 is of the Dr. Martin Luther King Junior Library, which is a unique collaboration between San Jose State University and the city of San Jose. The SJSU King Library's combined academic and public services make it the nation's largest joint library. Today's workshop is part of our pathway series introducing the different MLIS career pathways where you will get an insight perspective from instructors who have worked in specific fields. Today we'll be talking about skill sets that prepare students for work in academic libraries. So let's get started with the agenda. Today's agenda consists of an overview of the academic librarianship pathway, which courses students can consider, how students use a skill set, and then we'll meet faculty with expertise in this area who have made themselves available to answer your questions. What is academic librarianship? Academic libraries are found in institutions of higher education, in community colleges, private colleges, major universities, or specialized research institutes. Academic libraries employ approximately 26,600 professional librarians. Although academic library positions vary depending on the mission and type of institution they serve, some common responsibilities include managing projects, departments, and community relationships, along with providing instruction, reference, curriculum, research, classroom support, and keeping up with trends and technical advancements in library and information science. Here's a list of core theory and knowledge that students pursuing the pathway would benefit from in building a career in this area, such as uses of technology and issues facing libraries in higher education. These can be found on the iSchool MLIS Career Pathway for Academic Librarianship. Additionally, new roles for The Road Ahead, just published by ACRL, is available on our pathway page on the iSchool website. This is a collection of essays from leaders in the academic librarianship field with topics ranging from intra-institutional collaboration to librarians' roles in student learning incomes, or outcomes, I'm sorry, to evolving professional identities of academic librarians. Foundational and recommended courses such as Info230, issues in academic libraries, with similar topics such as digital libraries, data services, and design thinking, can be found on our MLIS website under this pathway. Internships are not required, but a great way to gain professional experience. Now, I'll turn it over to Sheila. Thank you so much, Taryn. So, for tips about jobs in academic libraries, they can be found listed in our iSchool MLIS Skills at Work Report on the following pages listed on the slide that you see. For each category in academic librarianship, such as collections, cataloging, reference, outreach, and instruction, this 2021 report is available for download from our website. I'll give you a few highlights today, but you should really read through and then return to the new report each year that you're in the program for updated trends as you progress throughout the program. The report highlights why you should think about a career in academic libraries, and the authors of the report found that 48% of the 400 posted positions were in academic libraries, while 87% of the jobs that were analyzed requested an MLIS. Other, sorry about that, while 87% of the jobs that were analyzed requested an MLIS, other advanced degrees in addition to the MLIS may be preferred for some positions, especially in academic libraries. So, if you have another master's in say a humanities or social sciences field, this could be a plus in the job search. In 2021, this report concluded that 90% of job postings looked for a candidate with experience, and 11% increased since the report was published in 2020. So this demonstrates that internships and even volunteer positions for those without experience could be a vital part of a candidate's overall strategy to present a competitive package to employers. Now, in the report, you will see that jobs were analyzed both by job function and by library type. So it's a great idea to map the job skills that you see to iSchool courses that you've taken or internship or volunteer experiences that you've completed to see where there might be gaps between your own skills and then the targeted positions that you're looking at. So you can use these gaps to identify which electives you may want to take in your remaining credits. You can use the worksheets in the student success planner to document this. And on the slide, you'll see I've kind of mapped specific sample job duties that I've found to perhaps topics that could be found on the academic librarianship pathway. So I suggest everyone interested in this pathway should take a deep dive into the career environment section of our iSchool career development resource for very detailed information about the types of academic libraries and the various roles that you could fill including salaries and promotion requirements and then tips to help you land your dream job. Often tenure track librarians are expected to do research and publish results in peer review journals as part of the promotion to tenure process. Now this may not be true for academic staff librarians but as you apply for work in different academic settings it's important to determine how the institution classifies librarian employment and status because that will help you know what you need to do to advance your career in that setting. So we talked about this strategy in our last pathway workshop but even early in your program here with us you could create job alerts on Indeed or other job search aggregators with keywords so that you can keep your eye on the types of positions in academic settings that are available in your area. Now here is an example from higher ed jobs and you can also try this with some of the other well-known job sites like Carl if you're looking within California or even SJSU handshake. Now all the job announcements that come into the iSchool are directed over to SJSU handshake which is the database that all iSchool students and alumni have access to for job search and there are many other recommended