Rud 2: Actual Blogging

Seven Questions
Chosen celebrity: Neil Armstrong
This challenge would be pretty much impossible as Neil Armstrong was notorious for rarely doing interviews. Still...

1. Why did you decide to become an astronaut?
2. Is there a particular skill set required? Being a pilot already?
3. In Chris Hadfield's autobiography An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth he talks about thinking like an astronaut. What is thinking like an astronaut? 
4. If you couldn't have been an astronaut what would you have done?
5. .....
6. .....
7. .....

This is no good! I can't think of Q5 - 7. We'll just pretend that that's when I was awestruck and said 'um' a lot!

How did I start in libraries?
I had to wait until I was seven and my sister could read and then we both joined the library. For years we both went once a week usually after we had done the food shopping with our Dad. After a while I stopped reading children's fiction, YA wasn't there then, and I moved to the grown-ups' section. There I read mostly genre fiction: crime and science fiction.

White, James. Star Surgeon.
UCC Library.

Undergrad Done
When I finished my undergrad someone said to me "Would you like to work in a library?" and I said "No, I think those people are boring!" Later I would become a student shelver in the library and I realised that I had miscalculated. I really enjoyed working in the library and I still know the Dewey classification scheme well for the sciences and engineering. Super useful at quizzes!

Onto the Library
I started looking into working in a library, any library really, I did a few interviews and waited for places to get back to me. This was during the Celtic Tiger when panels were formed and it might be a year before they'd get back to you. I started working in UCC Library 19th June 2006 - some days you don't forget. I remember wearing pink shoes (do I even own pink shoes now??) and they weren't comfy by day's end!

Over the last nine years I've always worked on front-line services: Customer Services, InterLibrary Loan, Health Sciences Customer Services and Information Desk, and Special Collections. In November 2012 I started working as the Special Collections Librarian in UCC and now I don’t work as much on the front-line. Instead I’m working on exhibitions, collection development and organisation, promotion of collections through blogging, and information literacy classes.

Actual Blogging
Anyone who works in library land may be annoyed, read will be annoyed, at some point that all other people think we do is read all day at work because we like to read. Sure, I like to read and I have read at work but then that's part of the job too. I'm doing this post at work as it's part of CPD. I can't magically move the information into my head without reading it. The 'fun' reading of genre fiction however, well that has to stay outside of work. There are limits!

References
White, James. Star Surgeon. London: Corgi, 1967.