Librarians 'suffer most stress'

[ias]

Librarians 'suffer most stress' (BBC)
Stress? Shhhhh . . . (The Times)/p>
What the researcher describes doesn't sound much like a professional librarian's job to be me. Don't know the last time I was stuck between book shelves (in fact, I wish I did get out into the book stacks a bit more often). And as for my work being repetitive and

Comments

perhaps

[fire_kitten]

he's also an idiot :-)

[eleanorb]

He certainly didn't interview Public Reference Librarians. Yes it can be stressful but it's not ever boring.

[guyelfkin]

I know several other librarians whoe jobs are very boring.

Library assistants' jobs are , on the whole, moreso (from my viewpoint as professional librarian)

Cataloguing is *really* really boring

BTW, So sorry about the miscarriage. I just saw your and Nick's about

{hugs}

Teddy
(cataloguer for the most part)

[ruthj]

I wonder whether the people he interviewed were shy, bookish people who originally went into library jobs under the delusion that libraries are quiet, gentle places to potter. If so that may explain why they were quite so stressed.

When I got my first library job, a friend of my Aunty Pat said, "I've always fancied working in a library. That must be a nice quiet job." "No," I said, "it is more like Marks and Spencers at Christmas time." (I was working on the issue desk in the Harold Cohen Library at Liverpool Uni in 1993, where there were only two computers on the counter and queues of 20-30 students at busy times)

RuthJ

[mrseff]

haw! So true! Anyone who thinks working in a library is nice & quiet clearly never spent a Friday evening at St. John's Wood library dealing with DVD issues & returns and trying to help 45 demanding borrowers at once to get their books & DVDs for the weekend... like Oxford Circus at Xmas!

I am not a qualified librarian but I got to try my hand at cataloguing when I worked as an assistant in a secondary school library a few years back and I, uh, liked it. I must be a big geek or something!

[mrseff]

Yeah, most likely - being a proper qualified librarian is far more intellectually demanding and less direct customer-service orientated than being an assistant - I know, I was one for a few years! Then again, look at the increasing underfunding of libraries... perhaps he's one of the baddies trying to further skew the role and value of libraries and more importantly, LIBRARIANS.

Hrmph.

And no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist... much!