Capturing Our Stories Oral History Program of Retired/Retiring Librarians

Question Bank

Short version

Introductory Questions:

  1. Name.
  2. Current or last library position.
  3. Where?
  4. Brief history of library career.

Library background

  1. What was your relationship to books as a child?
  2. What lead you to decide to work at alibrary?
  3. Why did you decide to become a librarian? Was it a common career path at the time? Was this career only one of a few options available to you?
  4. Were there social stereotypes tied to the being a librarian?

LIS Formal Education

  1. Where did you attend school?
  2. What were your most and least favorite classes?
  3. What is the most important thing you learned in library school?
  4. What were your other experiences while pursuing your MLS?
  5. What do you think about some programs taking the “library science” description out of their degree/accreditation?
  6. Are there specific library skills that you feel are timeless (a knack for customer service, for example?) or others that current students needn’t bother with as much?
  7. Are there skills that retiring librarians see new librarians lacking, such as practical skills?
  8. What is the most important thing you learned on the job that you could not have learned in school?
  9. What do you wished you would have known before you began your first job?

General Career Questions

  1. What were your favorite aspects of your work as a librarian?
  2. What are the best aspects about work as a librarian?
  3. What were your greatest triumphs as a librarian?
  4. What are some things about your work as a librarian that you will remember forever?
  5. What made your work experiences unique?
  6. Discuss some of the most enriching experiences during your career.
  7. Discuss a couple of difficulties you have faced during your career. These difficulties can be either with patrons, with the library or elsewhere. How did you handle the situation? Reflecting upon either those instances or on others, would you have handled the challenge in a different manner now? What advice would you offer to new professionals on how to handle challenging situations as they arise? What would you advise against doing?
  8. What have been the biggest frustrations or disappointments in your career? Were they avoidable?
  9. What do you hope that the next generation of librarians will experience?
  10. What different ‘hats’ did you have to wear as a librarian that you never imagined you would have to?
  11. How or why did you chose to stay in your career?
  12. How did you maintain your passion for the field?
  13. Is there something you wish someone had told you before you began your career?

Professional Associations

  1. Please tell me about your involvement with professional associations.
  2. What did you learn or gain from your experiences with professional associations?
  3. How did participation in professional organizations influence your career?

Ethics

  1. How often did you consult the Library Bill of Rights or any other American Library Association policy documents?
  2. How did you respond to the federal government’s attempt to limit civil liberties such as the requesting patron information through the Patriot Act and National Security Letters?
  3. How did you respond to CIPA and find a balance between the America Library Association position on Internet filtering and the needs of your specific library?
  4. Tell me about a time when your professional ideals clashed with the demands of your employing library and how you resolved this conflict.
  5. What was the most controversial time during your career in the information world? Did you do anything to contribute/hinder the impact the time had?

Service

  1. In what ways did the library you work in interact with the community?
  2. How have you used your position in the community to help people?
  3. What matter-of-fact words of advice would you give to new librarians in learning how to handle the homeless and other special users of the library?
  4. Do you remember the first patron you handled on you very own and what question was asked? What’s the funniest, or most surprising query you ever received?
  5. Who are the patrons you most remember and why?
  6. Who was their most memorable patron and why?
  7. Was there any resistance among the staff regarding serving patrons using the Internet and not necessarily using the library in a traditional manner?
  8. How do libraries provide services that current users want without losing track of what a library fundamentally is?
  9. What are the greatest changes you have seen to library services? Why were those changes valuable or not valuable?
  10. What is the ideal role of the library in the larger community?

Technology

  1. How do you feel about all of the technological changes that have taken place in the library over the course of your career?
  2. What sort of unanticipated consequences were there [in incorporating new technologies in libraries]?
  3. How have you dealt with the technological divide that has existed for the last 30/40 years?
  4. How has digitization changed the way you access information for personal use or for patrons, and is there a difference in methodology depending on the audience served?
  5. What are two primary differences in the way you approach information retrieval given the new parameters of searching in contrast to the approach you took when you first entered the library world?
  6. How did technology change your job? What were the positives and negative aspects of the changes?
  7. How has public access computing in your library impacted the demographics of library patrons?
  8. How have you learned to develop, adapt to and take advantage of advances to information technology?

Changes/Future

  1. How have libraries and the role of librarians changed over the years?
  2. What changes did you particularly like or dislike?
  3. As the library changed, what did you find hardest to change about the way you did your job? (i.e. What was the hardest to give up?) What issues did your peers have as well?
  4. What is your prediction for the future of libraries?
  5. Imagine you are not retiring now, but twenty years from now. What do you feel will be the biggest threat to libraries in the coming years?
  6. What is the future of printed books?
  7. How has the atmosphere of the library evolved since you became a librarian? In other words, how different do libraries look and feel?
  8. How do you envision the future of public libraries and the role of librarians?
  9. What do you believe is the most important function of a public library?
  10. What changes would you like to see in public libraries in the next ten years?