job sites in our career development resource that you can take advantage of. And I'll give you another couple of examples of two very different positions within academic libraries that I found on Carl's database. And I also found technician positions at several institutions such as Stanford and a local community college district which could be helpful if a student has no academic library experience and is looking to get a foot in the door. So you'll see here that one of the positions is very unique. It's Food and Wine Archivist at UC Davis and then another position as an academic library technologist for Occidental College which is a private college in the Los Angeles area. So some more suggestions on how you can engage with our various iSchool resources to help power up your profile. Do not forget to tap into all of these supports that iSchool has put in place for you and a good way to organize your efforts is to make use of the career planning checklist inside your student success planner. And now I'm so happy to be able to let you know we have advisors here and you will have a chance to have an opportunity to hear tips and recommendations from experts in this pathway. The iSchool Associate Director, Dr. Main whose career background is in academic librarianship will first introduce and start us off our panelists and then they're gonna introduce themselves and let you know about their background in the pathway, the skills and topics that they feel are timely and current and a little bit about courses that they teach. And then later we will be opening it up for a Q&A with our panelists. So over to you, Dr. Main. Okay, thank you very much Sheila and hello to everybody. And I'm really pleased that so many of you have joined us today. As Sheila said, before I went full time into teaching I worked extensively in a very large academic library and I have continued to consult in specialized areas in a few academic libraries, primarily in Europe because you can see if you look on the screen at the courses that I kind of focus on they're primarily in what we call special collections. The term is actually rather unique to the United States and I think possibly Canada. And so it's dealing with early books and libraries, medieval manuscripts and early printed books in Cunabula, the first 50 years of printing. But I think the important thing to understand is that these areas are very specialized but they do tend to be mostly within academic libraries though also in museums and in some very large historical associations. Now how I got there, I think is supportive of a lot of what Sheila was just talking about and the fact that there are many there's no one kind of academic library and no one kind of academic librarian any more than there is one public library or one public librarian. You need to put together I think a variety of skillsets and possibly advance into different areas throughout the library as your career moves forward. So for example, I started out working in what we call reference now. And then I did quite a lot of collection management work primarily with the history department because my background was in medieval history. And then I moved into technology implementation projects and ultimately landed into the area in the library that dealt with manuscripts and preservation of manuscripts and early printed books. But in fact, they actually involved a lot of technology because even when I was working there and I'm still consulting in many of them and increasingly nowadays the big focus is access. So the library is not just the building there it's to be giving access to a very wide number of people and often to all of its collections. So just to take one example it would be lovely though a little complicated from the West Coast to go to Reykjavík in Iceland and take a look at the Icelandic sagas. But even if you did that, they would be in glass cases and you probably couldn't see very much. But in fact, there's no need to do that anymore because of technology and tremendous tools that have been developed. We can look at tremendous collections in academic libraries and museums and other places and we can see them in tremendous detail and because of digitization and the way that they're curated and various tools with various standards that have been developed. You can even use tools like the international image interoperability framework. We're always fond of jargon in our field where you can actually use this tool to look at the same manuscript that has been collected in two different collections. So you might be able to bring up a copy of the Gutenberg Bible perhaps from a library in Germany and then bring up another copy from a library in Amsterdam and compare the two. And this is very, very important for scholars. So I think you need to have a variety of skill sets if you're going to move into academic libraries. So the basic stuff, obviously you'll be doing quite a lot of teaching so information literacy is very important, good communication skills very important. But nowadays, I think too, when you go to the interview, I think you need to be looking different from other people. And so if it was me, I would be thinking about a class in digital humanities. I would have a class in digital preservation and curation. Perhaps think about OER, the open education resources. I would think about things like data services in libraries, things like information visualization, basically how to collect data to make evidence-based kinds of decisions. But in addition to that, I would recommend being the person at the interview that looked to the future and even talked about maybe your interest in going into special collections and how all very current technologies making a huge difference. And I'm thinking in terms of artificial intelligence and how machine learning is enabling us to look into very early documents and helping us decipher handwriting. So I might pick up a class in artificial intelligence. I might discuss how virtual and augmented reality would let you create an example of perhaps an early printing workshop so that when you're bringing freshmen around the library or working