So, earlier today Barbara Fister shared on Library Babel Fish the story of How I became a librarian  . Chris Bourg, at MIT then shared this evening on Twitter her story of Librarianship being Plan C at least: This was not Plan B: My #altac story

For me? Far less educated when I became a librarian, having tried far fewer other hats on, but I also grew from student-worker in the university library to full-fledged librarian. And danced a bit with academia around the edges.

athriftymrs.com. (2013). enid_blyton_illustrations [Photo]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/thriftyuk/10038808435/

I was pretty sure I wanted to be a librarian very early on (and do admit to organising my Enid Blyton books with my own classification scheme which involved letters AND numbers and a lot of duct tape on spines).

Part of this was being a country-town girl at the tail end of Australia’s free tertiary education experiment, who saw books, reading and education as the only way to escape an alternative future of either early pregnancy or drug-dazed adolescence, with no hope EVER otherwise living in a place with sophisticated exotic infrastructure like traffic lights or a Chinese Restaurant.

On the way, I was told by my maths teacher I was “too smart for that” and “should think about being an engineer”. And in response convinced myself that I should aim high and try something that I maybe would have some interest in, and go to Law School.

By my second year at the University of Western Australia I was studying a 33% overload as one of the first 20 students admitted to a combined Arts/Law degree. I had tried apple-thinning over one summer to earn enough for next semester, and then by second year had moved to a private girl’s school as a live-in boarding mistress. Board and accommodation were provided in return for 20 hours of work a week. Not surprisingly, I sustained this until Easter before moving to college near the university and becoming financially dependent on my mother for eight months… until a college friend on the University Library committee suggested I apply for a job in the Reid Library for the upcoming academic year.

Reader, I liked it.

I was in Fine Arts, Architecture and Special Collections, so spent countless nights filing slides that the Visual Arts students viewed at the light table or borrowed overnight. If anyone wanted to know what Hunterwasserhaus looked like, we were the only place in town who could show you.

Hundertwasserhaus. (2019). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hundertwasserhaus&oldid=899063518

I would sneak into the Special Collections and browse the Festival of Perth programmes going back to the first ones in the 1950’s. As a Theatre Studies student I was overjoyed to discover a cache of notes from Peter Brook’s production of the Mahabharata in Perth, detailing the bump in and bump out plans. I spent one evening browsing the collection of original PhDs, trying to locate the first one written by a woman… depressingly difficult to locate.

When law school lost its gloss for the first time, I finished my arts degree and drifted over to Curtin to do a one year Graduate Diploma in Information and Library Studies. All the while still working in the UWA library at nights. I left the job half way through the year to work as a librarian/researcher in a small St George’s Terrace law firm, completing my Grad Dip in the same year.

Unlike Barbara or Chris, I was a long, long way from Grad School when I started my first full-time position as a 23 year old, as a systems librarian in a three-branch public library. It would be another 20 years before I completed my Master in Information Management back at Curtin again, being hired as an Associate Lecturer in the department about a month before my Masters thesis was finally marked.