Advice and Final Reflections

  1. If you had one piece of advice to give to a librarian who was just starting their career, what would it be?
  2. What is the one most important thing a librarian must keep in mind at all times?
  3. What are the top three personality traits that a successful librarian must possess?
  4. Would you mind comparing your first and last day as a librarian, in terms of your experiences, thoughts, and feelings?
  5. What skill has been most useful to you in your career?
  6. What do you feel is the most important idea or theme you'd like to pass onto future generations who will continue in the profession?
  7. Tell me about the accomplishment of which you are most proud.
  8. What will you miss the most about being a librarian?
  9. What do you plan to do after retirement?

Questions Covering the Past, Present, Future

Question Bank

[Original long version]

Career Decisions

  1. What was your relationship to books as a child?
  2. What lead you to decide to work at alibrary?
  3. Why did you decide to become a librarian? Was it a common career path at the time? Was this career only one of a few options available to you?
  4. Were you influenced by someone who inspired you to become a librarian?
  5. Did you always know that you would work as a librarian?
  6. What convinced you to apply to an LIS school?
  7. Were there social stereotypes tied to the being a librarian?

LIS Formal Education

  1. Where did you attend school?
  2. What were your most and least favorite classes?
  3. Were the classes he/she took taught well?
  4. Were the subjects taught actually applicable to a real-world scenario, or were they more theoretically based?
  5. Which class do you wish that you had taken that you did not get to take?
  6. Did any classes or library school experiences hinder your library career?
  7. How were classes relevant to your subsequent work?
  8. What coursework would they recommend for current MLS students?
  9. What are the limitations and strengths of courses being offered in LIS school?
  10. What is the most important thing you learned in library school?
  11. How well do feel that your education prepared you for your experiences in this field?
  12. Do you wish that you could have had the opportunity to learn more about technology when you went to school?
  13. What were your other experiences while pursuing your MLS?
  14. How do you see the importance of the master’s degree in preparing new librarians?
  15. What do you think about some programs taking the “library science” description out of their degree/accreditation?
  16. Are there specific library skills that you feel are timeless (a knack for customer service, for example?) or others that current students needn’t bother with as much?
  17. What activities, organizations, and part-time job opportunities do you feel provide the best experience for students?
  18. Are there skills that retiring librarians see new librarians lacking, such as practical skills?
  19. What can LIS students do to increase the possibility of landing a desirable job?
  20. What is the most important thing you learned on the job that you could not have learned in school?
  21. Did you feel ready to take on any job when you graduated, or did you have some concerns about your entry-level qualifications?
  22. What do you wished you would have known before you began your first job?
  23. What kind of experiences besides school helped you the most in your career?What particular skills are important for incoming librarians? How has this skill set changed over time? What factors have influenced this change?

Continuing Education

  1. What kind of experiences besides school helped you the most in your career?What particular skills are important for incoming librarians? How has this skill set changed over time? What factors have influenced this change?
  2. What types of continuing education were made available to you by your employer?
  3. When were you allowed to attend such classes, during work time or on your own time?
  4. What’s the best piece of advice you wish you had gotten when you were starting out?
  5. What professional resources, such as blogs, websites, etc., were the most helpful and/or interesting to you from a professional and personal standpoint? A. Did you bookmark key Internet sites?
  6. Did you use a listserve?
  7. Did you consult with one or two publications?
  8. Did you depend on information provided by other librarians or the director of your library?
  9. For example, do librarians who are active crafters and participate in scrapbooking or knitting events find such involvement beneficial in their careers?
  10. What interests and activities do you pursue when you are not at work?
  11. Have you used your personal interests or activities as a means to be innovative in your career (that is, have you established programming, created reader advisory programs, etc.)?
  12. Do you believe your involvement outside of work has contributed to your ways of thinking and problem solving, and how so?

