Meet me at the meeting.

I haven’t been the diligent blogger I hoped I could be. Part of the problem has been the number of meetings I’ve had to attend recently. I always thought I’d have to wait until I finished library school to start attending meetings, but some how I gained early acceptance. Many of the librarians at work joked that they spent more time going to meetings than not, and it seems that most librarian activity on Twitter is talking about their meeting attendance.

It makes me wonder why do there have to be so many meetings and committees? Right now I am on three different committees for libraries and a couple of others for campus matters, and I didn’t even try to get on any of these. At one of the meetings I attended this week, a few people joked about their constant comings and goings between various meetings, but I found it somewhat chilling. Is this what I’m going to school for? So I can be placed on various committees and taskforces to discuss the same issues that librarians have faced for over a century? I know it’s typical for people to go through an existential crisis close to graduation (the last time this happened, I decided to become a librarian), so I’ll accept it in the next few months or so. It just seems that librarians have two jobs- helping patrons and serving the profession. I see librarians who spend more time writing papers to be published, going to meetings, talking about library trends, ect., than actually working at a reference desk or cataloguing new material and I wonder if that’s what those people set out to do. It’s similar to teachers who go into administration, rather than stay in the class room. I guess it takes all sorts, and I think I’d rather be working with my patrons than gazing at my navel with 10 other library staffers about what Library 2.0 means to me.