This July we would like to introduce you to Aina Dambitis who is a volunteer at the Maritime Museum of Tasmania in Hobart. She says ‘I look after the books.’ Continuing Aina’s story
“When my family moved to Hobart fourteen years ago, we knew three people in Hobart. After the first flurry of activity to do with moving died down, I looked round for ways to meet people through volunteering. One of the organisations I rang was TMAG. The person I spoke to said they didn’t need volunteers at the moment, but I could try the MMT because they took anyone. So, I did and they did. I was welcomed warmly and told they needed a librarian. They were hoping one would turn up and here I was. And I have stayed.”
Where and how did you start your LIS career?
My paid working life was as a secondary teacher in the South Australian education system. I taught in the humanities and spent a lot of time with the teacher librarians. Teaching English and History, the school library was like an extension of my class room. Eventually, I added the Graduate Diploma in Librarianship on to my formal qualifications and became a teacher librarian, juggling classes with library work.
Somehow, each time I changed schools the library was at the stage of changing from paper catalogue cards to computer records. Each time the collection needed to be weeded. I learned to harden my heart and weed out books which were not being used or were out of date. The Bonfire of the Vanities in reverse. Endless lists and checking of records. Now, I am long retired and can please myself.
Teacher librarians have the best job in a secondary school. It is a great pity that those positions are often seen as a luxury and that schools think they don’t need libraries anymore because “you can find everything on the net”.
Does your role in the LIS field match what you expected before starting out?
The teacher librarian role was much as I expected. Satisfaction when a student fell in love with a book I had recommended and frustration with the work load.
My role at the MMT is to be the librarian. I was quite anxious about going as I know nothing about boats and as an incomer, I didn’t have the background knowledge that a born Tasmanian has without even being aware of it. I decided I would try to hide my ignorance by working quietly and obediently in the back ground. (Who knew that Terra Linna and Terralinna were two vessels and not a typo? That boats kept changing their names? Is it a “vessel” or a “boat”?) Excel spreadsheets ruled. To find out something you had to ask someone, usually a grizzled seagoing type of bloke. The organisation was at the point of finding an online catalogue system and we decided on eHive. It was cheap, easy to use and Vernon was a reputable company. The MMT is always desperate for funding so the new system had to be affordable. Once again, I was involved in making the move to a new cataloguing system. It was easier this time because we transferred data from Excel rather than from paper cards. And weeding was discouraged.
What are the key issues you face in your role? What are the rewards?
For me, one of the issues is an over reliance on spreadsheets. As we know, spreadsheets are useful for those who create them and less so for the rest of the team. Our online catalogue hasn’t been the unifying system that I hoped it would be. Almost every thing we have in the building is recorded on our online catalogue in varying levels of detail and what isn’t yet, will be (about 20,500 so far). But, what if the cloud falls out of the sky? What if the company goes bankrupt? I can’t find what I’m looking for, this is a terrible system. So, we continue to make spreadsheets. At some point, the two methods need to be reconciled and both updated. A lot of volunteer time is spent on this kind of activity. It is time consuming and needs careful oversight. Someone has to keep track of what everyone is doing and this kind of coordination is a huge responsibility for a volunteer.
Another issue is to do with cataloguing and the nature of volunteering. Most of the work is done by volunteers. We are a happy bunch of people, we come and go and we can be a little bit forgetful at times. There are guidelines for data entry which are mostly followed. I no longer lie awake at night festering about the cavalier use of punctuation or abbreviations or wording but at home I do still go back and make corrections in some entries, hopefully without upsetting anyone. Formal cataloguing is specialised knowledge which few have. I have almost reached the point of being able to say that cataloguing inconsistencies really don’t matter as much as they used to because of the powerful search engines we all use now.
Also, museum curators have a different vocabulary and way of describing things.
Also, the MMT has run out of space.
The reward is being with people who are passionate about our maritime heritage and expert in their field. The reward is listening to retired sailors reminiscing over morning tea. The reward is watching a nonagenarian identify a yacht from an old photograph and give the probable date of that particular race, the name of the owner and the builder.
The reward is finding what we are looking for.
What is a point of difference about your service?
We have a small collection of books (2,800) to do with the sea and sailing and the history of various vessels and of Tasmania and an increasing section dealing with Antarctica. It is mainly used by the curators and researchers as a reference library. There is a section of more general books for borrowing by members called the Crew Library. The oldest and most delicate are in a compactus, the rest on open shelves. We are very short of space and books and periodicals are stacked on top of each other, wherever they can fit.
The books do not appear on the public online catalogue because it is not a public lending service.
One member devised the catalogue numbering system so we use our own version rather than Dewey.
I have added extra information to the catalogue records of some of the most useful books e.g. the index or chapter headings or key words. This helps the newer researchers who are unfamiliar with the collection. I feel at liberty to do this because the library books are saved as private records and so I can be more relaxed about them than if you were checking them on our website with your critical eye!
What career strategies and skills are important for a successful LIS career?
- For a successful career, we need to like people
- We need a deep knowledge of our subject
- We need to be able to share our knowledge and skills.
ALIA Island 