There's much more to being a librarian then stacking shelves

Library and information careers get a particularly raw deal when it comes to stereotyping. Almost without fail, Hollywood films portray librarians as dull, elderly spinsterish types wearing cardigans, with their hair in a neat bun. "If they're not shushing people to be quiet, they're being authoritarian about fines," adds Emma Sherriff, outreach support officer for Plymouth Libraries.

Sherriff's job could not be further from this description. A sprightly young woman without a bun in sight, her role is to engage young people aged 11 to 18 in library services. Among the activities she undertakes to achieve this include running a weekly show on hospital radio to promote books and reading – as well as all the other stock in the library, such as CDs and archives of local history – and working with socially excluded young people to get them into the library.

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"I organise events at the library too – beauty evenings for girls and pizza and football nights for boys. We always link in some kind of promotion with them – something like, 'Borrow this book and get X, Y or Z.' It's all about getting people to appreciate the library and realise that there's nothing dull about it. In fact, all of us that work here have big personalities and are passionate about what we do."

Other exciting roles in the sector include web designer and manager, information officer, records manager, information technology expert, working for specialist libraries for organisations ranging from the NHS to law firms, and specialising in issues ranging from patenting to membership queries. You may not work in a library at all, but in an information or research centre. What's more, you can come from any background. Sherriff says she even benefited from studying units on crime and deviance in her degree at Bath University. "It helped because today I design and deliver programmes for young offenders."

It's not even essential to have a degree, points out Francis Muzzu, head of Infomatch, the recruitment agency for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). "Although most are graduates when they join the sector these days, others leave school with A-levels and perhaps go into a library where they work their way up. People often assume librarians are the people who know everything, but actually the role of a librarian or information officer is to be the conduit through which people get the information. That goes for whether you're a generalist in a public library or a specialist in a corporate or academic library," he says.

What you will need, however, are organisational and time management skills – to organise resources as well as your own time, excellent communication skills, a good memory, confidence and assertiveness, good teamworking and networking skills and a good grasp of IT.

For those who are ambitious, there's the chance to study postgraduate qualifications and to become chartered. There's no lack of opportunity for networking too. "Special interest groups exist for people who work in prison libraries through to those who work in the City," says Muzzu.

Among the rewards of working in this sector are being able to follow your passion, he says. "You might be particularly interested in cataloguing or database design or you might feel most at home in a legal or arts library. The joy is that there are so many opportunities – far more than I think most people realise."

The salaries aren't bad either, he adds. "They can go up to six figures." Then there's the fact that most career paths are structured, so people can see where they're heading. "People enjoy the customer service side too, and the sector is also good for people who like the idea of moving up into management. People like the flexibility too – there are plenty of part-time roles. I also think the sector is very good for its lack of sexism and ageism. If you have the right skills and are the right kind of person, you'll generally get a fair hearing."

For Yvonne Smith, prison librarian at HMP Leeds, the job satisfaction comes from helping people to learn to read for the first time, or encouraging them to pick up a book and enjoy it for the first time in their lives. "I like the fact that I can be so creative in my job too. For example, I helped start a project to keep families together. Research shows that if you can keep a family in contact while the man is in prison, he is much less likely to re-offend when he comes out of prison. Our project is called Once Upon A Time and it involves helping the man to read and record a children's story to send to his family. Everyone wins – the children love it and the men enjoy doing something for someone else. Most prison libraries do something along these lines."

Contrary to popular belief, her work is not all about working with murderers and rapists. "Each prison is different and I work in a local one where there are a lot of innocent men – men who haven't been sentenced yet and aren't actually guilty. But the one thing most prisons do share is that the majority of people in them have below-average education. It's very rewarding to help turn that around."

Jane Stephenson, head of information and library services at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, says one of the best things about her role is being valued and recognised as part of the academic team. "I also find it fascinating being a major part of this information age. There is so much information being published, and it's my job to help people through the maze."

As its name suggests, the centre – which forms one of six sites of the Southampton Library Service – has a focus on oceans and earth science. "The work we do involves supporting the research process. After all, the scientists here are publishing in journals all the time. The other side of my work is supporting the teaching and learning needs of students. For example, we have development podcasts and information literacy programmes for undergraduates."

Like others in the sector say, Stephenson says the role is largely autonomous, with a lot of room for creativity. "For example, we do treasure hunts here in the library to get undergraduates used to using information resources."

Such resources, she points out, do not always mean books or even documents. "A lot of students now want information from their desktops. Since anyone can publish on the internet, it's our job to help them get the right information."

The resources that Matthew Radcliffe, media co-ordinator at the BBC Motion Gallery, works with are entirely media based. "The gallery sells clips of programmes to broadcasters all over the world and it's my job to select clips from BBC programmes and different archives that we represent. I collect them, catalogue them and explore issues like rights before making them available online. I really enjoy the variety and the communication I have with people. There's also a good progression route. This role is certainly very different from the normal image people have of librarians."

Saints, poets and politicians... history’s librarians of note

Casanova

The renowned 18th century romancer of women spent the last 14 years of his life as a librarian in the service of Count von Waldstein at the castle of Dux, Bohemia.