with freshmen who need to understand about these things, taking a history course, then you can develop and show very good tools and good projects. And I think it offers a tremendously exciting career in there. So Sheila, I know that another area that's very important is leadership and that kind of skill set. And I think that's our next speaker, right? Yes, let's transition now. Our next guest panelist is Dr. Hicks. And would you like to share your tips and hints with the folks today? Hi, everyone. So I'm Dr. Deborah Hicks. I am the core coordinator for Info204, which if you haven't taken yet, you will definitely take before you leave us. It's the core required course that looks largely at leadership and management topics as well as the foundations of the profession. And I also teach one of the Info282s, one of the seminars in library management. And this one is focused on what I call community leadership. And I'm gonna focus more on that one today just because all of you will be required at some point to take 204. And in some ways, 204 is what you make of it. So if you're interested in academic libraries, you have the opportunity through your organizational analysis assignment to really take a look at what an academic library is from an organizational point of view. So you get to see how complex it is as an organization through that. And you can also take opportunities throughout the course to really dive a bit deeper into specific academic library topics. But in 282, what sort of sets this class apart from some of the other offerings that we have is not only do we look at what I would maybe call non-heroic leadership approaches, so more collaborative approaches that focus on working with communities directly as opposed to one person coming up with visions and executing those visions. Well, you also have the opportunity to work directly with libraries in the field who need work done for them. And so you get to create a real life product for a library. And so last year when we taught it for the first time, there were three academic library options that we worked with. For one group worked on a marketing plan for an information literacy program. Another group worked on a DEI toolkit for an academic library in downtown Portland, Oregon, where I live. And for those of you who aren't familiar with Portland, our downtown core has a very diverse population, a very visible, houseless population. And the library and the university that is downtown was trying very hard to ensure that not only were the students and faculty supported through this DEI toolkit, but also that the relationship between the community and the university in the library was supported through it as well. And then we also had a group working on a first year student experience project through another library. And so these were all real life projects for academic libraries where you get to put your leadership skills, these like collaborative leadership skills that we read and we think and we talk about throughout the course into practice through these real life, immediately useful projects that not only can you put on a CV and talk about in a job interview where you talk about meeting the actual needs of first year students, for example, but you can actually share that with them as well. And so it's really hands on and gives you that opportunity to add that line to the CV while also diving a little deeper into some leadership theories as well. One of the things that I didn't mention off the bat was that I also worked as an academic librarian before. I got my PhD. I worked at the University of Alberta in Canada as the philosophy liaison. Now, one of the things that when Linda was talking, Dr. Main was talking that she mentioned was that she ended up doing collections work in history because that's where she had background. Well, I ended up doing collections work in philosophy which wasn't my background, which is I think the more common way of going about collections work where a lot of us, because we tend to come in with humanities and social science backgrounds, we end up collecting in fields that are not our own. So like Linda, I have a couple of history degrees and I would have been the ideal candidate to be the history liaison. However, they already had one of those and so I had to pivot fairly quickly to go into the philosophy section. And sometimes you have to pivot even sort of a bigger pivot and go into STEM when you have a history background, for example. And so it requires a lot of flexibility and a lot of willingness to learn how other disciplines think and interact with information. So that to me is one of the big takeaways, one of the big takeaways for me as a librarian was figuring out like, oh, okay, so history and philosophy have a lot in common but they also have some differences and like learning those intricate differences was really important. The other thing that I discovered as an academic librarian was just how complex university libraries and universities in general are, they are not straightforward institutions. They can be a little arcane, they have levels of bureaucracy that you accidentally walk into all the time. And you need to learn those levels in order to get things done. And so one of the things that I did was in addition to taking management leadership classes was I kept my eyes open and I watched and I tried to figure out what the connections were and who was working with who and who was the right person to go to at the right time. And I found that to be really interesting. It was actually, it was commented upon by a colleague, she's like, oh no, you watch, when you're in a meeting, you watch people, you figure out what's going on. It's like, yeah, I do. Cause that's how you figure out the internal politics to see just watch what's happening and who's talking to who. And that was very helpful. It also sort of highlights a complexity around academic libraries that is sometimes not talked about as directly as I think it should be. And that is the complexity around the stakeholders and their needs. So if you think about who academic libraries serve, we tend to think immediately of students