Career Pathways: Linda Palmer

IN THIS NEW COLUMN WE WILL BE INTERVIEWING LIS PROFESSIONALS – FINDING OUT HOW THEY GOT TO WHERE THEY ARE AND ANY ADVICE THEY HAVE FOR STUDENTS OR NEW PROFESSIONALS. OUR FIRST INTERVIEW SUBJECT IS LINDA PALMER, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN AT MASSEY UNIVERSITY.

KIA ORA LINDA, AND THANKS FOR SHARING YOUR CAREER PATHWAY WITH OUR READERS. FIRST UP; CAN YOU TELL US WHAT QUALIFICATIONS YOU HAVE?

I studied for a Bachelor of Arts here at Massey University (1986) and I’m a Teachers’ College drop-out.

THERE MUST BE A LOT OF CROSSOVER BETWEEN TEACHING AND LIBRARY WORK.

Yes, but it turned out that I didn’t enjoy working with children, so it wasn’t for me. But basically nobody in my family had been to university, so going to Teachers’ College was a step into tertiary study. It was a year they were taking the top academics, so they screened us all by qualifications and didn’t stop to ask if we actually wanted to work with children.

Since then I’ve also gained a postgraduate qualification from Victoria University – a Diploma in Librarianship (1989) and a Master of Management in HR from Massey University (2013). My Masters I got while I was working full-time and studying by distance because it was really relevant to my job – it was the content rather than the qualification I was most interested in.

SO, YOU WENT STRAIGHT FROM THE ONE YEAR OF TEACHERS’ COLLEGE BACK INTO STUDY?

Yes, I got four papers, only two of which I could transfer. I learned quite a lot about myself – what I didn’t like and what I shouldn’t be let loose on. When I was on teaching practice one of the teachers said ‘You’d make a terrible teacher but you’d make a good librarian.’ I felt quite insulted, not that I’d make a terrible teacher as I pretty much already knew that, but at the librarian suggestion – because I didn’t really know what they were or what they did.

I GUESS ON THE FLOOR OF A LIBRARY THERE IS A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TEACHING THAT TAKES PLACE?

Yes, that bit I was actually good at because those people had chosen to be in the library, so it was teaching willing participants, not small children. Not the smell of the classroom, the toilets. I was kind of allergic to all that.

SO YOU’VE WORKED IN THE LIS SECTOR SINCE THEN?

Yes, basically since that insulting comment from the teacher. I had a friend who dropped out from Teachers’ College at the same time – there were lots of us that year – and she got a job at Awatapu College Library part-time. I went and helped her out a bit. Then I did a week volunteering at my local library and a week at the National Library. I didn’t like those settings so much but I quite liked the work - organising things.

SO YOU GOT OVER THAT INITIAL HESITANCE?

Yes, and I applied for a library assistant job here at Massey. Serials was an interesting place to be because we managed acquisitions and cataloguing but at a service point. We helped people do this amazing thing of trying to find journal articles by using print abstracts. Our whole ground floor was print abstracts, indexes and print journals. It was that customer service aspect that got me really interested.

I did two years as a library assistant, then I did the diploma at Victoria and then my husband and I went on an OE. I worked in London for BP in their Exploration Data Centre – where I catalogued seismic lines and drill reports, very technical. Cataloguing wasn’t really my cup of tea but I was way better than anyone else because they were all unqualified and had not much idea of the purpose. But it was really good pay and we were dealing with the actual explorers who went around the world drilling for oil and doing seismic lines*. The seismic line data was on microfiche so I catalogued those and reorganised an entire

suite (many, many cabinets) of microfiche. I also catalogued the well-drilling reports under subject headings. They were all filed on shelves completely backto-front because someone had moved them once and put them back in the wrong order, so every shelf ran backwards and no one had ever turned them around the other way. I was at BP for a year in between travelling.

Then I came back here and applied for a job I didn’t get, which was a good thing in hindsight. It was the Audiovisual Librarian, which was actually the last thing I actually wanted to do and it turned out to be a short-lived position. But I got a job here at Massey as the interloans librarian, which was half reference librarian, half Interloans and I’ve been here ever since doing a range of different jobs. From Interloans to the Distance Library Service, which was called extramural then. That’s a service which is really quite significant for Massey – helping distance students – in those days it involved searching for the students because the catalogue wasn’t online and they couldn’t do it themselves, so we did subject searches and sent masses of stuff out to people.

I was the Head of Lending for quite a while – Circulation. Then I became the Deputy Librarian, because that’s what happens when you stay somewhere for a long time. It was the client services side – service delivery, which was my area: Circulation, Reference, Distance Library, Document Supply and so on. I think I was the Deputy for 14 years and I’ve been the University Librarian for the last 5 ½. But my background is customer service really – in serials. In this job I’ve learned masses about the other half of the library – the whole collections part and the role IT plays across everything, it’s a completely different job but really interesting though.

WOULD YOU HAVE CALLED YOURSELF IN PREVIOUS ROLES A REFERENCE LIBRARIAN?

My first job as a professional was actually managing staff so I managed half a person and then more and then more, so actually I’m more of a manager than technical librarian. We would have called ourselves reference librarians, so teaching information literacy. But really, I get out of bed to make things better, to make services better, that’s the management or leadership part, which I’ve always found most exciting.

WE’VE KIND OF TALKED ABOUT THIS BUT MY NEXT QUESTION WAS GOING TO BE IS THIS THE CAREER YOU ALWAYS INTENDED TO GO INTO? OBVIOUSLY YOU STARTED OFF THINKING ABOUT TEACHING...

