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 What is your name?
Olivia Fitzpatrick.
Where are you from?
Cork originally
Where do you work?
Back in Cork at UCC after many years in Belfast
What do you spend most of your day doing?
There are many possible answers to this question. I have settled for circumspection.
Too much of my day is taken up with email. Replying, re-replying and replying yet again to communications of dubious importance, deleting invitations to improve bits of human anatomy, cute pictures of polar bears, sites for cheap watches and optimistic tips for world stock exchanges.
A lot of time is more usefully spent doing information literacy sessions on exploiting the resources of the library – electronic and, specified by the teaching staff in Arts and Humanities, the hard copy resources also. There is so much ground to cover that I often feel the students get information overload, but the combination of their complete familiarity with electronic media, and my strictures on the use they make of it, seems to be of use to them.
After that, I look at the list of deadlines and add to it. It never seems to diminish, but the things to do when there is time list also lengthens. Filing will just have to wait again.
Then there are meetings, demonstrations and training, seminars. These often outlast an attention span of 40 minutes. Many of them involve the use of PowerPoint.
I try to keep up with professional issues in journals and the articles of Tara Brabazon in particular, the guru of all thinking librarians. Her trenchant opinions on Google, PowerPoint, distance learning and libraries are forceful and informative. Newly appointed Professor of Media Studies in the University of Brighton, she has lectured in Australia and New Zealand. Among her many books on education and popular culture is Ladies who Lunge : Celebrating difficult women, which does exactly what it says in the title.
Did you always want to be a librarian?
No, it took me a long time to arrive at librarianship. Answering readers’ letters at Woman magazine in London, teaching English in the Ivory Coast and lots of other gainful occupations made a useful background to a library career. I trained at Queen’s University with a specific job in art librarianship in mind, and with a Lotto-sized stroke of luck, it became vacant as soon as I was ready for it.
What do you enjoy about your job?
I enjoy subject enquiries, not as immediately memorable in Cork as when I worked with art and design students – When is the 19th century? What is an adverb? Can I have a picture of a chicken, but especially the legs? Where can I find the history of Levi jeans/Coca-Cola bottles/Barbie dolls? In Cork they are more wide ranging and in more depth and invariably interesting and, yes, I do like dealing with the book as an artefact, private presses, the Dolmen Press, the books of the wood engraver Robert Gibbings
What do you avoid doing most?
…telling readers to keep quiet, wake up, get off their phones, pay fines, or to get rid of banned substances.
What do you do to unwind after a hard day at the office?
This is another question to which there are many possible answers but to sum up, I usually sit with a drink and think great thoughts for a while before planning my re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. However, although our stress levels are much higher than expected, this process is by no means limited to librarians.
Are you a “typical” librarian and if so, how, or does this question make you mad!
I resent not being able to mention the words cats or knitting, having to avoid cardigans and sensible tweeds whether I like them or not, and wish librarianship had the same cachet as, say, being ground crew to a hot air balloon.
Would love to be a typical something, but never having been a president of the USA, a Pope, a director of the FBI or hanged for treason, I do not have the profile of a typical librarian.
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