These are the Different Types of Librarians Found in a Public Library

Adult Librarians, Youth Services Librarians, Teen Librarians? That’s just the beginning…

It may surprise you, but just like there are different kinds of accountants, doctors, and lawyers, there are also different kind of librarians whose duties hardly resemble each others at all. While librarians in the United States tend to get the same graduate-level education earning some variation of an Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree, once finished with school, they have many possible roads. The first question is, “Would you like to work at a public library, an academic/school library, a special library, a museum, or an archive? Once that is decided, each of these types of GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) institutions have many unique career tracks. While I feel all of GLAM is interesting, I’m going to cover public libraries here since it’s what I know best…

Public libraries are the best-known type of library, receiving upwards of 1.4 billion visits a year in the United States. It makes sense, then, that there are nearly 50,000 public librarians (and almost 90,000 non-librarian staff).

It should be noted before I break down different types of librarians that job titles are one thing, but what…