When he asked me to elaborate on what I meant by “people like me,” (as we had both gone into teaching for similar reasons, and he is still fighting the good fight in a Michigan high school) I realized I had a number of answers.  Here they are, in order of realization and by no particular importance…

1)People who just CAN’T get up at 5am every day without needing a nap by 3pm.  We enjoy a leisurely post-8am start to our workday.

2)People who like helping out-we’re quick to give directions, share a recipe, or introduce you to a friend who might be able to help.  We often post articles or links on your FB wall after you mention a problem or curiosity.

3)People who geek out about multiple areas of interest.  Maybe we love writing AND movies AND teaching AND science fiction AND graphic novels AND technology AND sharks.  We have probably considered academia as an option for exploring one of these interests in depth, but may have opted out because we don’t have the time, money or patience to get 5 unrelated PhDs.

4)People who *heart* teachable moments.  I’ve encountered a lot of almost- or post-teachers in LibraryLand.  Some of this like to teach passively through blogs, readers advisory tools, etc, while others jump at opportunities to stand up front and lead educational programs or technology classes.

5)People who like books.  Not only do I get to buy books, but it’s my job to keep up on what’s up in the publishing world.  Reading the new Mary Roach book for work?  I’m in!

6)People with hard-to-pronounce last names.  Seriously, getting 150 teenagers to remember and pronounce Esseltine correctly was just a BEAR! Now I just wear a nametag and remembering my last name is kinda optional.  (Ok, so this was an afterthought.)

I’m curious: what interests/characteristics makes your career the right one for you?  I know this list doesn’t apply to all librarians, and I’m coming specifically from the Public Library world, so comment away, people!

The cottage was advertised in the local paper with very little detail–just a price, a neighborhood, and a phone number.  The price and location matched what I was looking for, so I called the owner to find out more about the property.  He described it as a “rustic” one bedroom, single-family home, and warned that a tenant had just moved out, so it probably needed a good cleaning before anyone else could move in.  I made an appointment to see it later that morning.  I had a very what-the-hell attitude since it was the first day of my housing search, and I figured that it couldn’t hurt to just take a look.  It wouldn’t waste much time, and I had other apartments to look at later in that same neighborhood.

I arrived at the cottage to find that it was an in-law building built behind another home and accessible only from an alley, not the street on which its address implied it sat.  It was surrounded by overflowing dumpsters and recycling bins.  The entire house was no more than 250 square feet, and it smelled of dead mice and mold.  It appeared (and smelled!) as if it had been vacant for some time.  There were no interior walls, and the ceilings were only about six feet high.  There were holes and cracks in the wood flooring that appeared to be open to a crawl space below.  There was no overhead lighting.  A previous tenant had been heating the building with a space heater.  The refrigerator was mid-1950s vintage–and not in a good way.  I’ll spare you a description of the bathroom.

Basically, this place was a nightmare.  The punchline to this story?  The landlord wanted $900 a month plus utilities.

So why am I posting this on Librations?  What does it have to do with libraries, or beer for that matter?  First, I really wanted a drink after seeing this place.  And second, this is a great example of how I could have applied my super-librarian powers of information literacy skillz to a real-life situation.

Even though the cottage was advertised in an actual newspaper (this wasn’t some shady Craigslist posting), and the owner paid money (albeit a small amount) for the ad, this doesn’t mean that any of the implied authority that comes with such a source should be automatically associated with the product being advertised.  As librarians, we deal with this sort of thing all the time.  Venerated publishers can do sleazy things (like Elsevier publishing fake journals to sell pharmaceuticals).  And Wikipedia (the anti-Elsevier?) has a large number of well written, clearly cited, and authoritative articles, particularly on topics related to popular culture and technology.

The owner’s use of the term “rustic” probably should have set off alarm bells in my head.  In a similar vein, pseudo-research about controversial topics can often be spotted based on the language and style used to discuss an issue.

And finally, sometimes you just have to dive into something to figure out if its credible, relevant to your research, and appropriate for the task at hand.  Man cannot survive on abstracts alone.  It was in the owner’s interest not to tell me too much about the cottage over the phone, so I had to see it for myself and experience the horror first hand.

Seeing this terrifying building wasn’t a failure, just as coming across an article or a book you end up not needing isn’t a failure, either.  It’s just part of the process.  Research (and house hunting), isn’t always clean, linear, quick, or easy.  Sometimes it involves dead ends, wrong turns, and readjustments.

And what’s a good house hunt without at least one horror story, right?