which are really important. And we, especially when we talk about information literacy and their needs and the collection needs around their education. But faculty are equally as important. They're just slightly more invisible users of the library generally. They don't come in, you're not seeing a faculty member come in and use the physical space of the library in the same way. And the positions at doctor or the courses that Dr. Main was talking about around digital humanities and OER resources and data services, those are really focused on faculty needs. And it's, I think they're an emerging that side of things the emerging faculty needs are becoming more and more important for academic libraries, especially as faculty are being asked to search out more grant funding for their own research and activities like that. And it is trickling down into the student level but sometimes when it comes at an organizational level the need to support information literacy and the need to support these data services they don't compete per se but they do beg questions around resource allocation. So that's just something to keep in mind around that. Now tips on preparing for a career. This is where I always stumble for it not because there isn't like right things to do but there is not one pathway. I can't say, oh yes, you need to take these courses in order to definitely get a career in academic librarianship that in some ways in addition to making sure that yes you are aware of the trends and the topics that are coming out of academic librarianship you also want to spend time getting to know your professional a little bit taking on leadership roles. So this isn't like take a course it's sort of like getting involved in your professional association and showing potential employers that you're interested in the profession and where it's going and this could be in a leadership position for this, you know, our student associations but it could also be like doing a presentation at a conference attending, you know doing a poster at ALA or CLA or something like that where you're showing off, you're you're showing off your ability and your interest in participating in the profession as a fully fledged professional and this is in some ways like an easy way to demonstrate leadership ability without having to take on a management role in some organizations. It's just saying I'm really interested in being a part of this profession and this is how I'm going to demonstrate it. Now I'm going to put on a slightly different hat right now and I'm going to tell you that at the college level we are having a student showcase coming up in February, I believe you should have already seen an email about it where you are invited to come and virtually do give a poster presentation about a project that you're working on and that's the kind of activity that align on your CV or in your resume that an academic library would be looking for which is you're sharing your insights, you're sharing your work and you're learning to talk about it professionally as well. So that was my plug for our student research forum so come join us. It'll be fun and it'll be a really low stakes way to practice your presentation skills around research plus there will be swag. So come, get a water bottle. So thank you. I think is it Allison who's next? I think so. Thank you so much for those wonderful insights. Thank you. Go ahead, Allison Johnson. Hi, thank you. It's really exciting to be here. I love talking about academic librarianship and so just to kind of give you part of my background, I started working in academic libraries as a circulation assistant which is one of those entry level academic library positions. So if you are trying to figure out how to get your foot in the door, I would definitely keep an eye out for those support staff. Sometimes those positions are called but basically you're kind of maybe working face to face with the patrons. So a circulation supervisor, I was at the front desk, I supervised student workers that were in the college and so it was really a supervisory position and but in that, doing that, you gain a ton of library experience. So I think that those entry level positions are certainly something to consider keeping an eye out for and a great way to get your foot in the door. I know not everyone's able to volunteer or do an internship if you have to work full time and in that case, you know, just the ideal thing is to find one of those positions. There are lots of them in libraries at my library. This might not be the case everywhere but we had more support staff than we did actual librarians. So those kinds of positions are really important to keep the library functioning. So after doing that for a little while, I received my MLIS degree while working full time as many of you are and then I did several things in the library. I started with public services which are those patron facing services like circulation in our library loan reference that kind of thing. So, you know, being the librarian over those areas, working face to face with students and faculty in the academic library and then eventually just kind of started supervising more departments in the library and became an assistant director for several years. So that was my library pass into academic libraries and it's really amazing the diversity of things that you can do in academic libraries and it was one of my favorite things about it was just even in one specific position that you might have, there's just such a wide variety of tasks you can do. Some days I might be really focused on teaching other days I maybe shut up in my office trying to write something. I might be managing a workflow, might be working with one of our systems trying to tweak things to get it to run more efficiently. There's just such a huge variety. Managing, like I said, student workers or library staff working team building that kind of thing. So some positions are more specific but I have found that a lot of academic library positions just offer a really fun variety of things that you get to do on a daily basis. Another thing that I think is really interesting to know