TARGET: Librarians - Where do they....

[Hildegard Pleva <HPleva@AOL.COM>]

At the age of seventeen and living in Brookly, New York in 1962 I determined
to find my first summer job in the big city. A friend of my dad's was a
librarian at the Engineer' s Society. He suggested that I apply for a clerk
job in special or technical libraries. Went through his list and got my first
"real" job in the library of the Winthrop Pharmaceutical Co. (Bayer Asprin).
Just as a technical aside I should tell you that the librarians in the office
wrote abstracts of technical articles by hand. I typed and filed the copies
on index cards according to their subject instructions. I also brought any
copying to been done to the single copier in the building. It was about ten
feet long.
     In subsequent summers I worked in the financial library of Goldman,
Sachs and Co. on Wall St. and as assistant to the librarian at the National
Audubon Society. You haven't lived until you've had a baby robin flying
around your library leaving presents on your most valuable volumes. The
highlights of my work their was meeting Roger Tory Peterson and getting a
chance to handle an original set of Audubon's folios.
     I began to think that medical librarianship would be great especially
after a medical careers conference at Downstate Medical Center. But my
parents were determined that I would attend a college of the City University
which would give me a free education. In those days parents believed that
their daughters would only have to work for a few years because a husband
would always take care of them. How important could becoming a librarian be?
In addition none of the city colleges offered a degree in librarianship. So I
went to plan B, which was attending Hunter College which cost at the time $24
a semester plus books and obtained a BA majoring in history and elementary
education.
     Six months after graduation I was married and teaching 2nd grade in
Connecticul.
Taught primary grades there for 4 years and then quit to raise my family.
Fifteen years later, the scenario which my parents could not have imagined
came to pass. I became the divorced mother of three sons. I returned to
teaching but in a Catholic school where the salary was just above poverty
level. This was in one of those slumps where public schools had little need
to hire new people. After five frustrating years of public school job hunting
I gave up in discust and began to think about other areas of education in
which I could get a new credential. I'd been a bibliophile all my life and
that old career impulse rose up in me. Within two weeks I was enrolled in the
MLS program at the State University of Albany. Was this karma or fate? I took
2 courses each semester for 6 semesters straight while raising the kids (ages
15, 13, 11) and holding a full-time job as a teacher of 2nd grade. Had the
help of a loan, state graduate fellowship and a scholarsip from the SLMS of
Southeastern New York.
     It seemed like climbing Mt. Everest but it sure worked. Got my first job
easily - filling in a sabbatical leave for a middle school librarian who had
established a wonderful library program and had two full-time aides who
taught me everything they knew. The next year I was offered five different
positions in elem. and mid. sch. libraries. Settled on one in Red Hook, New
York serving 500 students in a mid. sch.
     While my initial motivation was purely financial the results offered
additional benefits. I discovered once again how much I loved school,
learning, etc. I also discovered the benefits of changing one's career in
mid-life - renewed enthusiasm, greater autonomy, and professionalism.
Librarians are a lot nicer than most teachers. I like being the creator of my
own program. But the truth is when you're a one-woman department all the work
is done by one woman. Still do not have a full-time aide.
     Am I a cyberian? Not if my district can help it. AV and computers are
other people's kingdoms. It is very frustrating and so far from the current
vision of the library media center. Each layer of technology makes the
situation worse. Our new multi-media production center is on the other side
of the building, one floor down. Currently my principal and I are trying to
do an end run around these obstacles so that our students will have Internet
access and access to reference resources on  CD-ROM. It has been very
frustrating and I have voiced this on the list in the past.
     Thanks to all for sharing their stories and bearing with the length of
mine.

Hildegard N. Pleva, Linden AVenue Middle School, Red Hook, New York
hpleva@aol.com