As I was in Lib-school I worked with some people who weren’t especially bright and they went to schools with laxer admission standards/grading than Drexel.

So, consider yourself lucky. And you’re employer paid for it. Why are you complaining again?

As for Drexel going downhill, your SHOUTING really doesn’t make Ye Olde Drexel look good either.

Danielle, it sounds like you chose a good library school. I gritted my teeth through my terrible library school experience because I wanted to be a librarian, obviously. Getting a waste-of-time degree in order to do something I love? Boy does that sound pretentious! Give me a break.

Did you read my post? I didn’t say it was competitive, but I said there were REQUIRMENTS. Whereas there are no REQUIREMENTS for other library schools.

I find it sad that someone going to Drexel cannot read. The place has really gone downhill.

If I have to take a different job when I graduate because there are no jobs in the field so be it. The engineer that’s working as a barista and the MBA that is working a retail job knows where I’m coming from. I am aware the job outlook sucks and librarians are working for crap wages generally. But your solution of increasing the “quality” and decreasing the quantity of the graduates leaving library school is just foolish. Soon having a masters will be the minimum qualification for making a livable wage. Trying to make “librarian” an elite title is funny. Unless you are in the medical professions – there is a surplus of workforce in nearly every field. Only the competitive will get the best jobs and the rest will have to settle. I don’t care what that does to the professionals who feel exploited. Join a union and quit blaming recent graduates. I highly doubt library school was any harder to get through when you all were were there and I certainly don’t think you had the determination to do classes online while working and raising a family and having “professionals” look down on you for your sub-professional employment positions.

I think it’s because, as jobs are vacated (by retirement or otherwise), those management or supervisory positions NEED to be filled, but libraries are leaving lower professional positions vacant. You can get managers to do a lot of grunt work under the guise of “that’s why they get paid the big bucks.” We have 3 part-time jobs unfilled at the moment. Many of our other p/t jobs have been filled on a contract basis – despite them having been permanent positions up until someone moved out of them. One full-time job was posted as a p/t job.

What it means is that the existing staff absorb the duties, hours, etc. of those jobs. We’re being told that this is all for the next 2 years, while budgets are tight and until the economy bounces back.

I think it’s going to be permanent. If they see that we can manage like this for 2 years, it’ll become status quo. Those jobs are never coming back. And then you have staff doing more with less time and fewer resources. I can already see burnout. So potentially strong and great librarians are becoming mediocre because they’re expected to do too much.

And because of that situation, I honestly WISH we had those crappy jobs. I WISH we had casual staff we could call in. I’d feel badly for those librarians who had to take those jobs, but it would sure help as a system.

Seems like things are just in dire straits no matter what kind of job or library you’re in.

I feel like I would have loved (and been good at) this profession 20 years ago. Maybe even just 5 years ago. But I fear that I jumped onto a sinking ship when I joined this profession.