Applying for a job: what to do, and what not to do

Firstly, apologies for the massive gap between this post and the last one. I don't have any real excuse except that, well, there's not been much to blog about until now. May mostly consisted of me being on holiday, and whilst June was much busier library-wise, I haven't really been able to talk about it until now.

This is becasue a large chunk of June was taken up with advertising, shortlisting, and interviewing for the post of Library Information Administrator for the Research Repository (known in other circles with less long-winded titles as "Repository Administrators").

Now, I have been involved in the interview process before. Indeed, when we last advertised for a Repository Administrator back in 2010, I designed and assessed the test for it (at UWE, interviews for posts at this grade tend to involve an interview and a test, once you get past the application stage). I've also sat on interview panels for posts in other areas of the university in the past. But this is the first time I've played a part in the entire process, right through from designing the application questions to being on the interview panel.

So, what can I tell you about the process that's helpful if you're thinking of applying for a job? Well, for starters we had over 50 applicants, so that's a lot of job application forms to get through. And we were lucky (or perhaps unlucky, depending upon your view) that almost none of those applications were joke ones. Almost everybody was serious, and had experience that they could apply to the post being advertised. So we really did have to consider 50+ applications. So, considering that, what were the common mistakes people made when applying?

• Simply repeating the job description/ person spec in their application. We wrote it, we know what it says. Good applicants used their understanding of the job and their skills to explain why they would be good at the job, and why they wanted the job.
• Only giving one word-answers in order to demonstrate skills and assuming this meant we knew what they were talking about. If we ask for experience learning a new piece of software, "SPSS" doesn't tell us anything. Except that you can't write in sentences.
• Conversely, giving us one-page answers to demonstrate every skill on the person specification. You don't need to do a brain-dump of everything you've ever learnt - with this many applications, we haven't got time to read it and pick out the salient points. Focus in on the particular skill you want to promote, give us a short one or two-paragraph answer with examples, and demonstrate how you have acquired that skill.
• Using a load of acronyms and then failing to explain what they mean. The library world especially is terrible for acronyms, and whilst most of us might understand the obvious ones (OA, CPD, VLE etc) don't assume this is the case. I know I'm guilty of it, but if I'm applying for a job outside of UWE (or even within it) I won't assume everybody knows what RBI stands for.
• Not being concise when telling us about their current post. It's great to know approximately what somebody currently does, especially if it's relevant, but we don't need a full job description. Anything particularly relevant should be referred to when you promote your specific skills to us.
• Now, this may be UWE-specific, but the UWE application form asks you a number of questions relevant to the person spec that you need to respond to. It then has a section where you can supply additional information. There's nothing wrong with using the additional info box, but don't need to repeat what you've already said. Good things to include in here are things like why you want the job and what you understand about the job and its context. A couple of short paragraphs should suffice.
• Supplying unnecessary CVs. Don't supply your CV unless it is a requirement, or you honestly believe there are a number of things on your CV that you haven't been able to include anywhere on the application form. The UWE application form is pretty extensive as it is, and not once did I then read a CV that changed my mind one way or the other. It's not wrong to include a CV, but it's extra work for the shortlisters that they don't really need.

So, you've taken all that advice on board and been offered an interview. Giving advice on what to do during interviews is harder - mostly because, generally, the people who make it to this stage have done a pretty good job and therefore make fewer obvious mistakes. A couple of points worth thinking about though:

• Know a bit of background about the job and the organisation/ company. I guarantee you at least one other candidate will have done some research, so if you know nothing, it'll become obvious pretty quickly.
• Don't assume you're in with a good chance just because you have experience (either by doing a similar role before, or because you're an internal candidate). Everybody we interviewed had experience. The stand-out applicants were the ones that had experience, enthusiasm, and up-to-date knowledge not just of the job, but also of the area surrounding the job (in this case, open access more generally).
• If you have already answered a question and don't really have anything else to say, keep your mouth shut. This one comes from personal experience when attending interviews as well as being on interview panels. Good interviewers will leave a pause, so if you do think of something worth saying, you'll have time to do so. If you don't think of anything additional, then a brief, concise answer is better than a general ramble with no end-point in sight. Equally, if you haven't gotten anywhere close to the question the interviewer is trying to ask (and remember, they're human too - they can word questions incorrectly or incomprehensibly sometimes), they will do their best to rephrase the question to help you. With a good interviewer, you might not even realise it's meant to be the same question.