is that as others have said too, there is a lot of diversity as far as one academic library differing from another academic library. I did not work at a large research institution. I worked at a private liberal arts college university and so it was a much smaller campus environment and kind of a more close knit type community and the librarians that worked there, we did several things. We had more multiple hats and most of the librarians were involved in reference work either at the reference desk online via chat or working with classes, working with students, going into classes, working with faculty, we liaison to multiple departments. So I did history, I liaison to honors college and also the business department and like Dr. Hicks said, sometimes you just get those departments assigned to you but certainly there would be many academic libraries where they might even require a second masters in the area where you are going to specialize and be a subject specialist librarian. So there is just so much diversity. I know some students say, well, I heard you had to have a second masters or dah, dah, dah and that's just not true. I actually got hired into a librarian position before I even had my MLIS degree. So let alone a second master. So there just is a lot of diversity there and the best thing you can do is really keep an eye on those job postings, what's coming open, really look at what they have there. If they say that it's something that's required, it probably is going to be required because of the bureaucracy of academia. It might very well be required but some of those qualities that are listed as desired, qualities not required, those may very well be very flexible. So don't get discouraged if you don't meet all of the criteria. It doesn't hurt to put yourself out there and to go for some of those positions because like I said, just being, it can be kind of intimidating to think that you don't have the experience of the qualifications but you very well may be the kind of person that they're looking for. So because of this diversity of responsibilities, I would encourage you to think about your past experiences, your degrees, even your bachelor's degree, it doesn't have to be a second master's degree. What is your background in? So my background was in education and one of the things that I think got me my first job was that background because education is very applicable even though it was elementary education, it was very applicable in the college environment because you do many roles, you do teaching. So it's really important to think about what you have to offer if you've used any kind of technology in previous positions, worked with any kind of information retrieval system in a previous occupation, you can talk about that as experience. So really dig into your background, what you have done, what kind of projects you've done management and just because you haven't done those in a library doesn't mean you don't have experience that's relevant to the job. So I would really think about those and talk to advisors, talk to people who can try to help you connect with how does the background I do have connect with academic librarianship and then you already have a head start to really start to capitalize on that experience that you do already have instead of focusing on what you don't have. And like I think it was Dr. Mayn that suggested really keying in to certain areas that can kind of become your specialty that you talk about in those interviews and things and those can relate to past experiences that you have. So it's just a wonderful thing about the field that if you really like the college environment, the university environment, the academic environment, you want to work in that, that you really can pull in your other previous experiences into that environment. This is a great place for people who are curious and love to learn. There's endless learning in academic libraries. Every student that walks up to you with a new question, you get to dive into their area of research and it's so much fun to learn about new areas. And my favorite thing was that, you got to do all the research and you never had to actually write the paper. So it's just one of those things that makes academic libraries a lot of fun. But again, there are librarians that never work face to face with the patrons, with the library users, with students and faculty. There are many positions that are behind the scenes working with technology. So I teach Info 202 Information Retrieval System Design which is one of the core courses that I see some of my students are here now but you may or may not have already taken. But I think that in academic libraries, there are so many systems that are involved in running a library, managing behind the scenes face to face that the users are interacting with websites, databases, everything. There's so many of these. And it's the academic librarians that are involved in a lot of the design decisions. So there are some librarians that may have their hands back in there in the code and in the database behind the scenes. But all of the librarians are involved in decision making about how the patrons are going to interface with these systems. How, what options do we want to be available? What do we need to be drawing their attention to? So all of this design process and that's why Information Retrieval System Design Info 202 is so critical to any librarian and especially academic librarians because so much of the work you do does revolve around these systems. So I'm excited that you all are expressing interest. There's so much to this field. I don't know, marketing has been just talked about much but there's definitely this side of putting the library out there to students trying to do outreach, trying to get them comfortable with the library, getting it on their radar. So there's this whole aspect of marketing in academic libraries. Also the user experience is huge in libraries. So if you are really like to think about how is the user interacting with anything from signage to physical spaces in the library to websites, it's all part of the user experience in academic