Quote Originally Posted by ouronis View Post
What kind of freelance would you do?
I'm already doing some of it. Teaching computer courses through Community Education, private tutoring. But it's just a small supplement to my income. I don't know if I can solely do freelance. I need a secure source of income to feel comfortable.

Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
Ordinarily, I would say that you should pursue your dreams and should just quit and dedicate yourself full time toward looking for the permanent position in a library. However, for most jobs, it is easier to get one if you already have one, and the US is heading into a recession now and will likely be there for at least a year or three, and jobs are soon going to be even harder to get.

So instead of quitting, I would recommend that you keep your present jobs, try to make yourself more valuable at the place you like the most, and send out resumes in your spare time.

Start by telling your most sympathetic supervisor that you want to do more work and be more useful and helpful, and ask how you can do that. Then work like crazy to do it. It may work out, it may not (library management, I have discovered, can be both political in the bad sense of the word and capricious), but in either case, it will be good training that you didn't have to pay for.
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Early on in my library career I was naive and thought that if I just worked there long enough, eventually I would get to take on the responsibilities and challenges. Eventually I would be 'asked' to do things and to be shown the ropes. And of course I expected to get a full-time job after working on-call for a year or two. But it never happened.

It took me a few years to realize that I have to make things happen myself rather than waiting for them to happen to me. So I have been explicit about telling the manager of the library the types of experiences I want to gain more of. The gaps in my skillset that I need to fill. While the managers are usually understanding of my situation, there still isn't much they can do themselves to make it a reality. My work situation is unique in that I don't have just one work location or manager I work under. It's hard to take on some larger projects when I keep going from library to library.