Anonymous Patron writes “A Story Out of MA says Devon R. Dawson, the archivist-curator of the Holyoke Public Library’s history room, will leave on Aug. 24 because the city was unable to give him a pay raise.
“I have student loans and things I need to pay off; I can’t keep deferring it,” said Dawson on Friday.
He has been paid at the rate of $23,000 a year for a 35-hour work week, starting on July 1. Before that, he was paid $26,000 for a 40-hour week.
He said he will return to California to look for a better paying job.”
Professional Goal
To have an annual gross salary that exceeds my student loan debt load. So close……
Re:Professional Goal
You chose a new profession? Do tell so the rest of us can find a job where annual salary > student loan balance.
I thought I was woefully underpaid, until I read about that archivists salary. I feel Trump-like now.
Is this a clue to low salaries?
Take a look at this condescending definition of librarianship:
“Library science is distinct from librarianship, which is the practical services rendered by librarians in their day-to-day attempt to meet the needs of library patrons. Librarianship tends not to create new knowledge, nor to strive to advance any field or discipline. Librarians only rarely engage in library science, and then usually outside their jobs as librarians. But the study of library science is part of the requisite training of librarians.
The term library and information science should not be broken into these separate pieces. Library and information science is a hybrid academic field that grew from library schools’ fight for survival in the electronic age. The politics of academia, issues of status and prestige, issues of perceived obsolescence and other forces created these programs. Programs in library and information science are interdisciplinary, overlapping with the fields of systems’ analysis, computer science, statistics and various parts of the social sciences.
The field of library and information science is not defined by its output of information specialists, but by the “information specialists” who remain in academia teaching and doing research, by its literature, its journals and all the other ways in which an academic discipline is defined, the study of which, by the way, falls within the scope of library and information science!”
See? Too many academics churning out the front line folks so they can stay employed in the “real” LIS. Librarians are a product, not to be confused with people who want to be paid well. No jobs? Well, isn’t it some small comfort that your efforts have kept someone else employed? This definition is found in Nationmaster.Com