One final point that might help with the nerves (and this doesn't come from previous interviewing experience, but from some wise words my mum told me a long time ago): remember, you're judging them as much as they're judging you. You might find the job doesn't sound like what you thought it was going to be, or you don't like the atmosphere, or the attitude of the people you're going to be working with. It might just not feel 'right'. And that's fine; far better for everybody that you find out now than a month into the job. You'll probably find that if you do feel this way you won't get offered the job anyway - it's happened to me in the past and, looking back, I'm incredibly grateful that it did.

Now hopefully that'll advice will help both you and me out if/ when you or I apply for jobs in the future. If I take it on board, apply for jobs and don't get them, I'll let you know so you can ignore the advice above!

State of Play - Open Access: Extending the access to the research literature

Considering I attended this conference at the end of February, this blog post has been a little late in coming. But my recent attendance at the 37th annual UKSG conference, and subsequent blog posts about its content and the ease of networking at it, has reminded me that it’s not the only conference I’ve attended in recent months!

As with the UKSG conference, I wrote a blog post about this conference on open access for our library staff development blog. Whilst what appears below is, for the most part, what appeared there, I have included some perhaps somewhat contentious thoughts that are very much my own personal opinions. Whilst I could have stated these on our staff blog, I didn’t want to take the focus away from the content being discussed. Here, on my own blog, I’m happy for people to take away whatever they will from my own views!

Conference Report

A researcher writes their research. It is then sent off to an independent reviewer (such as a Learned Society) for peer review, before being published by the researcher’s university, which runs a campus-based publishing house.

Is this a nightmare scenario, a pipe dream, or the future as you see it? At the conference I attended entitled “State of Play – Open Access: Extending Access to the Research Literature” it was the ideal scenario that experts in Open Access came up with when asked “How would you ideally structure open access?”

The conference was excellent and fast-paced, with a lot of ideas and strong opinions on the topic of open access. Below I will talk about some of the main themes that captured my interest.
Gold Open Access

This is where the author (or more normally, the funder or university) pays for a piece of research, usually a journal article, to be made freely available to read on the publisher’s website. In contrast to this, green open access is when a version of a piece of research is made freely available online, usually via an institutional repository (such as the UWE Research Repository).

The Head of Science Information at the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) explained that the Research Council UK (RCUK’s) preference was for gold open access rather than green open access. This is because it gives immediate unrestricted access, and is then accessible to the widest audience possible. Articles on institutional repositories often have embargoes, and aren’t the final published versions. Whilst they are usually a good representative of the final version, I can see the argument against a system that provides delayed access to research.

In addition to this, green open access is helping to prop up an already broken subscription model. A number of speakers pointed out that whatever system we have in place, the business model for it needs to be sustainable. Whilst the green open access business model props up the current subscription model, the gold open access business model is scalable and therefore sustainable in the long run.

Not everybody agreed that gold open access was the way forward (although there was some discussion about how green and gold open access should not be mutually exclusive), but the speakers really got me thinking about, and have nearly managed to convince me, that gold open access is the best option.

