What exactly do librarians do?: A Q/A with Emily Beck, curator of WHL

As it turns out, librarians don’t, in fact, sit behind a desk and read all day – as disappointing as that sounds. So what really goes on behind staff doors?

Well, librarianship is a big field, and there’s dozens of specialities the up-and-coming librarian could take: reference, research, cataloguing, archives and special collections, children and teen services, subject matter, and so many more.

To get a peek behind the curtain, we sat down with three recently promoted librarians at the University of Minnesota Libraries. In the first of a three-part series, Emily Beck, curator of the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine (WHL), gives a day in her life, from teaching classes to conducting her own research.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear from Laura McElfresh, an associate cartographic metadata librarian, who tracks down the history behind centuries old maps; and Anne Good, associate curator of the James Ford Bell Library, and of Special Collections and Rare Books, who similarly teaches, researches, writes, and everything in between.

The following interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Interview with Emily Beck

Can you give me a day in the life of your job? 

Every day I am working with the student employees to think about what materials need to be pulled or shelved, or what special projects we're working on. Every day I am talking to Lois Hendrickson, head curator of WHL. She and I work very collaboratively. 

During the semester, I often am teaching. Last year we taught 125 unique classes, and so that means a lot of my days are teaching or prepping for teaching. And the prep is usually meeting with faculty and instructors, or putting together lists of things to pull, or making activities for the students to do while they're here. 

Sometimes we're working on exhibits. Lots of meetings. Sometimes I'm working with booksellers to think about what we want to purchase.

I manage budgets and space. That’s a lot of work that maybe people don't think about. We're a closed stacks, non-circulating collection. We have a vault where all of the materials live, and we have to keep pretty close track of what's going on down there. 

There's a lot of making sure that everything is shelved correctly. Do we need to be doing any sort of special projects to take care of this stuff? There's a lot of preservation needs that we're thinking about. We meet with Anna Shepard, a conservation specialist, who helps us see what things might need enclosures, special boxes for the books if the bindings are in rough shape. Stacks management is a big category. And I do my own research too. It's kind of all over the place. 

What's your research about? 

I have several projects. One of them is trying to figure out how to make interactive digital surrogates of movable books. So in the Wangensteen, we have a lot of flap anatomies, which are sort of like paper dolls where you lift up the flaps and you can do a paper dissection. And we have a lot of books that have wheels that you can turn, those are called volvelles. 

Often people would put those in books as a way of calculating different things or doing navigation. And the problem is that they're digitized just with regular still photography, so there's no way to tell whether or not they move, or how they move. I'm working with Lois and Theresa Berger, head of the Digital Library Services (DLS) and Digital Library Services Librarian, to figure out a way to make them interactive on UMedia.

Because if you’re looking at flap anatomies, and you can't control that interaction yourself, then you also lose some of the meaning. We argue that the meaning comes from the interactivity, and from the movement that you yourself are doing. That's something that we've seen born out in the research that scholars are doing with these types of materials, that the purpose of these materials is to implicate the user in the creation of meaning through movement. 

I also have a long-running oral history project called Plant/People, that I do with my good friend, Macey Flood. We interview people who have close connections to plants and land in pursuit of health. 

And I also work on recipe books. What are people making in their homes to help manage their health? What kinds of remedies are they making? What ingredients are they using? Who are they looking to be authority figures? Where are they getting their information from? 

Can you tell me about your promotion? 

Yeah, I was promoted to full librarian this year. It is great to have my colleagues look at the scope of what my career has been and say that I'm doing a good job, I'm working at a high level, and that I should be promoted. 

How long have you been at the U of M Libraries? 

Gosh, I think I started this job in 2017, although I worked here in the Wangensteen as a student employee, as well while I was in graduate school for a few years. But I started out as an assistant librarian, and then associate librarian, and then full librarian, which is the same sort of structure that faculty go through as well. 

What’s the most challenging part of your job? 

Context switching is pretty constant in my job, and I find that challenging sometimes. Like we teach in 20 or 30 different departments every year, so I have to be ready to talk about material from a biology standpoint, but also from a history of medicine standpoint, also from a bioethics standpoint. Sometimes that is a little confusing in my brain. So that’s both challenging, but also kind of fun, because then I'm constantly learning. I find it challenging to find large enough chunks of time to do any deep thinking. There’s a lot going on. 

What’s your favorite part of the job? 

I love the teaching, and any sort of opportunity to talk with people about the material, whether that's teaching or advising or just working with researchers. It's really cool to see how different people look at things in different ways and make meaning with them in different ways. 

What are some common misconceptions about librarianship?

Yeah, actually this weekend someone asked me if my job is quiet, and I thought, “Well, it's quiet in that it's not usually audibly loud, but it is not quiet in an activity sense. It's not calm.” Sometimes people think that I get to read a lot in my job, and I don't. I wish that I got to just sit with the books and read them all the time, but there's too much going on. 

People don't always understand what a curator adds to a library. What's the point of a curator? It's not always clear to people how much information curators, librarians, and archivists have in their brains about the material, and the different ways that that can help people. 

When you have people who have spent every day for decades with these materials, they know so much about them. And people don’t always know just how collaborative we can be as research partners or teaching partners, and research really should be collaborative. Talking with the staff in the library is really critical for successfully finding and interpreting things. 

What do you wish people knew about librarianship? 

I wish they knew how expensive it was. People donate stuff, which is so nice, but few people want to donate money along with their materials. And all of the money that is required to support a book in perpetuity in this institution, it’s so much. The total cost of stewardship is something that I wish I knew how to communicate better with people. Thank you for offering me your book, but I don't have the funding to care for it.

It's useful for people to know that librarians do their own research. We are part of the academic environment just as much as the faculty are. We're doing research that is important and valuable and requires a lot of professional expertise.