It’s all coming together.

I’ve been having a bit of a heart wrench lately, thinking about what kind of hot librarian I want to be when I’m done with the program.

I’ve known I wanted to be a children’s librarian since I was in high school, and I came to school with that as my goal. I started volunteering in the conservation library (The Place that Fixes Broken Books) and have kind of fallen in love with it. I’m not as much a fan of preservation – that means writing reports and guidelines and grants – but I do love fixin’ books.

So I talked to the amazing Jennifer Hain Teper today about how I could possibly mash-up these two happy things. She, of course, had the answer I wanted to hear. She described having a background in conservation as a cookie. I’d be a public library young adult librarian candidate with a wonderful, useful, not-common cookie. A sidehatch, if you will.

I feel so much better about spending all this time in the conservation lab, and I’m going to sign up for a practicum next semester that will allow me to learn about how preservation and conservation in a public library works – because public libraries often do not have a good system for this – and I will be even more valuable as a possible employee. That makes me feel extra smug about it.