This does lead on to some interesting scenarios though. If we do successfully implement a fully gold open access culture, there should no longer be any need for repositories or (dare I say it) Repository Managers. So I would be out of a job – as would a lot of other library staff who currently administer library subscriptions. However, I believe that a number of other jobs would spring up to replace them – there still needs to be an infrastructure in place to manage gold open access and article processing charges (APCS – see below), and I strongly believe this is a role librarians can take on. So perhaps it’s a case of different roles, rather than lost jobs.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

In order to achieve full gold open access, universities have begun to pay publishers article processing charges, or APCs. If the research is RCUK funded, RCUK will often pay these APCs (via the university). However, speakers at the conference were mindful of how these charges worked, and more than once they warned against allowing big subscription deals to morph into the Big APC Deals. There was a suggestion that, instead of paying APCs per piece of research, we should be paying for each of the specific services that publishers carry out, such as peer review, separately.

The other difficulty with APCs is the complexity of the decision making steps that authors have to go through each time when applying for funding. The decisions they have to make at this stage (such as which Creative Commons licence to choose, what type of copyright agreement to sign) are different to decisions they have had to make in the past. Whilst library staff can help with this, if the infrastructure isn’t in place to enable this to happen, it could get very confusing for the author.

Open Access Infrastructure

Over the past ten years or so, an infrastructure has grown to support open access. This includes services such as SHERPA ROMEO (which provides information on publisher copyright policies), SHERPA FACT (which links together funder and publisher policies), and DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals). All these services were originally set up as projects and are still being run on project money. This means that none of these services have robust sustainability plans, but are incredibly well used in the open access community. We therefore need to find a way to assess and select the critical services we need to support open access, and then determine how we will sustain this infrastructure.


The above topics weren’t the only ones discussed. Other areas of debate included Creative Commons Licenses, the current peer review system, and how other universities run their institutional repositories. I came back from the conference with a number of questions and ideas: “Why don’t we keep those stats? Why have we never tried to run a webinar? Do I really have a preference for gold or green open access?” Overall, an incredibly thought-provoking conference which has given me lots of good ideas to take forward. Not to mention lots of potentially unanswerable questions.

So long, and thanks for all the nursery rhymes

You may have noticed that this blog has been rather inactive in the past year. That's because I haven't been at work for a year. Sure, I've done the odd thing here and there: helped a colleague with an essay, come to work for a Keeping in Touch day, read a professional magazine or article here and there... but, essentially, I haven't really thought about work much for 12 months. I've been too busy worrying about that bundle of 'joy', changing nappies, cleaning up food, finding suitable nurseries, buying car seats...

All that changed two weeks ago, when I came back to work. And everything's different. And exactly the same. Just as with everything else where a baby is involved, it seems, you can't describe to somebody who has never been through what coming back from maternity leave is really like. I chose to return to work 3 days a week, because I didn't want to be away from my little one all the time. But I also didn't want to give up work completely. I'm lucky that I a) have a choice [we could afford it if I didn't want to work], and b) actually quite enjoy my job.

It's the routines and attitudes at work that haven't changed: coffee still happens mid-morning, the start of term is still horribly busy, lots of the faces are still the same with the same old good and bad points. It didn't take me long to feel at ease and just back somewhere where I knew the drill... until I sat in on a couple of meetings, and realised how much I'd actually missed in a year. The next few days were filled with questions and ponderings and much-needed explanations.

On top of all that, working part time is another challenge. Again, I'm lucky that some of the more obvious challenges of working part time probably don't apply to me: I work in a female-dominated profession, so part timers get taken just as seriously as full-timers (if they didn't, there would be no workforce left). Meetings and important information are also worked around part timers, and if you can't be there for any reason it's usually fairly easy to get hold of a comprehensive write-up. Rather, the challenges revolve around having to change my mindset back to 'family member' every Saturday, 'mum and sole carer' on a Monday, and then back to 'librarian' on a Wednesday morning. Of course, there's the normal nursery pick-ups etc. which means your day doesn't stop when you leave work; for your little one, it's just beginning.

