Postgrad profile: Anita Cooper (MSc in information and library management)

Anita Cooper worked in financial services for over 20 years, in Canada and Ireland, before going back to college to change careers.

"In 2009, I decided to retire myself from that business and pursue what I wanted to do, which is to become a librarian," said Cooper, who is in her first of the two-year part-time MSc in information and library management at Dublin Business School (DBS). She says it combines her love of books with her "highly organised attention to detail".

She became interested in the field after visiting a cousin who is a research librarian at a museum in New York. “I got a tour from her and thought, ‘This is the best job in the world.’”

She took an opportunity for redundancy at work to go to college. First, she needed an undergraduate degree, so she did a degree in English, and Greek and Roman civilisation at Maynooth University.

After being accepted into the MSc programme at DBS, Cooper, who lives in Naas, Co Kildare, deferred to try a digital humanities master’s at Maynooth. “It was more of a distance learning programme that didn’t suit me,” she said.

She eventually withdrew from that course but not before gaining technical knowledge in coding and digitisation projects. She took night classes while waiting to enrol in the master’s at DBS.

“I found coding and digitisation interesting and might pursue the technical end of librarianship. A lot of that is teaching those types of skills to students and patrons of libraries,” Cooper said, adding it’s too early in the programme for her to know what path she wants to follow.

She says the DBS course is more technical than those offered at other colleges and includes modules on information technology, networks, information architecture, as well as traditional library cataloguing and literacy teaching.

“I dipped my toes in two postgrads, and it was a two-year wait to start the course at DBS, but it was well worth the wait,” she said.