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Monday, November 13, 2006

Career disappointment & restlessness

This is long overdue...have been wanting to post this for a long time.

Recently, I feel more & more strongly about my job scope being so not librarian.

For the past 2 years, what I've been doing is more liaison & PR and I'm not doing that much of professional librarianship. I feel really unhappy coz I have not been able to develop a librarian's professional skills. I can't proudly say I am a selector (i.e. collection development) coz I am not doing "real" selection of materials or specialising in any subject area or genre...I'm not developing any specific collection; just receiving & allocating don't really hone any specialised skills coz I must admit, because of all these, I don't know enough about any collection in the library. And to tell the truth, I'm not recognised as a selector among the selectors.
I keep trying to defend that I am a sort of selector but it's kind of far-fetched now...and now, since management doesn't seem too supportive of selectors, I will probably not end up with much skill in that area.

Secondly, another professional skill I want to develop is cataloguing, which i've been wanting to do for a long time. However, I've not been able to try it out yet. If possible, I hope that I can transfer to the cataloguing dept some day if there is an opening.

I'm sick of the liaison work I have to do...I don't want to be a professional liaison officer, I want to be a professional librarian! I know there will still be a need for all librarians to do some liaison work (related to librarian work), but not most of the time! Furthermore, management have some weird mindset of not hiring any more library officers, only librarians...so we have no helpers to carry out the admin & operative stuff?!


Anyway, when I joined the organisation, I was supposed to be part of the collection development team which has since been separated from my unit. As I was new, they gave me the current job scope (& some other areas which has now been allocated to others...shorthanded then) to familarise with things and promised me that in the next FY, I could start on doing collection development on a certain area so that there could be a easier cut-off in terms of the evaluation form. Fine.
Then, when the new FY came, they decided that the collection development of that area should remain with the current selector since she is very good at it (of which I agree...but she's also overworked...I don't mind working on other subject areas too) while I concentrated on the expanding scope of one of the areas I was working on. Eventually, I am not doing that area anymore since management has decided to hire 1/2 staff to work on that because of the expansion in scope. Fine, as I wasn't coping well with 3 areas of work although I seem to be still doing some of the things here & there.
Recently, I was told that they want to "expand" my job scope to cover 1 of those areas of which I have handed over...and a lot more liaison stuff which really is not my forte or like. In the end it was disappointment after disappointment.

The current work I'm doing has not developed me enough to be viable anywhere else in this industry, so hopefully I can transfer somewhere where I will really do some professional work as what a librarian should do. How can I move on when the current work is so...?

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