A New Feature – Reports From An Academic Librarian’s First Year On The Job

The ACRLog blog team is excited to offer a new feature for this academic year. We told you about the ACRL member survey , and its demographic data leads us to believe that a fair number of years have passed since many of our readers spent their first year as an academic librarian. Well, we hope to take you back to those halcyon days (excepting perhaps those who landed the first job from hell) with reports from our first-year academic librarian, Lauren Jensen. I asked Lauren to share with me some information about how she came to choose a career in academic librarianship. Consider her response your introduction to Lauren:

I spent my undergraduate time at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, IL. While I was there I started working in the library while pursuing History and Political Science and had planned on working as a legislative aide or within a museum. By the end of my junior year, I decided that the library was a place that I enjoyed and I was encouraged by the staff to pursue this. Julia Dickinson, Public Services Librarian, now at Berea College in KY, was both my supervisor and mentor. Our discussions, along with others on the staff, made me realize that libraries were the place to be. I graduated in May of 2005 and started my Masters of Science at the Univesrity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 2005. I planned on completing the program in one year, and then secured a Graduate Assistantship position with the Government Documents Library there under Karen Hogenboom, Mary Mallory, and David Griffiths. While finishing up school, I started looking for jobs and found an opening for a public services librarian at the Hewes Library at Monmouth College in west-central Illinois. I was hired at the end of May, finished school end of July, and started here mid-August.

We look forward to Lauren’s occasional reports from the field, and we hope you will as well. Look for Lauren’s first post sometime next week.