From the ALA:
Mean librarian salaries up 2% in 2008
Analysis of data from more than 1,010 public and academic libraries showed that the mean salary for librarians with ALA-accredited master’s degrees increased 2% from 2007, up $1,151 to $57,809. The median ALA MLS salary was $53,251, and salaries ranged from $22,000 to $331,200. Results are reported in the 2008 edition of the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Librarian—Public and Academic, published by the ALA–Allied Professional Association….
So my summer internship is over and it’s back to California tomorrow. I’m excited to get back to Victor, and Arty, and California friends. And I’m excited to start my new job at Berkeley’s bioscience library. I like work, and I’m going to be doing some challenging stuff and, doubtlessly, learning a lot. But I’m reluctant to re-assume all the trappings of working life.
Travis and I were just talking about this when I was visiting him over this past weekend. One of the nice things about this summer internship was the fact that I had work, without all the trappings of work. I could show up to work smelling like fish cause I’d just helped to pick gillnets, and that was cool with everyone cause they smelled like fish too. There was certainly no expectation of looking nice, or having showered, or any of that. Commuting consisted of walking across the street from the chicken coop to the office, although sometimes I did have to walk across the street in the rain. I could work extra hours on four days to scamper off early for the weekend on Friday.
So even though I’m excited to start work at Berkeley, I’m mentally rebelling against the need to dress (and smell) nice again, to commute again, to adhere to a schedule again. I’m particularly unexcited about the commute - I’ll be taking BART, which is nice cause I’ll be able to read on the train, but it’s going to be around an hour in each direction, all told. That bumps my workweek from 40 hrs to 50 hrs, right there.
So all this is making me feel particularly determined to find a close-to-ideal situation when I’m done with school next May. I doubt I’ll be able to find a job that allows me to show up smelling like fish (and I guess I can live with that). But I want to be picky about where the job is located (Victor and I want to move back east to be close to our families), and where we live in relation to the job, and the character of the town that we live in, whether it holds opportunities for Victor as well as myself, whether it’s a place where we’ll want to spend some time. Hopefully there will be enough opportunities when I graduate that I’ll be able to exercise some amount of pickiness - maybe my resolutions will melt away in the light of the reality of the situation. Victor and I have both made a few sacrifices for the sake of library school and my fledgling career (thank you, Victor); nothing major, but we’ve still made some decisions that have steered our lives away from how we’d ideally like to live. I’m hoping that with my first professional job, we’ll be able to re-adjust our priorities back to be more in line with our ideals.
Just left my cool job at the Center to go on to another cool job at Cornell. I told my friends at the old job that I’d keep them up-to-date via this blog, so I’m unearthing it. Look at it! It’s so dusty and creaky. It’s like a zombie. Except that I think zombies are more wet than dusty. I wonder if my mom is still checking it (the blog, not the zombie) every day? If she isn’t, does it mean she no longer loves me?
So, since my last post, there was Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were lovely, then a new semester that included an internship and a coupla classes plus my old job at the Center, and then I got a job, and another job, and a scholarship. The first job is via Cornell’s Biology Library but I will actually be working and living at the Cornell Biological Field Station. It starts June 2 and will last through the summer. I’ll be working on a data curation project involving a long term aquatic ecology data set, an online repository, two dwarves, and a wheel of cheese. There will also be the semantic web. I will tell you more about it later, when it actually happens and I know enough about it not to be nonsensical and flippant. After that I’ll be working full-time for UC Berkeley’s Bioscience Library. In a fact that turns out to be not entirely coincidental, this is also where I did my internship this semester. And I won a scholarship for one thousand dollars based on my sheer intellectual prowess. Disappointingly, it’s to be applied to my tuition rather than given to me cash in hand. Oh, and I have to take a couple more classes before I graduate, which will be in Spring 2009, unless the asteroids come and muck everything up.
So that brings you just about up to date, except for two important events. One is that Victor and I went hiking on the Tomales Bay Pt. Trail in Pt. Reyes Nat’l Seashore and saw elk, and wildflowers, and elk in wildflowers. Like this:
And, we went to Limantour beach (also in Pt. Reyes Nat’l Seashore) and found that the best thing to do at the beach is to bury Arty in the sand. Here’s how:
And so:
And then he falls asleep:
And there you have it. Next post might be from Rhode Island, or Cornell, or something. Or it could just be from here.
We have lots of lovely, big, reflective picture windows where I work. Which is nice, from a pleasant-work-environment standpoint. Unfortunately, one window in particular is situated in such a way that it reflects an inviting vista of trees and sky, and consequently it’s not uncommon for birds to crash headlong into the window and either die or be stunned.
This happened to a juvenile sharp-shinned hawk last week. It’s a beautiful bird: it was really a shame. It’s now in our freezer. I’m planning on donating it to the California Academy of Sciences, as they have a collection of bird skins, but before we froze it we took a few pictures.
So I got to go home early today from work.
First, we had a fire. This is the second brush fire in as many weeks that has come close enough to the Center to necessitate the stationing of a Fire Marshall on the premises to evacuate us in a timely fashion should the need arise. So we were on tenterhooks most of the afternoon, ready to grab our personals and go.
Then, in an anticlimactic sort of fashion, the power went out. It may have been cut by the fire department, but we didn’t get any warning if it was. After wandering around for a minute or two, the assistant director said, “I give up. Everyone just go home.” So I did. Yay!
Today is my last day of a 3 week span of freedom.
Tomorrow I start my summer semester. I’m taking a PHP/MySQL class.
On Friday I will start a new job. It’s in addition to my current job, but should only occupy about 10 hours per week. I will be working largely from home: my primary responsibility will be to maintain a blog for the School of Library Science’s internship program.
To prepare myself physically and spiritually for these transitions, I underwent a cleansing ritual. There were no sweatlodges, psychotropic substances, or emetics involved, though. I just cleaned my desk.
I filed last semester’s notes and papers. I organized my texbooks. I rearranged my plants.
I am pleased.
I’m not a napper but I’m increasingly of the opinion that most others are. It has only recently begun to dawn on me that this may be the case.
Nappers, of course, can’t say enough good things about napping. I think that napping is fine, but it’s just not for me. Midday naps leave me feeling disoriented and cranky. However, lately I’ve begun to feel pressure to nap. It may be because I’ve recently changed jobs, and most of my co-workers seem to nap, often during lunch. In a new environment, it can be difficult to find one’s place, and the temptation to succumb to habits that one wouldn’t normally adopt in order to fit in can be somewhat overwhelming. Will it take me longer to be accepted by my co-workers, because I don’t nap?
During a lunchtime conversation one of my coworkers alluded to a study linking napping with longer life spans. At the time I assumed that this must undoubtedly be a correlative rather than a causative relationship, since napping generally goes along with doing things like taking long strolls in the countryside and sipping a glass of red wine most days, and that this more laid-back approach to existence was the overall cause of the longer life span. However, a cursory glance over some web pages of varying authoritativeness (I won’t bother to cite them here, so as to perpetuate the dubiousness) indicate that napping per se may lead to longer life. There seemed to be something about natural dips in our brain functioning in the afternoon, and 20 minutes of sleep at that time being more efficacious than, say, sleeping 20 minutes later in the morning. This is probably common knowledge, since it’s one of those factoids that encourages us to do things that most already want to do, like eat chocolate. Or drink red wine, for that matter. Since I don’t watch the evening news, I’m often slower to pick up on these things than most.