"how I set out to become a librarian...": lis career talk

Van Wylen Library (Hope College, Holland, Mich.)

As promised, here's the report from my presentation on 5 March at Hope College on how and why I became a librarian, what I do as a reference librarian, and further resources for exploring librarianship as a career. Since the talk was thirty minutes long, it's a bit unwieldy for a blog post. Instead, I've made the talk, PowerPoint, and resource list available on a new page -- librarianship links -- where you can download the talk script and slides as PDF files and review them at your leisure.

I was kindly introduced by Priscilla Atkins, poet and head of reference and instruction at Hope's Van Wylen Library. She put together my intro with help from Jackie Bartley, my very first creative writing professor at Hope -- the one who inspired me to pursue non-fiction rather than fiction writing, and who could not have been a better entre into liberal arts education. Jackie was also at the talk, as were about a dozen former faculty of mine. I don't think I've given or accepted so many hugs in the space of an hour since I stopped "passing the peace" at church in the mid-1990s!

There were also about a dozen librarians-in-the-making in the audience, which was gratifying to see.

You can access the resource handout I made, the slides, and the talk in PDF from here.

On Thursday, I'll be posting the text from my talk from the Women's Studies panel discussion, "How Has Women's Studies Mattered in My Life."