Reflective Essay: A Career As A Student Assistant

As an undergrad at LSU, I changed my major from History to Liberal Arts (Art History Concentration), had my first experiences working in a library, and learned to value hard work, a willingness to learn from those higher up and even those lower than me, and a desire to work in a quiet environment. It was in my three years as a Student Assistant at Hill Memorial Library, first in Microfilming and then in Digital Services, that I first thought library work could be a possible career option. However, this thought wouldn’t become my definite goal until much later. As a Student Assistant, I got to do tasks as varied as ironing newspapers, microfilming newspapers, and using a Digibook or Epson scanner to do scans of rare books, facsimiles, and photographs …show more content…
However, I knew I could do more, thus I opened myself up to learn what I could from those around me and to learn on my own valuable skills. I took an online course on Access because I knew a knowledge on basic database design could prove handy for keeping a tally of what was sent to the bindery. The thing though, which I learned to use, and what I look forward to diving into every day is VSMART, the library’s catalog database. I learned from higher ups in the department how to handle basic correction and manipulation of MARC records, and how to delete items weeded from VSMART from OCLC. I took this knowledge and applied it to a massive project of going through the records in VSMART of items purchased for the Opening Day collection, for the then new Fairwood Library. It was this project that synced me into library work. I found that it can be a fun treasure hunt. It’s the thrill of the hunt for records to be deleted due to being free of shelfmarks, items to be deleted from records due to being lost for more than two years, and just minor corrections to make the items easier to find and access by the