“Library school” has taken Jasmine Daigle to some unusual and unexpected places: Remote areas of rural New Brunswick in a bookmobile; Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame; and now the inner workings of the R.P. Bell Library.
Jasmine joined the R.P. Bell in February as a cataloguer on contract to replace Alana Estabrooks, who is on maternity leave. It’s her latest stop in a line of unexpected but rewarding positions related to libraries.
“I realized traditional education was not where I wanted to end up,” said Jasmine, who completed a B.A. in English and History at UPEI and initially considered a career in teaching. “I wanted something less traditional and education related, but still relevant.”
Her answer was the Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) program at Western University, where she completed her degree in 2011.
Her first job after library school was with the New Brunswick Public Library system, where she worked both within libraries and on the road with the bookmobile, bringing books to rural communities over a huge geographic area.
“It was fabulous. I loved it. I got to see all the amazing things in New Brunswick that don’t make it into the tourism ads. All the pretty hidden nooks of the province,” she says. Highlights included New River Beach, the Indian Island First Nation, and Long Reach. “Everybody’s impression of New Brunswick is trees and bad roads, but that’s not all of it,” says Jasmine, who grew up in Irishtown, near Moncton.
When her bookmobile contract ended, Jasmine applied on a whim for museum and curatorial work with the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame. That eventually led to a two-year position as a museum educator and curatorial assistant with Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in Calgary. “Basically, I helped make the galleries look pretty and then toured the kids through it,” she says. “It was a lot of fun.”
Sadly, work related to libraries, archives and museums can be precarious because these public institutions are often underfunded and vulnerable to cuts. When her position was cut at the Sports Hall of Fame, Jasmine looked homeward. Her first week at the R.P. Bell Library was during the strange quietness of Reading Week. Since then, things have picked up.
“I walked out of Technical Services the other afternoon to fill my water bottle, and every table was full. That makes me very happy,” says Jasmine, whose role as a cataloguer in Technical Services is crucial to ensuring the library can get its materials to the library patrons who need them.
“Cataloguing makes it as easy as possible for people to find that one paper or book for the project they’re working on to go much easier,” she says. “If you don’t know you have something and you don’t know how to find it and it never sees the light of day, there’s no point in keeping it.”
Her undergraduate degree taught her the usefulness of a good library and librarians skilled in research. After running into a dead end researching liquor laws in pre-Confederation Canada -- a topic she thought would be “super easy” -- Jasmine was saved by the special collections librarian. “They know the collection. It’s like personalized reader’s advisory, but for research.”
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