Employment

First Positions

  1. Tell me about any paid or unpaid library experience you had prior to attending library school.
  2. What was your experience in interviewing for your first professional position?
  3. What was your best experience in an interview?
  4. What was your worse experience in an interview?
  5. Did you have to complete an examination as part of the interview for your first professional position?
  6. What was your starting salary for your first professional position?
  7. What was your first day like as a librarian?
  8. What task did you first tackle in your first position?
  9. What was your very first (or one of the first you can remember) reference question and who (ex. a little girl or teenage boy or older woman) asked it? Do you remember what sources you used to answer it? If asked the same question (or similar) today, what source would you use to answer it?
  10. What was the most surprising part of your first day on the job?
  11. How did you feel on your first day of work?
  12. Who made you feel most welcome and comfortable?
  13. How long after the first day did it take to become more comfortable on the job and be part of the routine?
  14. Did you feel ready for your first professional position?
  15. How much on the job training did you receive?
  16. Were you thrown into the job with no help, or did you get to ease into the position gradually?
  17. What were your duties and responsibilities and daily routine at your first job?
  18. What was the climate like in libraries at the time you started your first professional position?Were libraries quiet bastions of study standing in sharp relief to the revolt and revolution taking place in the streets, or were they institutional comrades-in-arms, empowering the masses in order to facilitate the creation of a new world of democratically created and shared knowledge?
  19. Did you have a plan for you career in the beginning or did it evolve organically over the years?

Subsequent Positions, Including Management

  1. Can you provide a list of your daily tasks at both the beginning and the end of your career?
  2. How did these duties and responsibilities change over the course of time?

What positions did you hold over time? What were your responsibilities in each of these?

  1. Did you work up to the position of librarian from earlier positions in the same library as, for example, library clerk or assistant?
  2. What was the hierarchy of the library in which you worked?
  3. Tell me about your supervisor and library director?
  4. What was your interaction with management like?
  5. How and when did you move from one position to another?
  6. If you worked at multiple libraries throughout their career, I would want to hear about the differences in the locations.
  7. How long did you typically stay in the one library position?
  8. What inspired you to look for new positions?
  9. Did you find ways to make librarianship financially rewarding?
  10. If you took positions in management, did you have less direct interaction with patrons? Did you miss that aspect of your job?
  11. Besides a salary increase, what were the advantages of advancing to higher positions?
  12. What were some of your experiences with management, either managing or being managed?
  13. If you worked as a manager, was being a leader a skill that came naturally to you or did you have to learn how to be a leader?
  14. Is being a manager of a library very different from being a librarian?
  15. How have you seen your library or other libraries be leaders in society?
  16. How do librarians prepare to be directors?
  17. Over the course of your career, how have you personally been a leader in your profession?
  18. In what ways can those of us entering the field prepare to be the new leaders of the field?
  19. How did you measure outcomes for grants and statistics and use these to plan for services and obtain grants?
  20. How did the library get funded and what did the librarians learn about finances over the years? What were some of the biggest budget complications? What advice would they have related to fiscal matters?
  21. What do libraries look for in candidates for entry level professional positions?
  22. Did you find any effective techniques for dealing with the long, tedious process of decision-by-committee?
  23. Do you have any advice about the best ways to deal with the amount of bureaucracy that most libraries are fraught with?
  24. Which responsibilities of directorship did you find most rewarding? Most daunting?

General Career Questions

  1. What were your favorite aspects of your work as a librarian?
  2. What are the best aspects about work as a librarian?
  3. What were your greatest triumphs as a librarian?
  4. What are some things about your work as a librarian that you will remember forever?
  5. What made your work experiences unique?
  6. How did you keep yourself motivated?
  7. What made you excited to go to work each day?
  8. Discuss some of the most enriching experiences during your career.
  9. Discuss a couple of difficulties you have faced during your career. These difficulties can be either with patrons, with the library or elsewhere. How did you handle the situation? Reflecting upon either those instances or on others, would you have handled the challenge in a different manner now? What advice would you offer to new professionals on how to handle challenging situations as they arise? What would you advise against doing?
  10. What were your most successful fundraising events? What would you change or add in staging similar functions?
  11. How did you deal with challenges in the past and how might you apply these experiences in solving new problems?
  12. What have been the biggest frustrations or disappointments in your career? Were they avoidable?
  13. What do you hope that the next generation of librarians will experience?
  14. What was your single major professional regret? How did you recover? What did you learn from it? What would you advise others to do in order to avoid similar mistakes?
  15. What different ‘hats’ did you have to wear as a librarian that you never imagined you would have to?
  16. What about your job would most surprise those outside of the profession?
  17. What was the most rewarding aspect of your career?
  18. What was your most challenging experience?
  19. Did your position meet your expectations?
  20. How or why did you chose to stay in your career?
  21. How did you maintain your passion for the field?
  22. How have you seen libraries/librarians come together to help one another?
  23. What made the most impact on your career as an information specialist (i.e. a mentor, a job change, ALA, or conferences?)
  24. Is there something you wish someone had told you before you began your career?

Mentoring