in libraries, master's degree or not.
romaincrisis
snowghoul
2087
