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Dandi,

 

I am using "take a page from ___ handbook" idiomatically.  There is not a real pre-med handbook, per se.  It's just a common thing that pre-med majors do in order to 1) make sure they want to become doctors and 2) show medical schools that they're serious about becoming doctors and 3) get more exposure to the day-to-day routine of being a physician.  Shadowing might be just accompanying a librarian for 10-20 hours over a period of time (a month or two)-whatever works in your schedules (i.e. from 1-3 on Thursday afternoons)-on whatever she needs to be doing (research consultations, collection development meetings, working on an internal assessment project, etc.).

 

Sorry for the slow response, I've been out of town.

 

Thanks,

--Christina

 

 

Dandi,

 

If you're wanting to find out what happens in an academic library,  you might want to take a page from the pre-med handbook and see if you can "shadow" librarians from different institutions and in different parts of the library.  Most libraries know that there will be on-the-job training with any new hire; but spending some time behind the scenes at a library can give you a sense of what you skills you will need to work on after you get a job.  Plus, it will help you in answering questions during an interview because you'll have a better understanding of what the job entails.

 

Good luck,

--Christina

 

 

Wendy has an excellent point! She's a top research/instruction librarian who is always "in the know." I've had some excellent conversations with her at conferences.

Hi, Everyone.

The very first day of online library school, I contacted my closest academic library and told them I was now in library school online but had never worked in a library and asked if I could work for free.  They took pity on me and said yes, and though I completed library school with stellar grades, everything I really learned, I learned sitting at the knee of the cataloguer who kindly explained every single thing to me over and over and over until I got it.  (Surely no one ever took longer than I to understand some of the trickier points, but eventually I got it).  I have never had anything to do with cataloguing, by the way, but because I understand the pieces and how they work, I understand a lot more about the mechanics of retrieval than someone who never learned much about records because it wasn't in the scope of the job they wanted.  I also asked a million questions about every other part of the job (ILL, reference, etc.) and everyone who I asked told me something I didn't know.  In my personal opinion, my online degree would have been completely worthless without the accompanying real-life experience.  If you can't find any academic libraries nearby who'll take you as a volunteer, try the publics.  Any real-life experience beats none.