Article by Kevin Hawkins
Director of Library Publishing at the University of North Texas Libraries
To many people’s surprise, when I applied to library school, I didn’t actually expect to end up becoming a librarian after graduating. As an undergraduate I had worked in a digital humanities center (then called a “humanities computing” center) and was drawn to theoretical questions around digital text, and found that a number of people working in this field had once gone to library school. Seemed like a good experience to have in any case, no matter what I ended up doing, since I was fond of libraries and thought it would be good to know some expert tips on how to use them more effectively.
For the career essay component of my application to GSLIS, I visited a small consulting firm that specialized in document processing applications to learn about their current work. I imagined I might end up working at such a place after graduating, or maybe working in a digital humanities center at a university. But I came to see that libraries have dedicated funding (and therefore positions) in a way that DH centers and consulting firms generally don’t, and an opportunity in a university library opened up for me. Though my roles have evolved, and I’ve changed institutions, my career has actually maintained a relatively straightforward path within academic libraries.
Then, as now, there were two required courses at GSLIS: “Information Organization and Access” in the fall semester and “Libraries, Information, and Society” in the spring. Unlike now, both were taught once a week—on Friday mornings at 8 a.m.—as a lecture for the entire cohort of students, with the time of the week and lecture format adding to students’ usual grumpiness about any required course. While the former provided a clinical overview of various aspects of librarianship, it was the latter course that made a greater impact on me. With alternating lectures by Leigh Estabrook and Dan Schiller on topics ranging from professional codes of ethics to the history of the postal service, this course more than any led me to identify with librarianship as a mode of professional behavior that transcends particular employers and job duties. Dan Schiller, like Dave Dubin in his teaching, illuminated the radical nature of the profession, and Dan gave evidence of the historical role of government in promoting communication. While the allusions to political radicals and the relationship between the post office and libraries were lost on many of my peers, it is this frame of thinking that I learned at GSLIS that has informed my career since then.
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