Some of you may remember a post I wrote a while back lauding seasoned librarians who take us newbies under their wing and mentor us (bless y’all to the moon and back). Well, my mentor is Claudio Bringas, a community librarian at Edmonton Public Library’s Enterprise Square branch, in downtown.
But what does a community librarian do? Aren’t all public librarians community librarians? I asked Claudio if he’d be willing to answer a few questions, and he very graciously agreed.
What does an average day look like for you?
It depends. Some days are mainly about contacting people, emailing, making phone calls. Sometimes you could spend the day writing reports, and other days you would be delivering programs outside of the library. It’s difficult to describe an average day—it varies day to day.
Sometimes we have internal team meetings, and also meetings with different community members. For example, this afternoon I have to meet somebody from a community league and also the Community Recreation Coordinator for the City of Edmonton. They’re planning on setting up an English language training program (something like a conversation circle) at the community league, and are interested in knowing what the library can do to help. That’s an example of what a community librarian meeting outside of the library would be about.
In some branches, community librarians have to do more desk hours than others. When I was at the Stanley A. Milner branch, I only had to do one day every so often. Here at Enterprise Square, it’s whenever I’m needed, so I’ve been doing much more desk hours than I used to.
You became a Community Librarian back in 2008, when the EPL first started hiring for such a position. How would you say community librarianship has changed since then?
Well, one thing is the perception of the people outside of the library. The different community groups are more aware of community librarians and have a better understanding of what we do, whereas at the beginning it was very strange. People didn’t know why we wanted to attend certain community meetings, go to interagency meetings, or participate in this or that event. Now they’re always inviting us to go. I think that’s because they’re more aware of what we do, and aware of the library services as well.
Before, people would think, “The library’s there, they have their books and collections, and that’s about it, right?” Now the public is starting to become aware of the changes. I think it’s because the community librarians are engaged with different groups, and we’ve been doing a wide variety of activities that people wouldn’t see as traditional library programs.
Internally, for us, I would say that in the beginning we had much greater freedom to do different things, explore different programs, whereas everything is now more regulated and has to be justified. For example, as far as programs: if you want to create a program, it must be approved and follow the appropriate channels. Your proposal has to go to the teams that oversee certain types of programs. In the beginning, it was like, “Well, this is something new, and we’ll just try it out.”
A cast-out-a-net-and-see-what-comes-back kind of thing. See what sticks.
Yeah. And that’s pretty much what I did when I moved to the Stanley A. Milner library from the Londonderry branch. My manager said, “Basically, there’s this area that the Downtown library serves. We’ve been focused on one specific area (which was the inner city, the East side of downtown), but there’s also this whole other side where we have lots of organizations and different places. You go and explore to see what’s there. Go and.… do whatever.”
If you had to give one advice to hopeful community-librarians-to-be, what would you say?
That they would need to have a lot of experience in different community initiatives. Just a library degree by itself isn’t enough.
So the message is, “get involved”—right?
Yeah. The people they’ve been hiring lately are people that have all these great experiences and have done all these wonderful things, internships here, setting up libraries there… It makes it very difficult for other people to compete if they don’t have those experiences.
When I got this job, I was one of the first five, and I don’t think any of us had those types of experiences. We were just straight out of library school. I think if I were to apply now, I wouldn’t have a chance. So that’s what I would suggest: Get involved with community groups and initiatives, whether it’s a paid job or volunteering.
The other thing I would say is that if somebody likes a job where they’re always in control of everything, everything has to be a certain way, this job is not for them. [laughs]
About Claudio: Claudio Bringas is one of two community librarians at Edmonton’s central public library branch. An Aussie by birth, he mostly grew up in Chile before moving to Canada in 2001. He graduated from the University of Alberta’s MLIS program in 2007.
About the Edmonton Public Library: The EPL currently has 18 branches spread out across Edmonton, as well as a few lending machines in busy areas of town. It has a full-time Community Librarian per branch, except for its central branch (which has two) and Highlands branch, which has two part-time community librarians instead (co-community librarians, if you will).
Want to learn more about the not-so-secret life of librarians? Check out my first post on what librarians do and my posts on my volunteer job as a spider librarian (part 1, part 2, part 3)! :)
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