But I do love books...

One of the questions we commonly ask candidates when they come in for a registration interview is why did you choose librarianship or information management? This seems to be a question many people find difficult to answer and the less well-prepared go for the cliched "I just love books and reading". Not quite the explanation we are looking for.

And yet, I'm a librarian and I do love books and reading. My local library was vitally important to me when I was a child and teenager, allowing me to explore in my own time what the world of literature had to offer. Without the freedom to browse and pick up books at random I would never have discovered many of my favourite authors or books.

Similarly, without the library I would have had to pay out my own hard-earned cash to discover that I didn't like Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, Ulysses by James Joyce, all of Joseph Heller's works apart from Catch-22, and the interminable Lord of the Rings to name just a few and what an expensive disappointment that would have been.

So while I didn't become a librarian simply because I like books and reading, my positive experiences with the County Library in Barry did lead me to at least consider librarianship as an option in my frantic search through the careers service in my final year at uni to find something you could do with a degree in history and classics - oh so useful. As I read more about the job and the kinds of skills and tasks involved, I began to think, yes, this is something I could enjoy and a librarian was born (well, after a year at RGU anyway). I suspect it must be the same for many in the profession?