Nicole E. Brown, Class of 2004—Placements and Salaries 2004

By John N. Berry, III -- Library Journal, 10/15/2005

She earned her MLIS just over a year ago at the School of Library and Information Services, at the Pratt Institute in New York City, but Nicole Brown’s library experience covers a surprising nine years in both public and academic libraries. Much of that work included duties traditionally reserved for “professionals.” She had lined up her current job—Instruction/Reference Librarian at the American University in Cairo, Egypt—long before she graduated.

She managed to expand even her first library job, as a Student Assistant at the Murphy Library at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, from which she graduated in 1999 (BA in Psychology and Spanish, in which she is fluent). It was an experimental position, and she thrived in it.

“I shadowed the professional librarians at first. I didn’t say a word for probably two, even three months,” Brown reports.

“I watched what they did, and I pointed when the directional questions came. It became apparent that it was useful to have a student on the reference desk,” she recalls. “Say an undergraduate came up and said, 'I have to do a paper and I need ten sources.’ I would know ('Do you have that class with Prof. X?’). I had seen the assignments, and the librarians hadn’t. Ultimately the librarians loved what I did.” All ten of the professional librarians with whom Brown worked wrote recommendations to give her an award. They sent her to a Wisconsin academic librarian conference.

Through all her library school years (2002-04) Brown worked as a librarian trainee in the branch libraries of the Brooklyn Public Library, a famous training ground for service-oriented librarians. She worked at outreach to teenagers and daycare centers, and did reference work in Spanish, the language of the neighborhood.

The mix of real library work and LIS studies at Pratt enhanced Brown’s educational experience. “It was fun to be the person in an LIS class who had real library experience,” she says. “I was there with lots of career changers and many who had never worked in a library. I already had wonderful library experiences and I told fellow students, 'Hey! It is going to be a great job—a great career!’”

After Wisconsin, and before library school, Brown moved back near the area where she was born and raised, near Ithaca, NY. There she worked as a reference assistant in the Cornell University Libraries. At Cornell she was on a committee to design a new reference desk, and they came up with a one-piece, counter-height desk that could accommodate three librarians.

Brown is now helping develop the information literacy course at the American University in Cairo. She and her boss, Alison Armstrong, did a conference presentation on the subject. Brown’s article on “The Shift from Apartheid to Democracy: Issues and Impacts on Public Libraries in Cape Town,” was published in Libri: The International Journal of Libraries and Information Services, for which she went to Capetown to do the research.

“I’m one of those people who enjoyed library school, because I enjoy school,” Brown says. “But I think that real librarianship is learned more through an apprentice-master relationship than through courses. I was apprenticing from that very first job at LaCrosse.”

Her advice to current LIS students: “Get that experience, even if you have to volunteer, I hate to say it, but get in there somehow.” Then she backs off, “It is more important to find a mentor, someone you admire, someone at a different stage in their career, further along.” Armstrong, Brown’s current mentor, is head of the information literacy department in the university library at Cairo. Brown is currently on a committee to plan the library for a new campus, and she chairs a subcommittee that is planning the information commons at the American University.

Nicole Brown is energized, excited, and enjoys her career as a librarian.