chat

Humans have a built in desire to gather and share knowledge. We are a social species and evolving ways to communicate and share our experiences in order to increase the overall knowledge of the whole community increases our chance of survival immensely. I would say this communal sharing and understanding of others perspectives in order to strengthen the whole group (empathy) is the greatest achievements of our species and what makes us human.

People take for granted that the ability for a species to have information learned through experiences be passed on and not die with the experiencer. Not many other animals have that. I think this is why most of human culture has a strong culture of story telling and remembering our ancestors.

We stand on the shoulders of giants to see further than they could. This is why the loss of education, the warping of history, and loss of media preservation is so tragic. It leaves us in a loop of having to relearn the lessons we already learnt. That's what happens when you atomize and hyperindividualise a social species.

Imagine if we didn't have this tendency to store and pass knowledge? Imagine not knowing what germs are, not knowing to wash your hands, not knowing which food is poisonous? Imagine if every individual had to come up with the invention of the wheel all on their own?

So yeah, librarians and archivists of all kinds are cool and it's natural to want to be one. I don't think they're valued as much as they should be.

Welcome back comrade Stalin

it doesn’t help pay the bills but i hoard digital books and keep them in a Proton Drive and a Mega Drive, and i share them in a Telegram channel and sometimes other social media.

as leftists, we know that this type of work is not profitable to capitalists and that is why they won’t pay us to do it.

i’m not sorry you were born working class. i am sorry that our organizing efforts are still too neoliberal-brained to recognize the value of labor that serves our greater good.

I thought about going to library school for a while, but ended up getting a temp job at a call center alongside 3 people with MLIS degrees lmao

at a time when archivists are becoming obsolete.

Not if the pillars of technology start to collapse.

Public libraries might get cut but we're going to need thousands of communist monks to be our archivists through the dark age.

Not sure if there was ever really a golden age of archives and libraries to look back at. Modern libraries are a product of so-called philanthropy ala Carnegie et al. The takeover by lefty nerds in urban areas has always been tenuous at best.

If you have the energy, there are all kinds of unpaid spots in small, niche archives that have no funding or not enough funding to do all the work that needs done.

But yeah I understood my teachers a lot better when I became an adult and realized 90% of teachers are people who wanted to do something else but realized too late it was unrealistic. "Well, there's always teaching." I have it on good authority you can get suuuuper drunk through all of teacher's college and still pass.

you me

i always wanted to be a librarian but grew up in poverty and had to drop out early to work.

by sheer will alone i bruteforced my way into high-paying software jobs on merit, but these days my skills are out of date, the work i enjoyed has been replaced with the stochastic parrot and certifications don't cut it. i've heard even if i went back for my degree it won't matter. but what i loved in every job was creating and maintaining and organising the mountains of documentation and context-building which facilitated my colleagues to complete their tasks. it was so much work, but i was expected to do this in addition to my 'normal duties'. no time or money set aside every week to compensate me for this work.

so i resurrected that child in me and thought about getting a MLS. but from what i've heard from people in the field… the comments in this thread seem to be about the US; the situation isn't much different elsewhere. i'm lucky to be currently residing in a country that has archives encoded in its constitution, so i might become an archivist.

my friends all say i'm a great teacher; that i light up when i teach them something. so maybe i'll become a teacher.

my therapist says i should work with animals; that i light up when i talk about animals. but that's not economically viable either. most of the jobs are hurting (or treating injured) animals and that sounds heartwrenching. i'm reminded of a friend whose special interest is insects, but there's not even academia down the entomology route: it's pest control.

i don't even know what to do anymore! i don't know where i'm going and i'm so fucking lost, because every avenue i look down has people walking the other way saying 'you don't even want to see what's down there.' for now i toil on whatever part time shit is willing to put up with my mentally and physically broken ass, and plod slowly along trying to restart a life that never began.

EDIT: also, smart person that i am /s, i got my technical writer certificate just before the pandemic. because technical writing is totally something you can get hired for these days…

I somehow misread that as libertarian and did a double take, like ain't no way comrade sharkfucker has any desire to be a libertarian.

But yeah, it's a wonderful calling but I have no idea what it's like getting into that as a career. It seems pretty niche these days, but I wouldn't abandon the thought unless you've looked into it and found that it wouldn't fit. When I've gone to the library in my area, the librarians are mostly pretty old, and I imagine many will be retiring soon.

I also fantasize about what job I'd do if a successful revolution takes place. I feel like any job I find under capitalism will ultimately leave me alienated. But under socialism, there would be so much to do that is currently neglected. Re-energizing libraries, improving literacy, conducting historical research, and improving information accessibility would be priorities I'd imagine which would bode well for you. Personally, I think I would do well with electronics repair, recycling, and e-waste mitigation and processing.

Books smell nice

I’ve applied to several library jobs here and never even got an interview. I volunteered at my high school library when I was a student and the job could not have been easier. Local libraries here get maybe ten or twenty patrons over the course of an entire day. Weekly community events rarely attract more than a few people. Not to insult librarians but this job is a reward for being a good little treatlerite, nothing more.