This month’s issue of 7 Questions with AAAL Members features Michael Baird Collection Management Librarian at Olds College.

1. If you could learn to do anything, what would it be?
In the next year, scuba dive.

2. If you could be any fictional character, who would you choose?
Robinton, masterharper of Pern

3. What is your best piece of career advice?
Be flexible, keep learning, and remember why you are doing this job and not some other career. No matter how bad a day you may have, you chose this career for a reason, think about that core reason.

4. What is your proudest work-related accomplishment?
I had the surreal experience to create an original catalogue record for a book from the mid-1500’s when doing one of my practicums. I will always remember the feeling, the connection to history.

5. What do you do when you’re not working?
When not working I love to ride horses and explore the wilderness. I am also involved with 2 Dungeons & Dragons groups. I love theater but have not been in a production for a few years now. I design costumes and write fiction.

6. What is your favourite quote?
“I was always taught that if you’re not careful, you can lose yourself in the world. You get too busy with things, not busy enough with yourself! Spend your days and nights living someone else’s agendas, fighting someone else’s battles, and you’re doing the work you’re supposed to be doing, but every day there’s less and less of you in it all! Till one day, you come to a fork in the road, and because you’re distracted, you’re not thinking. You lose yourself. You go right, and the rest of you, the really important part of you, goes left! And you don’t even know you’ve done it till you realize, you finally realize, that you don’t have any idea who you are when you’re not doing all those things!” Dr Stephen Franklin (writer/creator J. Michael Straczynski, 1996)

7. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you go?
I have not been enough places to truly answer this question. I chose it though because it sits forefront in my mind all of the time. I have been to Wales and I loved it, it felt like… home. I am also drawn to a few other areas: The pacific – Hawaii or New Zealand, Argentina almost won me away from Canada once, and Iceland has an appeal. Perhaps the best answer is I would love to live on a cruise ship and spend my life seeing the world. The Valley of the Kings to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, then off to the fjords and the northern Baltic, skip across the arctic and down to Japan, go dive the Great Barrier Reef, watch the lava flow on the big island, an excursion to Machu Picchu, then the drama of Tierra del Fuego, up to Central America to explore Mayan ruins, and that is just a start.

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