One thing is certain: returning from maternity leave is like nothing else I've experienced. I'm not in a new job, but I'm not in the same place I was a year ago either. Just as with everything else baby-related, it's an entirely new learning experience. I might be tired, but I'm certainly not bored. I also know that I shouldn't be so hard on myself; I've been away from work for a year. Of course it's going to take me a while to learn about all the things that have happened when I've not been here. I've only been back for 6 days, after all.

What does a librarian do all day?

A few weeks ago, I was reading a report on open access. Part of the report discussed the work we do as librarians to promote and advocate it. This got me thinking - how many of my family and friends actually know what it is that I do all day? Sure, they know I'm a librarian, and some of them may even know I'm a Repository Manager - but do any of them have any idea what that means? So I posed the query on Facebook. Here are the responses I got, and the professions they came from:

Question: Just a musing... as a friend/ relative/ colleague do you have any idea what I do at work all day? If I tell you I'm an Assistant Librarian and a Repository Manager does that help? Just reading something on open access and it got me to wondering..

• Researcher: Not really, I imagine there's some cataloging involved..... 
• Banker: I know you're a librarian and I know you don't speak to people who want to borrow books. This leaves me confused.
• Teacher: I thought on late night working days you were forced to communicate with book borrowers? 
• Accountant: No-one seems to know what I do. And when I start telling them they stop listening! :-) 
• Engineer: Not really. Going out on a limb, I'm guessing it involves some sort of split between sitting in front of a computer and going to meetings.

The responses, to be fair, were a little more positive than I was expecting. None of them were explicitly wrong, and they even came up with a few different things that I do between them. As with most jobs I imagine, the engineer, although being flippant, is right- I do basically split my time between meetings and sitting in front of a computer. The banker's comment is also fair, as I only started speaking to people who borrow books (as in, I didn't work on the Help Desk) 6 months ago - after being in my job for nearly 2 years.

So, they have some idea. But I thought it might be worth pointing out a few places where people can learn more about what a librarian actually does. Firstly, the 23 Things course that I did (which is where this blog all started) pointed me towards a good place that it's worth taking a look at if you want to know what a librarian does. Library Day in the Life goes in rounds, and gives librarians a chance to blog (or tweet, video, animate, take photos, or anything else you can think of) about their day or week at work. I contributed to this via Twitter in July 2011 - these were my tweets then.

July is an odd time for me work-wise though, as things usually quieten down significantly over the summer. So I had a think back over the things I had done at work today, and it seemed like a pretty representative day that gives a good flavour of all the kind of things that I'm involved in. Here's a run-down:

9-9.30am: Time to check my e-mails before the first meeting of the day. Significant ones included:

• An e-mail from a librarian at Sheffield Hallam asking if I could provide more info the Research Data Management event some of my colleagues are organising in a fortnight's time. Our university library currently has funding for a pilot project to create a repository for researcher's research data (as opposed to their outputs, or publications), and I'm on the project team for this (because my day-to-day job is running the publications repository).
• An e-mail from an IT colleague letting me know that the references on the outputs repository now conform to the university's referencing standard - something we were working on together last week to improve
• Composing an e-mail explaining a plug-in for the repository which should enable it to store more data that it is relevant to the REF (Research Excellence Framework). The REF is the way the UK government currently assesses the quality of research in universities.

9.30-11am: Attended a team meeting. There are about 20 of us in this team at work, and today the focus was on the library budget and planning for the 2012/13 financial year. We did discuss some other things though, including:

• The e-learning repository we are planning on setting up to store e-learning materials (such as videos explaining how the library works - something else I'm involved in creating). This is another project team I am involved in, as it will likely use the same software as the outputs repository.
• How the library can work with the marketing team more effectively
• How to use social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to the best effect to promote the library

11.15am-12.15pm: Attended a planning meeting looking at what teaching we should offer in the autumn term. Although I won't be there to deliver the sessions this year, I did do so last year, and will be involved in the discussions and planning this year. In the autumn term we prepare and deliver a lot of library sessions for students which introduce them to the library and materials for their subject (both in print and, increasingly primarily, online). The meeting was to make some early decisions about when and how these teaching sessions should take place

