It’s a still almost a year away, but…

My expected date of graduation is August 2008, and that’s only two complete semesters away from now. It’s coming on faster than I thought–which, as of this week, I’m glad of. I know I’ll be a raw beginner, but I’d like to get started, and I’d like to think that the profession can find a use for me. So, as is often the case when you’ve given a little piece of your heart to something, I’m on an emotional rollercoaster this week as I imagine myself making my way closer to being an actual library professional. My feed reader brought me some views from people who are the kind of people I hope to be in a year: new professionals in academic jobs. Via ACRLog, I heard from two new librarians this week,  Brett Bonfield and Josh Petrusa. The passion and intelligence in their writing is obvious and to me, quite encouraging, but I think what I responded to even more was their realism. Yup, the role of a librarian might be in crisis no matter how much we love libraries. Yup, it might be hard to make our bold new ideas fly once we hit the workplace. Somehow it’s really helpful to hear people who are doing what I want to do tell it like it is for them. I have found a couple of great mentors along the path to my own education and they have great advice, but I sometimes feel the need to reality-check this and balance it with the view on the ground from my soon to be peers. I think there are going to be big differences in the trajectories of our careers as compared to theirs. To bring some of these up helps me start preparing for that. On the other hand, it’s always important to listen to more experienced voices as well–everything is bound to be new to us right now, but on the other hand they’ve lived through a few cycles of major change and have a broader perspective.

Still, when such a voice of more experience, such as  Karen Schneider’s on ALATechSource, echoes concerns that time is running out for libraries to meaningfully keep up with change, it also becomes clear that us young’uns do have some reason to ask these hard questions. Now, preferably.

So, as I’m reading through the library feed on my Google reader, I’m finding that I read articles about where the profession is headed in a new light. From all corners, I’m hearing that there are some great things out there and some major worries. Brett Bonfield’s post in ACRLog and Karen Schneider’s in ALATechSource really got me thinking. I know they are not alone in asking the hard & scary question of what will we, as librarians, actually be doing in ten years, but their phrasings seemed particularly relevant to a student-on-the-verge such as myself. Brett, a first-year librarian himself, came right out and said something that I think a lot of us are our nervous about–going to library school is a big decision in terms of financial and opportunity cost, but more than that, we’ve started to give our hearts to this field. Possibly the worst thing I can imagine is that I’ll wake up in ten years, heartbroken again, because I have no place and have failed to preserve an institution that I love.