IN DEPTH
From teacher to student: the road to a new career
Emma Rothwell is the Library Student at the National Library of Ireland. The Studentship is a year-long Graduate Trainee programme offered to a person who intends to pursue postgraduate study in Library and Information Studies afterwards. Here she explains how and why she decided to take a new direction with her career.
DESCRIBING myself as a “graduate” feels like a little bit of a stretch because I graduated back in 2011 with a BA in Religions and Theology with English Literature. The following year I qualified as a secondary school teacher and I have been working in schools in Dublin and the rural mid- lands of Ireland since.
However, throughout my teaching career, and especially in the school holidays when I had a moment to think about what I was doing with my life, I found myself flicking through webpages about MLIS courses offered around the islands of Ireland and Britain. I finally made the decision to go for it and I could not have asked for a better first experience of librarianship than the one I am currently having at the NLI. Our director, Dr. Sandra Collins, describes the NLI as the “memory keeper” of Ireland. I am really proud to be playing a small role in capturing and preserving some memories of Ireland and Irishness in the 21st century.
My role
The Library Student works primarily in the Published Collections department where I have been getting experience of acquisi- tions, cataloguing, periodicals and reader services. Obviously the Covid-19 pandem- ic had a big impact on the Studentship programme when we all switched to remote working. It was very frustrating to spend months away from the collections and col- leagues that I had just been getting to know for a few weeks when we were sent home.
July-August 2021
Emma Rothwell is the Library Student at the National Library of Ireland.
On the other hand, it did create an opportu- nity for me work on a brilliant acquisitions project remotely.
As a legal deposit library, the NLI aims to collect a copy of everything published in Ireland, but many smaller organisations are not aware of their obligation or, indeed, of the fact that the NLI would be interested in acquiring their publications. I spent weeks tracking down publications by local history societies, local arts groups and galleries, grassroots diversity and inclusion organi- sations and theological groups. It has been very satisfying to watch all the publications trickle in through the post since our return.
Getting lost in the library
My journey into librarianship has been a winding one. The year immediately before the Studentship I gave up a full-time, per- manent teaching job in the midlands and took up a part-time one in Dublin so that
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