Well, yes, but I didn’t go into teaching thinking about it as a career. I applied for a job in a long-run roofing company doing office work and advertisements for the company. I was quite interested in the advertisement part because I was interested in writing, art and design and I thought it might lead on to advertising work, copywriting. So, it was a toss-up between that sort of work and Teachers’ College and I was accepted into Teachers’ College. It wasn’t driven by a plan to be a teacher. I don’t know what I was driven by!

I GUESS IT’S HARD WHEN YOU’RE STARTING OUT TO KNOW WHAT DIRECTION TO TAKE?

Yes, and now I’ve got two daughters in the same position wondering ‘what shall I be?’ One’s studying law, the other is studying a Bachelor of Health/ Science, there are so many choices. Whereas when I did all that there wasn’t a lot of advice. Also, you only have knowledge of things from your own experience, so the moment someone suggested librarian to me I just thought of our tiny little public library – why would I do that?

WHAT WAS YOUR IDEA OF LIBRARIANS AND WHAT THEY DID?

It was the classic: bun, pearls, shush, in a little public library – because I hadn’t been exposed to anything else. In tertiary libraries it’s literally all about teaching, learning and research, and the entire experience with staff and students. That is really exciting because it’s about growth and discovering information and libraries support that. That bit for me was the exciting thing, and our role as support or guide, making it easier and better for people.

SO, IF YOU WERE MEETING SOMEONE WHO HAD JUST FINISHED THEIR UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE AND WAS CONTEMPLATING DOING A POSTGRADUATE LIS QUALIFICATION WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO THEM? WHAT SORT OF PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES DO YOU THINK YOU NEED TO GO INTO LIS WORK? PARTICULARLY IN THE TERTIARY SECTOR.

I’m one of those quiet, organised people who probably did write in my application that I love reading. Now when I see those applications I think ‘Oh my God, no.’ Library work is not a sheltered workshop for people who like books. It’s all about people, so you need to know what your strengths are. You need to really, genuinely like working with people and to make their lives better, whatever type of library you are in. It’s about people and it’s about technology and it’s about information, so it’s about those three together. Just thinking ‘I love books and I love reading’ is not going to cut it. You have to know that you want to essentially make some sort of difference to people’s lives through those things. If technology isn’t really your thing I’d think twice about a career in libraries because whatever we do, we are using technology to make it smarter or faster or more efficient or better.

There is a place for introverts, because I’m 100% introvert, but it’s about people in the end. There are few jobs where you can just sit quietly and stamp books, which is what some people think we do. The organising aspect is still really important because we take quite complex stuff and try to make it easier for people – a logical mind is useful. But also a creative mind – it’s not all Dewey order, creativity is important but whether you’re in acquisitions or cataloguing or customer service, the user is at the heart of it.

There’s having a library qualification and then there’s a whole lot of other skills that are becoming increasingly important. I now look for people with marketing skills, project management skills, communication skills, IT skills, process improvement / service improvement skills, research skills – those things are all really important and library qualifications don’t necessarily deliver all that.

People with Phds who have experienced the full research process and are published can be great – it’s incredibly useful in terms of services to researchers because you understand what they do. The traditional pathway of graduating with a BA in English then getting a library qualification is fine but some of those other skills are actually really valued. Māori and Pasifika knowledge is really important and being able to work with people from different cultures is really important. In some ways I’m looking more for attitude than for the qualifications.

WOULD THAT APPLY TO THE IT SIDE OF THINGS ALSO? SO PERHAPS YOU DON’T KNOW ALL THE IT SYSTEMS BEING USED IN THE LIBRARY BUT YOU’RE QUICK TO LEARN?

Exactly, I think those sorts of skills are quite transferable and we have people who aren’t librarians as such but they’re bringing those other skills. So you can bring IT skills as long as they are user focused – if they’ve got the user at the centre of everything and are able to communicate well, then that’s a really good match of skills.

The jobs aren’t like they used to be. Even reference librarians – they’re supporting the entire research lifecycle, which is way more than ‘how do I find some books?’; it follows through to ‘where do I publish?’ and ‘how do I know that I’m making a difference?’ and ‘how do I measure that?’ – quite a lot of quite technical things that wasn’t even talked about five or ten years ago. A library qualification is a good starting point but all that other stuff builds on top of it.

Some tertiary libraries are looking for a whole different range of skills to fit the job and they’ve reframed their jobs. The research support librarian role is quite a new concept and employers are looking for different sets of skills for those roles. We don’t just help people find and use information, we need to market our services, we need to run projects in robust ways, we need to be able to communicate what we do, so all those requirements need additional skills. So much of our work is about change, so we need people who are ready for that – who embrace it, manage it and lead it.

I GUESS THERE’S A MUCH WIDER RANGE OF JOBS IN THE LIS SECTOR THAN THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THE PAST AND PEOPLE COMING TO LIBRARY AND INFORMATION ROLES FROM OTHER SECTORS CAN BRING LOTS OF TRANSFERABLE SKILLS.

Exactly. I might be hard-pressed to see the fit with someone coming from engineering, for example, but all those other skills are transferable: teaching skills, someone with research and publishing experience, marketing and comms experience.

Another area is the role of the physical library building. Increasingly we are focusing on the design of buildings – they’re not warehouses for low-use print books, they’re a community space on campus. Just like public libraries are looking at buildings, signs and doing UX on furniture; tertiary is also looking at the way patrons are using and experiencing buildings – asking, what can we do to make that better?

THANKS SO MUCH FOR YOUR TIME, LINDA!

*Seismic lines are a map of the subsurface built on sound reflections. You make a big bang, by vibrating a large weight or detonating a dynamite charge, and measure how long it takes for the sound wave to come back from each reflector back to surface.