1pm-2pm: Working on the Help Desk answering student's queries. Obviously the questions can vary a lot depending upon the time of year, but today most queries were around:

• Helping students to find journal articles using specific databases
• Helping students to find books that weren't where they should be on the shelves
• Taking fines (it's that time of year!)
• Explaning how the photocopying and printing system works

2-4pm: I answered researcher's queries about what publications they can add to our outputs repository, and how they go about doing this. I also catalogued some of the publications that have been added to the repository (mostly improving and tidying the data researchers have entered about their publications). This also involved looking up publisher's policies in relation to what we are and aren't allowed to add to the repository in terms of book chapters and journal articles, and contacting the publishers when I couldn't find an answer.

4pm-5pm: To finish the day, I arranged an appraisal meeting and got together all the appraisal documents I will need for the Senior Library Assistant's appraisal, who I line manage.

So the work I do is nothing if not varied! Maybe that's why librarians find it so hard to explain what they do- not because "all we do is stamp books and take fines", but because it's so varied we don't know where to begin. And if you're still not sure what we do, or don't believe me that it really is this varied, take a look at the CILIP Body of Professional Knowledge draft for consultation. It's currently being updated (and is already much improved from the old, incomprehensible version), so it is only in consultation form at the moment, but it gives a really good overview of the range of skills a librarian might have. Looking through it, I probably have somewhere between 50 and 75% of those skills.

As a final thought, maybe the comments above from my friends mean we should spare a thought for those working in other professions too. Do you know what an accountant does? Something to do with maths and money, right? Although in all fairness, they tend to get paid a lot more than us librarians to do it and people to not quite understand it... :)

Teaching on the UWE MSc Information and Library Management (ILM) course

Once again, I haven't posted on this blog for a while... that's not because I've done nothing of any interest at work (or at least I hope it's not), but simply because life outside of work has been, well, busy, to put it mildly!

But I do have a couple of work-related things I wanted to share...

Firstly, about a month ago I was asked to contribute to a teaching session for the Masters students studying towards their MSc in Information and Library Management at UWE. I've always been curious about these sessions, as I didn't study for my MSc at UWE (I studied at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to gain my MSc). So when I was asked if I would help to put together a session on the repository and open access for the course, I was keen to find out what these sessions involved. However, I was also nervous. Now, I spend quite a lot of my time teaching students library-related material and running repository training sessions for university staff, but somehow this was different. This was "proper" teaching... But hey, I thought, it won't be for a while yet, I don't have to worry about it - it will be future Anna's problem. Then I was told the session was in a week and a halfs time. So not only did I now have to think about the session properly, I had a week to write the content for it as well.

Thankfully writing the content was easier than I anticipated. I already had a lot of material ready as part of other training sessions and talks (it turns out a "proper" teaching session isn't very different to a library teaching session - which will hopefully come as no surprise to people who teach library sessions. I wish I was more confident about these things!). Even finding relevant articles and information for the students wasn't too difficult.

When it came to actually teaching the students, I was quite nervous. I started off presenting the session quite hesitantly - not helped by the fact that my boss and one of the senior management team were in the audience. I hate presenting to people who are in charge of me in some sense, it makes me so much more nervous! Thankfully, once I got going I warmed up a lot, and the students seemed really interested. There were only about 7 of them, but they got pretty engaged and were happy to ask questions and be part of a discussion. The second half of the session involved them doing some hands-on exercises, and I got a lot more questions and interest at that point as well - including some questions my boss couldn't answer, which made me feel quite needed! Overall, it was a really rewarding, satisfying experience, helped massively by the interest and engagement that came from the students.

Which all leads me on to my next blog post, which is also about something I anticipate could be highly rewarding and satisfying to do - mentoring.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #22

I have a confession to make. It's been some time since I volunteered for anything officially - and I've never volunteered in the library and information sector.

