Volunteering and the rise of the intern

I am going to cover 3 aspects of volunteering – to gain experience, use of volunteers in libraries and volunteering in a professional association

One of the things mentioned in Bronagh McCrudden’s: ‘Would you work for free? Unpaid work in the information profession (and how to make it count)’ is that information work is invisible.  It did strike me that this is a bit like that other women's job -- housework. I think this is actually a difficult case to make in a time when other professions are also looking for people to work without pay, but it is still an interesting parallel.

I've seen quite a few intern posts coming up in the @UKLibraryJobs stream on Twitter. I'm pretty sure that in better economic times these would have been paid posts. It makes me very sad for the (usually) new professionals who take up these posts because they are desperate. A really pernicious thing about the intern culture is that it discriminates against those who need to work to live. It keeps young people dependent on their parents for much longer than in previous generations. However it appears that many people do make volunteering work for them as 2 out of 3 people in McCrudden’s paper had a successful experience. And I know that many organisations will get good use out of volunteers in their libraries but still – if it’s worth getting done shouldn’t it be worth paying for?  

If I am ever unemployed again, I know I would consider a volunteer post to keep my skills up-to date – if I can afford it.

So the converse of librarians working as volunteers is the use of volunteers to run libraries. One of the things that slightly shocked me about the Cilip  Council candidates was that they were all a bit mealy-mouthed about the use of volunteers in libraries.  Not a single one said that they were outraged that this government and many local councils seem to think that anybody can run a library. They were all very careful to talk about the great contribution made by volunteers which is no doubt true. Of course, if all the volunteers are unemployed librarians trying to gain experience then hey – why pay anybody.

A less controversial way of gaining experience as a volunteer is to work for one of Cilip’s groups or another professional organisation. While in work I have volunteered as a mentor and I plan to volunteer to do something for one of the professional groups I belong to.

Routes and Roots

I blogged in Thing 10 about my way into librarianship, so I won't repeat that here. Instead I'll reflect a bit more on the why.

It has always interested me how many people come into libraries, or information work if you prefer, via other jobs and after a number of false starts. For me, working in libraries was what I wanted to do. As several people say in their blogs, it sometimes feels as though we are no longer allowed to say that it was a love of books that brought us into libraries. In my case that was the reason - I've developed a great interest and passion for other parts of the profession, but basically, without the love of books I wouldn't be here.

 There are some interesting class (and gender) issues around library work. I remember seeing a paper ages ago on librarianship as a kind of halfway house in class terms. Librarians compared to their parent were supposed to be either on their way up in terms of social mobility or on their way down.  This struck me as reflecting my own observations, but I'm not sure how this compares to other professions. I can't find that one, but I did identify a couple of interesting papers in a similar area. 

One on men in librarianship which seems from the abstract to be saying that men become librarians because working in a female dominated profession gives them greater access to class mobility and one on the "glass ceiling" in libraries (quite old this one) which (again from the abstract) seems to be saying that women achieve less because they choose to take career breaks to bring up their children. So that's ok then. I was surprised at just how annoyed this one made me!

Anyway, enough about my obsessions. Let's publish.

References(if you're interested)

Lupton, B., Explaining Men’s Entry into Female-Concentrated Occupations: Issues of Masculinity and Social Class  - Gender, Work & Organization -

Available at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0432.2006.00299.x/full

[Accessed November 7, 2011].

Jones, Elizabeth & Oppenheim, Charles, Glass ceiling issues in the UK library profession - Journal of Librarianship and Information Science -

Available at: http://lis.sagepub.com/content/34/2/103.short
[Accessed November 7, 2011].