Who Knew?
The BBC reports on a study in Britain that found that Librarians ‘suffer most stress’
Fighting fires may sound taxing, chasing criminals demanding, but a new study says that working in a library is the most stressful job of all.
Librarians are the most unhappy with their workplace, often finding their job repetitive and unchallenging, according to psychologist Saqib Saddiq.
He will tell the British Psychological Society that one in three workers suffer from poor psychological health.
The study surveyed nearly 300 people drawn from five occupations.
They were firefighters, police officers, train operators, teachers and librarians and were intended to cover the spectrum, with the librarians first-thought to be the least stressful occupation.
If they gave librarians guns and axes, I’m sure their stress level would be reduced.
7 comments
Hear, hear! While I am not credentialed as a librarian, I have worked part-time jobs in libraries no fewer than four times in my life, and as much as I love being in libraries, I believe I’d dig ditches with a shovel before I’d take another library job. At last, someone is saying in public what library workers have known all along.
i never knew. i adore libraries and librarians. also, i wear out my indestructible plastic library card about once every 6 months or so, and they’ve always cheerfully replaced it.
I would think that it varies a lot from system to system and how much actual freedom a librarian is given to do their job.
I’ve been in cheerful libraries in small towns, but in other places it’s like boot camp with more rules and tighter standards.
I would assume that if you are in a large system there is probably less room for individuality and creativity.
*gasp* It’s just that… people… won’t … SHUT UP….
I enjoyed taking library classes way back when, but I think I like libraries for the smell of the books and the respect people give towards them. Teh Google is putting them out of business though (books and libraries). Sad thought.
Actually, Ellroon, what Google is actually doing, as opposed to what some people think Google is doing, should help both libraries and books. Google and Wikipedia are good places to find the books and materials you need if you are doing research, and then find out where you can get them.
They should also be making available books that are out of print, or too fragile to be handled, but would help people doing research.
When you are doing research in a lot of fields you end up learning to use a microfilm reader. It would be nice to be able to do that on-line, instead of waiting in a library reference room for the microfilm to be found and a reader to become available.
A digital picture is as close of most of us will ever get to The Book of the Kells or a Gutenberg Bible.
it’s not like those microfilm readers are fun to look at either. google books is great [so far, at least]. i’ve found some treasures i’d never have thought to even look for before google books put them out there on the web.
even with that comvenience, if they want my library card, they’ll have to pry it from cold, dead hand. or else just give me the keys to the library itself.
The problem, which is all too common in the tech area, is someone comes up with an idea that they believe to be the greatest thing since sliced bread and start implementing without checking to see if it’s: legal, duplicated, wanted, or understood.
Tech people tend to just “do.” Even though is throughly taught, all too many people start writing code before doing any planning or design. If you look at in-house software, most of it is linked together modules with no overall design or documentation. Hell, if you write a good user’s manual you can create the code from that. One of the old game companies actually did that – the manuals were printed before any code was written.
The guys at Google just started this project without explaining what precisely they were doing and what their intentions were. From the outside it looked like they wanted to create a replacement for libraries, rather than an in-depth card catalog with a version of the Gutenberg Project.