libraries, accessibility. All of this is really huge. So like I said, at the beginning there's so many things to grab onto in this field. I encourage you to kind of view it with a very broad lens and to find the things that really resonate with you as you start to kind of build your own place within academic libraries. All right, thank you so much. Thank you to all three of our panelists. So now this is a really fun time where our attendees get a chance to ask any burning questions of any of our advisors. And it looks like we have our Q&A open but before we start going through the Q&A that are already appearing in the Q&A module of our Zoom I have a few questions that came in for the panelists of students that weren't able to make it to the session. So I'll go through these and we'll see if we can get some of these answered by whomever would like to make a stab at it. So the first question was how did you know that you felt that you were gravitating towards academic librarianship let's say over the other possible pathways? Do any of our panelists want to talk about that? I can take a stab at that one. Great. So what drew me to academic librarianship was a previous master's degree that I had it. I didn't know what to do with it on the job market. Dr. Mayne might agree with this. The history master's degree is a wonderful thing. It is not necessarily the most employable degree they have out there. And so initially, not unlike Dr. Mayne I was sort of interested in going into archival work and working with documents more directly because of my history background. But when I took my first reference class everything changed. And it sort of really connects up to what Allison was saying this idea of going down into the rabbit hole with a student and occasionally even with faculty members but not having to necessarily write the paper at the end yourself really drew me into that. So I got to sort of still play in the world of academe without having to take on all of the responsibilities that come with being a student in academia. And then I went off and became a professor and re-entered the world in a different way. But it did offer me a way of staying within academia without necessarily remaining a perpetual student. Hey, great. Dr. Mayne. Yeah, I was just going to say that like probably many people certainly in my cohort I was just out job hunting. And I was like, I just basically wanted to get into the job market and ended up starting to work in Trinity College and find that I really liked it. And then just, and that there were many opportunities to do a variety of different things. And then just basically did not move on from there. So it wasn't a great calling for me. As Dr. Hicks said, I had a history degree. I had an even narrower history degree which is a specialty in medieval history. It has since worked very well for me when I'm doing consultancy projects with special collections. But at the time, the only opportunity really was to teach and I didn't want to teach. And so I went into the academic library and then absolutely find my place there and really enjoyed it. And now of course, what am I doing with teaching? But so I think there's many different pathways Sheila that we all kind of get into. That's right. Okay, I think I'm going to go to the next question in the interest of time, which is perhaps Dr. Mayne would you like to describe the difference between getting into working at a junior college or community college versus a university library in terms of requirements and qualifications? I actually know quite a few people who have gone to work in community college. And basically there, I think, certainly in California and I believe across the country, the real focus there tends to be more on the students. As Dr. Hicks was talking about in the larger academic libraries, the faculty have to publish and it's a requirement often for them to make tenure. In the community colleges, the faculty do publish and contribute a lot, real focus is on teaching and on the students. So I think in the community college library, the work is going to be much more on the information literacy, running orientations for students and working very closely with students and possibly also working with students who've come from disadvantaged backgrounds and working with ESL students. And then obviously many community colleges are just completely open. You will also have the public coming in there. Now you will do some of that in the larger academic libraries, but there you will also be supporting faculty who will be interested in support for data services, for grants who will need to help with like scholarly communication and publishing in there. So I think it's very much more hands on with students in the community colleges. Great, okay. The next question was about similarities and differences between preparing for a job in academic librarianship versus the public librarianship pathway. I know we have many students who are interested in multiple pathways. And if any of our panelists want to comment on that, preparing for possibly a job in either both of those pathways. I would say one focus that might be different is you might want to do more extensive reference or specialized reference courses, looking more in depth at advanced searching techniques and maybe looking at special topic areas to do research in as opposed to public libraries, you might need less of the specific focused courses in reference, but there also, again, like I mentioned before, it depends on kind of what flavor of academic librarianship you're interested in as far as technology, which direction you want to go. So I would really kind of think about that and maybe even kind of thinking about as combining multiple pathways to make your own pathway. Do you want to pair academic librarianship with another focus as well, emerging technologies or really kind of making it your own? Thank you. Okay, we have so many questions. I'm gonna try to go through these in a speed round. Any panelists want to describe some of their favorite job duties and non-favorite job duties, job duties that you did not enjoy for a realistic spin on your real