My life in libraries
The photo of the member of staff flicking through the card catalogue brought back so many memories. I have been a library user for more than 50 years, starting out with those thrilling voyages of exploration in the children’s library at Doncaster public library as a child (books and rhyme & song – what is this place of wonder?). I then moved up to the adult library, wrestling with those card catalogues to help with my homework, and then my first Saturday job as a library assistant at 16. I was further delighted to encounter my first ‘OPAC’ machine at university in 1984, and there has been no looking back…
I have used public libraries in East Sussex and West Sussex ever since leaving home, alongside studying, then working as a library assistant and finally becoming a fully-fledged qualified librarian in the mid-1990s. Whilst my career has been almost exclusively in college and university libraries, my love of public libraries - and how they made me feel - has stayed with me throughout.
My favourite library experience is following the submission of the last piece of work for my degree, when I was thoroughly sick and tired of reading academic textbooks. I spent the entirety of that summer working my way through as many 19th century novels as I could get my hands on at Brighton public library – novels that I hadn’t read for A-level English, novels that I felt ought to have read, novels that I simply didn’t have the time to read whilst studying. Oh, and applying for library jobs….