Thing 20 - Library routes

Like many others, I feel like I have already addressed this thing in thing 10, so took the advice of the CPD blog and took a look at other's pages which describe people's paths into librarianship, to compare to my own. I suspected I probably was fairly typical and indeed found a number of posts which described someone with a background of liking books, visiting libraries as a child and occasionally an English Lit degree, who had somehow 'fallen' into librarianship - hmm, sounds vaguely familiar... So, yes, typical maybe, but it was heartening to find that I'm not alone! Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone who seeks to work in libraries is the same, but it is great that a group of people with these similar interests can find an aspect of work to appeal to their particular talent - there are a wide and varied range of skills that fall under the umbrella 'librarian'.
As I said before, though, I'm not too sure where my route takes me from here. There are lots of things that I would like to do - when I finished my Masters, I would have loved to continue to a PhD, but it wasn't to be at the time. Perhaps one day, but the longer that I have stayed away from academia, the harder it feels to consider returning. I liked the idea on someone's blog (can't remember who, sorry!) that cataloguing is a 'gift' that you either have or you don't. I knew from early on in my library career that this would be my preferred area - I think it comes from having a very logical way of thinking. It's this love of logic that makes me wonder if I were to move that I might enjoy expanding into the IT side of things, though it is hard to know how to develop these skills independently in order to make that move. I suppose that one thing I really took from reading other people's stories is not to be afraid of making a move into a different style of library work (sometimes completely away from the 'back-room' work)- if you can get past other people pigeon-holing you, you may find that you flourish in other areas as well.