experiences? I can start with this one because it's very easy for me. I hated buying books, hated it. I don't know why it was, but it was something that I put off and put off and put off and then would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in a really short amount of time, which sounds like it's really fun and really pleasant, but it ended up being really stressful for me and I just, it wasn't something I enjoyed doing. The, at least when I was purchasing books, the interfaces that I was working with were really complex and they weren't fun to use and so that was part of the problem. That you know, for those of you who have been around academic libraries for a while, they used to get a slip and used to just sort of like a little slip of paper that would give you all the information and they tried to replicate that online and it didn't go well. So that was my least favorite part of the job and the part of the job I put off a lot, even though most people think it sounds like the best part of the job. The best part of the job, I would say, was probably reference work. I really enjoyed reference work. I worked in a humanities and social sciences library so it was really interesting questions that were coming up and that sort of got that part of my brain that really enjoyed that puzzle searching and that puzzle putting together part came together. I also like people and like working with people and so that public facing side really appealed to me. So yeah, that would be what I liked and what I didn't like. Okay, then we have another question. Is there anything I can do in my last semester to help prepare myself for a career? This is a person who works a full-time job and doesn't have time to do the internship and they wanted any tips on when to begin job applications or practical steps that they could take prior to graduation or tips on what kind of portfolio work is best to utilize with a job application? Well, I can jump in there and I think it's a mistake to not try to fit in an internship, even a virtual internship. Now, I understand that you're working full-time and that of course you have to do that. I mean, you have to keep your job, you have to pay the bills, you have to put foot on the table. Of course that you must do that but often with a virtual internship you can work your hours depending on what they're having you do. It might be developing information literacy modules. For example, it might be organizing digital collections and some of that you might be able to do the evening at the weekends and work around your job and I think that would really pay off highly. Thank you. Okay, the next question. I have a quick follow-up to that. Please do, yes. There was a when to apply and I would say the real answer is you can apply basically at any point during your degree. If they want you, they will wait for you to finish your degree. You can negotiate that. So if you see a job right now that you're like, oh, in six months time I'm gonna have this degree and I will be perfect for it. You can just say in six months time I will have a degree and I will be your perfect candidate in your cover letter. So don't necessarily let that hold you back from applying because they will wait for you. Okay, I'm gonna go to this question. This attendee asks, I've frequently come across academic library jobs that require knowledge of archival systems, mark, Dublin core, et cetera. What are the best MARA and MLIS classes to take to fulfill these requirements? And I think Dr. Mayn, you have your mute. I was just going to say, could you just give me the first part of the question again, please? They wanted to know the best MARA or MLIS classes that would guarantee their knowledge of the archival systems such as mark, Dublin core, et cetera. Well, obviously it would be a combination of things. I think it would be the Info 248 class, but also the class on metadata would be incredibly important. There's a class on encoded archival description, which is one of the 246 classes and also a class on XML would be the areas that I would, well, they're the areas basically that I work in because I do work in the backend things of manuscripts. And those are kind of the important and key drivers, I think at the moment. Thank you. Okay, the next question, the student wanted to know the link for the career environments pages. So all you need to do is go to the hamburger menu on our website and you will be able to navigate to the career resources pages of our website and underneath career environments, you'll find the one for academic librarianship pathway. Alrighty, the next question, this would be probably for Dr. Mayn. Is there a benefit on the job market for having completed a thesis versus the e-portfolio? Well, I think you might get very different answers from different people, but I think the general feeling and from the feedback that we get from employers is that we are very much a skills and competencies field now. And that they're very much looking for skills and competencies rather than that sort of in-depth into one tiny thing that you tend to have to do in a thesis. So we're hearing consistently that employers are very much more interested in the e-portfolio as long as the skills and competencies that we have students meet are current and the kinds of things that they're looking for. And I noticed that an awful lot of programs in our field are moving that way. But other people may have different views on that. Okay, I did my thesis option when I did my MLIS. It did make me stand out compared to the people I was competing against, particularly to get into an academic library. I also had a previous master's degree, so that made me stand out a little bit too. But do I think that it got me the job? No, I think that it came with it came with drawbacks that might have also like bit as equal to the benefits of it. So for example, it delayed my graduation by a semester because thesis work just takes time. So that's something to keep in mind. It meant that I couldn't take certain courses because I had these credits to fill. I loved it. It prepared me for my PhD. So like in hindsight, I don't regret doing