Emily Sanders

LI 835 XI

Summer ‘18

Academic Librarian Interview

Interviews are a great way for students to learn more about the field we are intending to

work in. For this assignment I chose to interview Emily Alexander. She is a SLIM alumni and

she is currently working as the Resource Management Librarian at Graceland University in

Lamoni, Iowa. I always enjoy the opportunity to interview someone in the field because it gives

me the opportunity to see what others in the field are doing and it gives me an idea of what

kinds of jobs are out there for librarians.

I started out the interview by asking Emily what she does on a daily basis. She begins

her day by doing cataloging if there is some that needs done, along with reference during the

school year. Emily is also in charge of ordering books for the library, managing the online

resources, talking to those vendors, fielding sales calls, and is the in house Excel master. Since

Emily is the Resource Management Librarian she is responsible for all the resources within the

library. From there I talked to Emily about what kinds of decisions she gets to make in her

position. She mentioned that she gets to decide what books to buy, but the library is no longer

collecting print resources unless there is a request from someone on the faculty for a specific

book. They do however, collect resources for the children’s and YA collection since Graceland

does have a teacher’s college. Another resource they continually collect is all of the Mark Twain

nominations, which is paid for through a grant.

Next, we talked about the projects that she has been involved with at Graceland. She is

currently heading up a relocation project. They are moving everything from the downstairs to

the upstairs of the library. She said that this has been a lot of work and a lot of manual labor that
she did not expect coming into the job. They have had to move all the shelves and the part of

the collection that was located there. It is taking a lot of time and her workspace has also been

moved so that has been an adjustment as well. Another project she got to work on was curating

a collection of board games for a game night that the library started, which has been really

successful thus far. Another things about the Graceland library is that its staff is very small.

There are only three librarians on staff. Emily, Sabrina, and Josh. They are all SLIM grads.

Josh is the director, Sabrina is the user services librarian, which includes outreach, student

workers, and ILL. Since the staff there is so small they all so everything they can to help one

another.

From there, I asked Emily why she decided to become a librarian because I think it is

important to see where people come from and how they get to where they are now. Emily

majored in English in college and did not really have a direction she wanted to take after

graduation so she decided to apply to three graduate MLS programs. She only finished parts of

all the applications and did not finish all the requirements on them. On her SLIM application she

marked that she wanted to be a graduate assistant. Dr. Fay saw that she spoke German and

had Kathie Buckman give her a call and see if she was still interested. During all this she had

accepted a job teaching in China but was not totally sold on it. She got offered a GA position at

the SLIM office as a research assistant for Dr. Fay so it just seemed like a good fit and was a

natural transition for her. She kept telling me that it is not a very inspirational story, but I think

that we all end up where we are supposed to be and in a way it is inspirational. I wanted to talk

to her about her favorite part of her job next. She said that she really likes the cataloging part of

her job and her absolute favorite part is when a student or patron comes in for help and she

knows exactly how to help that person. She really feels like she accomplished something when

she can help a patron with exactly what they need.

 At the end of the interview I asked Emily about any qualifications for success in this field

or if she had any words of wisdom for a current MLS student. Emily mentioned that as an

academic librarian you need to know how to talk to all different kinds of people. She speaks

with high up administrators of the university, professors, students, public, alumni, and people

that come for the rare book collection ( Church of Christ) and government document depository.

Every person has a different need and needs to be approached differently. That is one of her

keys for success in this occupation. Her words of wisdom were to take the cataloging class

because it provided her with real experience and it is one of the reasons she got hired for her

job. Always do the things that give you more experience and will help you in your future.

Overall, I love just talking to others in the field about what they are up to and I really enjoyed this

assignment.