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was a librarian at Christ Church College, Oxford before penning the classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Laura Bush

The (soon to be former) first lady of America, is a qualified librarian and school teacher.

Mao Zedong

Chairman of the Communist Party of China and leader of the People's Republic for 27 years from its creation to his death in 1976, gained his first insight into Marxism from working as an assistant to the chief librarian at Peking University.

Benjamin Franklin

One of the founding fathers of the USA, and also the founder (in 1731) of America's first lending library, The Library Company, in Philadelphia. He briefly served as librarian there.

Philip Larkin

English poet Philip Larkin spent his working life as a librarian, first at a municipal library in Wellington, Shropshire and then at the University College, Leicester, Queen's University, Belfast and finally the University of Hull.

Saint Lawrence

Patron saint of librarians, Lawrence was was in charge of administration and archiving of the early church. Under persecution from Roman rulers, in AD258 he was ordered to produce the treasures of the church; so he gathered the poor and presented them. He was martyred, purportedly on a gridiron.

Mohammad Khatami

Khatami served as head of the National Library of Iran from 1992 until winning the presidency with a 70 per cent majority in 1997. He remained president until 2005.

Melvil Dewey

Inventor of the Dewey Decimal System by which the library world sorts itself to this day was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a librarian. He was also a great advocate of the early library as a "university of the people" and founded the first library school in America.

J Edgar Hoover

The former head of the FBI found his first job as a messenger and cataloguer in the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Philip Pullman

The best-selling author had a brief, enjoyable stint as a librarian before becoming a teacher then moving on to write His Dark Materials.

Jakob Karl Grimm

One half of the Brothers Grimm, Jakob Karl Grimm, was appointed court librarian to the king of Westphalia in Willhemshöhe, Germany. He then moved on to a librarian position in Kessel where his brother was also working. Jakob and Wilhelm went on to record folk and peasant tales, bringing them to a wider audience as fairy tales.

Librarians on film

Fictitious librarians abound but pop culture isn't usually very kind to their image, often portraying them as bores or geeks. Notable exceptions include Rachel Weisz's heroine character in The Mummy series, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's mentor Giles. Rene Russo creates an athletically inspired librarian in 1989's Major League and what of the inspirational escapee Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) in The Shawshank Redemption who inherits and builds a library for his fellow prisoners.

Anne Giacomantonio

'The two NHS libraries I work in save lives'

Richard Fallis is assistant librarian within the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Library Network.

"A lot of people think of hospital librarians wheeling trolleys of books around wards, but I'm much more involved in the clinical side of things. I actually work across two hospital libraries, both of which have five staff, where I do everything from enquiry work to issuing and returning books to literature searches to providing support and training for people. The people that use the libraries range from consultants to allied health professionals. We also work with NHS support staff such as cleaners and caterers because we provide literacy and numeracy training.

Although some of the job is fairly routine – with a lot of books to process – my role also includes more challenging things like training, whereby I give tutorials and use electronic resources. I particularly enjoy that. I also really like being given tasks like tracking down an obscure article or finding something that doesn't have much written about it.

I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that our two libraries save lives. They give doctors, nurses and others the ability to carry out evidence based practice and that can be a difference between life and death – as well as help save money and time.

The stereotype of a librarian is someone who loves books, but I'd say today you have to love technology too because it is changing the way we work so much. People think they can find their own information on the internet, but so much of it is dodgy. Our job is to show them the difference between the good and bad information. I think you have to be good at promotion and marketing too. As a bit of a wall fly, I used to find that side of the work daunting, but I've learned to enjoy it.

There are so many myths around about jobs like this. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that historically, we have not been good at promoting ourselves and telling people what we do. Once people realise what the job really involves, they're usually extremely interested."

'It's fantastic to be able to make a difference with my job'

Lisa Sutlieff is information, data and communication officer at The Childcare Company.

"The organisation I work for provides online NVQ training for nursery nurses. Basically, we help them to get qualified while they're working in a nursery. My role is looking after the learner database and producing reports on things such as statistics. I'm also involved in ensuring the learner programmes are user-friendly, which involves thinking about different learning styles. I write for our trade press too.

I really like the way that the job brings me into contact with the people we're training and it's fantastic to make a difference. We have lots of trainees who have massive family commitments and they wouldn't be able to study if it weren't for training like ours.

After doing a degree in English literature, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I tried things such as marketing and PR and I liked elements of both, but I was never wholly satisfied. One day, I decided to do an online personality test on a graduate website and it told me I ought to be an academic librarian – something I'd been consistently told would suit me since I was 15, but I'd always dismissed because I thought of the stereotypes of librarians shushing people up. But being at my wits' end, I thought I'd look into it a bit more and applied for a traineeship at Oxford University. I worked at Nuffield College, which I loved so much that I decided to take a Masters in information and library management, while I was working.

I finished that last November, and while I was looking around for a new role that really appealed to me, I decided to temp for a while. I wound up here and although I hadn't expected that it would turn into a permanent position, I quickly saw what an information professional could bring to the company. I put together a presentation for the directors talking about all the reasons they should hire me. Luckily for me, they were forward thinking and responded positively. I've been here ever since."