it, but I don't think it necessarily made me stand out on the job market in a way that I couldn't have done in other ways, yeah. Thank you. Okay, so the next question we're gonna do is when I decided to start the MLIS program, I looked for entry level in all sorts of positions at academic libraries. But I found that my application just didn't get past HR. I used to be a professor and have a PhD in humanities. Is there any advice on how to get an application past HR and into the hands of the folks hiring at academic libraries? I guess I'd ask for a little clarification. You say when you started, when you decided to start the program, then you began to apply. So I'm not clear at what stage you're at now. We're finding increasingly that HR, basically they look to see that you have the degree and they're looking to see that you have the MLIS. They don't really care about what courses you took or whatever, but they're not doing, they do that tick off often, that check off where then they then pass the applications onto the actual hiring committee. And often the hiring committees don't even look at your transcript or your grades or whatever because they've been told by HR that you have the degree and then they can start going through the pool and they will be looking much more at your cover letter, your CV and those kinds of things. So I'm not really sure if you now have the MLIS or if you're just applying now that you've started the program. And I think the other thing is I think it's very important to make sure that you tailor everything specifically to the actual qualifications of that particular opening and the particular things that they're asking for. I'd also like to add on that we do have our career specialist Kim Doherty who works closely with students in the program and alumni. So she might be a great resource for you to reach out to individually to have some of those conversations. I'll go to the next question. If a local academic library is not currently hiring or advertising internships, what are your thoughts on reaching out to see if they need volunteers or are they generally not open to that? Oh, I would reach out absolutely and see if they're open to that. And even if they're not currently offering an internship, they might be very taken with you have changed their mind on that. There's never any harm in asking all people can say is no. But I would definitely go in and have a chat. Alrighty, the next question. Do you think a second master's after the MLIS or a PhD is a necessary thing in the future library world? If so, have you heard of any jobs that help pay for these degrees like in other academic fields? Yes, the short answer to the second part of that question is yes, academic libraries will often support a subject master's or even a PhD if necessary. Sometimes they will pay directly and help you with tuition if they think that there is a benefit to the organization. So if you wanna go off and do a PhD and a topic that they don't care about, they might support you in terms of time off but they might not support you in terms of salary or tuition. But if they decide that you wanna go off and do a PhD in library leadership, for example, then there is a good chance that they will pay for it if they think it's going to benefit you. And more importantly, the organization moving forward. So yeah, that's the short answer. Not so short. We'll try to get a couple more questions in. How common is it for librarians to move between academic and public libraries or do librarians tend to stay on one side or the other? They tend to stay. It's not super uncommon but most people tend to stay once they get in. I've seen, most of the movement I have seen has occurred at the management and leadership levels of organizations. That's where you tend to see a bit more movement. The one of the differences is that if you end up at a big research public library like New York Public Library, it's actually just because of the nature of the work at New York Public Library, academic libraries are very, very interested in that or there are other large research public libraries in the United States as well. But it's a little bit more unusual to see cross-pollination across the sectors. Thank you. Okay, the next question. Do you think in the coming years that we will see opportunities with academic libraries for remote contract work or remote part-time work related to outreach programs, marketing or related services? I don't know that I have a good answer to that. The outreach work, for the outreach work, I do see quite a lot of remote work in academic libraries where they bring in part-time people to help with teaching. And a lot of our students have got good work that way because they're very comfortable with things like Canvas and a lot of the libraries are offering online literacy classes or online orientations to support faculty in classes. So I'm seeing that. I don't know about the actual outreach and whether that will continue or not, possibly, because some of that has had to go online during COVID. And so people are looking at different ways of doing things now. Wow, I see that we have reached the hour of one o'clock. I see that we have a couple of questions that haven't been answered. So what I'd love for you folks to do that didn't get answers is to please send me an email, iSchool at sjsu.edu and I will get answers for you and I will get those email back out to you. I really want to encourage all of you who are interested in this pathway to take advantage of the resources that are on the iSchool website as well as your faculty pathway advisors and reach out to them by email for support with these questions and also the advising tools that we have provided you. Here's a link on the slide for the advising toolkit. I want to thank all of our panelists for joining us today and everyone for coming out and participating in this session. We will be taking a tour around all the pathways this year and offering more workshops on the different pathways. So on behalf of Taryn Reiner and myself, Dr. Main, Allison Johnson and Deborah Hicks, thanks again for joining us for this Lunch and Learn workshop.