I am a librarian. I am not a librarian.

I have an information science degree. I’ve been working for fourteen years, my entire adult life. Most of my jobs have been in libraries.

I am a librarian. I am not a librarian.

photo by emdot

As a student at Michigan State University, I learned Library of Congress serials cataloging.

I walked through secluded aisles surrounded by rare books, incunabulum, alternative newspapers, and gay pornography.
I cataloged comic books in the world’s largest archive of comic art, radicalism, and popular culture.

In the course of my work, I learned that Spiderman serials change their volume as often as many Spiderman readers change their underwear. By graduation, I could walk into any comic shop in the country and pick a fight about whether X-Men film adaptations should be considered canon.

When I went to graduate school (Michigan ’02), my program had recently transitioned from “Library Science” to “Information Science.” In the process, they picked up a bunch of renegade computer science professors and expanded to include information architecture, information economics, archival theory, and a bunch of crazyass dot com bubble refugees like myself.

photo by sh0dan

We discovered that the term Digital Library can be used to describe an entire array of cool shit, including the Internet itself.

One of my professors, Sue Davidson, tells the story of how Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang called to ask about the subject guide to the web she had created for the Michigan Electronic Library. Sue answered: “that’s what librarians do, we organize information.”

Librarianship, defined as the act of organizing information, is a broad and inclusive field. Librarianship as a profession, is not. There are strict professional guidelines determining who is and is not technically a “Librarian,” but there is also a strong case to be made for the authenticity of self-identification.

There are librarians who work in libraries, and there are librarians who just Are.

It’s the difference between being a Jew by Religion, and being a Jew by Ethnicity. Both groups contribute to the cultural whole.

While a Librarian by Profession is inherently a Librarian by Ethnicity, the opposite may not be true. A trained librarian can sport a different job title, but  her clarity and understanding will still contribute to her work.

photo by Syntopia

I’m a librarian by ethnicity.

Right now, I work as a user experience designer on a software team. I wrestle with ship dates, dependencies, conflicting user requirements, and engineering constraints. I design interfaces and help identify how the software should behave.

But somewhere, deep in my soul, I am doing the work of the Library.

I’m a librarian by ethnicity, regardless of the job I take. I don’t make my living as an ALA going, patron-helping organizer of resources, but I’ll be damned if I don’t use Librarian skills to battle confusing groupings of information.

Librarians bring order to chaos, and so, with a little luck, do I.

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I’m Erica Firment. I was born in Flint, MI. I live in San Francisco, CA. I am a User Experience Designer.

I have a Master’s in Information Science, and a B.A. in English. I also have a Master Beekeeper Certification from Cornell’s agricultural extension. Guess which one I’m most proud of?

Librarian Avengers started in 1997

Librarian Avengers started in 1997. In Internet time, that’s about 50 years ago. I was a young English Major when I wrote an essay called Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian and hooked it up to the domain name I got for my birthday. The positive response from the library community was one of the forces that propelled me into graduate school.

I blogged grad school, where I stole free food from SIG-CHI meetings, studied Human-computer Interaction, and joined the Community Information Corps. I wrote long boring papers, taught classes, learned some web-devery, and worked as a researcher/professorial indentured servant.

The name Librarian Avengers was adapted from the Lesbian Avengers, a group of activists whose hellraising I admire. I learned about them as an undergrad working in the Michigan State University American Radicalism collection.

I owe that library many great things, including my love of comics, my first Cutter table, several Professional Heroes, and the chance to hold a first edition copy of The House on Pooh Corner.

*Saying “I am a librarian” is like saying “Please, remove $80,000 from my paycheck” so let’s keep the librarian thing between you and me. Seriously. This profession is rough.

View Erica Olsen’s profile

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First of all, and lets just get this out of the way: a full-time job is actually a pretty shoddy reward for 2.5 years of graduate school stress. Yes, I’m grateful and all, glad to be here, nice to meet ya, etc. but frankly, I think I was looking for something along the lines of “congratulations on your degree, here’s your houseboat, now get out of here you scamp.”

I suppose having a stable schedule and slightly-more-realistic paychecks is reward enough, but lately I’ve had to face what seems to happen any time you put enormous effort into something. Which is, a rather slow transition into something different that requires enormous effort. Like learning not to scream when someone suggests you attend the Metadata Working Group Meeting.

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