Librarian Career Development 5,2 46 A young librarian’s career development: personal notes from Hungary Agnes Koreny Delegation of the European Union, Budapest, Hungary Introduction When I was approached by the editor to contribute to this journal, plenty of questions came rushing to my mind. Of course, these questions mostly concerned what I was going to write and to whom. It was easy to see that I had to gauge the latter first and adjust the former accordingly. In other words, the potential target audience – presumably library professionals – would determine the professional content of my message. Yet I could not help thinking further afield and guess what associations the potential reader in the United Kingdom and elsewhere might have upon reading something from a country quite remote from his/her own. W hat ideas and images are there in the librarians’ perception about the region of Central Europe in general and about Hungary in particular? Many librarians, I assume, do have closer ties with colleagues and even friends in Hungary due to earlier and continued professional contacts and partnerships. Still it is fairly safe to say that the state of the profession in Hungary is by and large veiled from colleagues abroad and one could add a thing or two to clarify the issue. It is moreover a humble assumption that this paper would carry a lesson, however slim, to my colleagues in foreign libraries, either with analogous situations or with sheer contrast by setting something in relief. Thus, I cannot desist from presenting a librarian’s admittedly specific overview of the specific – or not so specific – situation of libraries in Hungary today. Then I proceed to discuss briefly the characteristics of librarian training in Hungary as a point of departure for career development, and finally I will illustrate by a personal example what opportunities a Hungarian expert may have in this field. General position In present-day Hungary the librarian is in a tight corner from several aspects. First, he – or in most cases she – is worried about the shortage of money. The librarian is grossly underpaid, her institution underfunded. And this latter is the keener point when the profession’s general state is inspected: given a humble salary many people dedicated to their profession would persist in their job if the circumstances were adequate. Yet the general decline and protracted failures in the working conditions scare off even the most devoted librarians and force them to quit. Librarian Career Development, Vol. 5 No. 2, 1997, pp. 46-51. © MCB University Press, 0968-0810