However, when I was younger I did volunteer quite a lot, and it was one of the best things I could have done. One of my first experiences of voluntary work was during my gap year between college and university, when I was finding it difficult to get paid work. I ended up volunteering for an organisation in Exeter that aimed to improve the employment prospects of 16-25 year olds. It gave me confidence that I could do a job well, and relate to teenagers younger than me - confidence I didn't previously have. It also led to me finding paid work by building on the experiences I gained (such as team work).

That experience led me to want to continue doing voluntary work - over the next 4 or 5 years I worked reading news stories onto audio tapes for the blind and partially sighted, and as a first aider for the Red Cross whilst at university.

Since I started working full time I've spent a lot less time volunteering - but I have been involved in voluntary work in a different way. This summer, a university student asked if she could get some work experience at the library I work at. Our team was able to provide her with some useful routine tasks, but I also felt that it was important for her to see a wide range of the work that librarians do. As she was volunteering in order to learn whether or not she was interested in a career librarianship, I believed that she needed to do both some routine tasks and to get involved in some of the more creative, exciting things we do.

I strongly believe that if you can get voluntary work experience that allows you to carry out some routine tasks and learn about the wider jobs and organisation, volunteering can be a good thing. It gives you a wide range of experience and a better understanding of the world of work, and of the sector, you are volunteering for. Yes, we can devalue our profession by working for free and only carrying out the tasks that paid staff can do - but I hope that is not the way our work experience student felt, and that she got something more out of the experience.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #21

If I'm honest, I feel like I've completed something very similar to this Thing (promoting yourself in job applications and at interviews) in the recent past. I've been in the same job for nearly two years now, but as part of my Chartership portfolio I sat down and made a list of my activities and interests. Most of these were work-related, but there were some personal ones in there too. This was in order to put together the four-page CV that needed to appear in the portfolio. As a result of this, I also went about updating my 'standard' 2-page CV. I do tend to modify it when applying for jobs (or I did, when I was looking), but the basics remain the same.

I guess the most satisfying thing for me when I did this was discovering just how wide a range of professional skills I had actually acquired since I got my Information and Library Studies MSc - from advocacy skills to website maintenance to stock selection to classification skills to staff management. I don't use them all in my current job, but I do use a lot of them - and it's great to know that if I want to do something a little different in the future I have all that experience to draw on.

It's been a while since I looked at, or applied for jobs - but in the past I've spent a lot of time applying and interviewing for posts. I think initially I wasn't great at the interview stage and it let me down, but I've learnt to sell myself. Some of the advice I'd give when applying/ interviewing for jobs is:

When completing the application form, make sure you address the criteria on the person specification and job description. Just as Maria says on the cpd23 post, essential really does mean essential - and desirable means important too. If necessary, go through the specification points one by one and address each one. Sometimes I've found that one of my experiences covers more than one criteria, but I have spoken to panellists in the past who have said they really like people who make it clear exactly which criteria they are addressing. Also try to talk about the job itself and why it interests you - if your application sounds generic it can put the panellists off (I recruited for a post a year or so ago and this happened. The person who didn't mention any specifics of the job, just talked about their general interest in libraries, didn't get an interview).

If you are lucky enough to get an interview, try to pre-empt some of the questions. You probably won't guess them all but you'll be much better prepared. It will also force you to take a look at the organisation's website and learn a bit more about them. When you get to the interview, be proud of your past achievements, be clear when explaining them, and be honest. Use your achievements as examples to answer the questions you are asked if at all possible. If you find you're really not getting on with the interviewers, be glad you've discovered this at the interview stage - you'd be unlikely to enjoy working with somebody who you clash with instantly. Believe it or not, I have actually been to interviews where I've enjoyed myself. Sometimes I've been  unlucky and someone has just happened to have more experience than me, but more often than not the interviews I've enjoyed are the ones that have resulted in job offers.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #20

I have now had a look at the Library Routes project wiki - and dutifully added my Thing 10 Roots/ Routes post to it. Having read some of the posts, it seems that many now-librarians didn't seem to think of, or even know about, librarianship as a career. Whether it was our first serious job after university, or a job we thought of after having tried a number of other careers, there was often something else we thought we wanted to do (or were told to do) first. For me, it was publishing. That never really happened as I ended up working in a library and loved it too much to leave.

