Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Interview questions

When you get to the part of the interview (and you will) where they ask you, if *you* have any questions. You *should* have some. Some of them may have been answered already, but have a few in your back pocket, to be sure.

Feel free to chime in here, I'll try to keep adding to this list:

*What was your career path?
*What is your typical day like?
*What is the worst (best) thing about your job?


Questions you should be prepared to answer:
_How have you handled a problem at work?
_Where do you see the profession going in the next 5 years?
_What made you interested in this position?

More specific to academic libraries/reference
positions:

_If someone asks you a question that 10 others have
already asked you, how would you answer it?
_Something about your teaching philosophy, how do
you see bibliographic instruction/information literacy/critical thinking skills?
_If someone said your collection was weak in X [fill in some legitimate, but perhaps obscure request, like graphic novels in Spanish in an academic library], how would you handle the request?

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Spring Quarter marching on

* How do I tell if this is a scientific journal article? [Talked about language used, references, datum, publisher, etc.]

* What is the accession number for this paper from the Institute for Theoretical Physics? [Ended up giving the patron contact information for the ITP.]

* I'm looking for Erasmus Darwin's book from 17xx. [We could actually print this book, albeit in 50 image chunks, from the 18th Century Books database. How totally cool.]

*I need a Ph.D. dissertation from Oxford or a 2 page article from this journal. [WorldCat had it...]

*How do I find the most recent volumes of this journal? [They are now online.]