But perhaps the thing that struck me most when reading the blog posts on the Library Routes project wiki was just how diverse people realised the profession could be after joining it. A common theme seems to be the willingness to just jump in and give new things a try.

I guess in both these senses my career path to becoming a librarian was fairly typical - although I did learn at a fairly young age how varied the profession could be. In my very first post, working in a busy public library at the age of 17, I talked to children about their books, helped elderly people complete crosswords, explained fees and fines over and over again, found out how big the population of the UK was, directed people to the closest bus stop, helped teenagers find missing books, recommended books I thought avid readers might like... all in the space of 4 hours on a Saturday morning.

But then I graduated, went to work in an academic library, and had to learn a whole range of different skills. In that sense, I'm no different to any other librarian on the Library Routes wiki - I'm still amazed at the variety of jobs on offer in the library and information profession. Five years ago, I'd never heard of institutional repositories. Now I'm the Repository Manager.

I suppose my advice to people earlier in their career would be to keep an open mind. Try out as many new things as you can, and always be willing to learn new things. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, you'll probably love working in libraries - they're incredibly diverse and change a lot, all the time!

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #10

Like so many other librarians, I didn't really intend to end up being a librarian. I guess I should have seen it coming, as my very first job was as a Saturday Assistant at a small public library in Exeter. I really enjoyed the two years I spent there, but decided to go to university because I needed a degree (I studied Media anc Cultural Studies and English) in order to get a job in publishing. I don't know that I ever truly knew what a job in publishing would entail - I think it was more a case of having to make some sort of choice about my future because careers advisors told me I should.

Either way, I had a number of jobs doing a myriad of different things (post woman, office worker, shop assistant...), but I always seemed to end up back in a library. Whilst I was at university I worked as a shelver in my uni library, and then in 2004 I started working as a Library Assistant at a university library in London. It was a small campus, so although I never followed the traditional grauate trainee route, I did gain a wide variety of experiences while I was there.

Being a Library Assistant was meant to be something of a stop gap whilst I broke into publishing (yes, I was still hopeful at this point). But I enjoyed the job so much I started to wonder why I was planning on doing something totally different. I stayed there for 3 years in the end, and only moved away in order to complete an MSc in Library and Information Studies at RGU. This was where my career started to take the slightly more traditional route, as I'd finally realised I was happiest working in a library!

I did my MSc full time at RGU (and, yes, moved to Aberdeen to do it). I can't recommmend the course highly enough - I really feel as if it prepared me for working in libraries. At the time it felt like a lot of reflective writing, but now I'm very, very glad there was such a focus on it! And, although less of an issue for me as I'd spent three years working in a library, you get the chance to do a 4-week placement. Mine was in a college library so I got to see how that operated differently to a university library, but if you don't have any practical work experience it's a great place to start.

Great as RGU was, Aberdeen was a long way from home for me. So after the course finished I moved back down to Bristol, much closer to all my friends and family. I spent a year working part time as an Information Co-ordinator, but didn't find the work especially challenging. Working part time was a result of having to fight hard to find a job at all, so I was keen to find something full time and a little more taxing.

Which brings me to my job as a Repository Manager at the university library I now work in. Another benefit of changing jobs was that I was encouraged to start Chartering - something I had been keen to do ever since I moved down to Bristol. That all happened a year and a half ago, and I've just submitted my Chartership portfolio. I'm not sure what will happen next; hopefully I'll Charter, but for the moment I'm happy in my current role - there's loads more to learn and I certainly feel challenged most days!