I graduated from my MA in Library Science last year, and I'm currently managing a small university library. I'm in the UK, so I can't speak for high school librarians in the US because our high school 'librarians' are often not actually librarians (i.e. are not qualified).

The first thing that people often don't realise is that not everyone who works in a library is a librarian. The people you see shelving/issuing books are almost certainly not librarians, but instead library assistants/information assistants. They don't have time to sit around reading, but they don't require a master's.

I see three main benefits of my MA. The first is that the academic colleagues I work with respect me more, because in many cases I have as many qualifications as them. The second is that it developed my research skills further than my BA did, which is a huge benefit when helping students.

The main benefit though is that it allows you to learn a huge variety of skills in a relatively short time. Librarianship, particularly if you're in a small library with very few professionals, can require you to balance a huge variety of tasks. Some of my duties include: * Teaching. I have to teach university-level information literacy sessions to students across a huge variety of disciplines. * Budget management. * Cataloguing. Most of our cataloguing is outsourced, but occasionally I still have to fix things. For this I need to have essentially learned a new language, and I also need to be able to very quickly establish exactly what a book is about, when I probably don't have any real knowledge of that subject. * Similarly to the above, I have to be able to gain an understanding of a subject very quickly. If someone comes to me wanting help finding information, I almost certainly know less than them about the subject. I have to know which questions to ask to establish exactly what information they are looking for, and have a good knowledge of our resources to be able to decide what advice to give. * IT support. Bigger libraries have multiple people to do this, but I'm the only librarian at mine. So this might include fixing problems with our online resources, our hardware (self issue machine for example), our library management system, or any basic problems that students are having generally with IT. * Legal advice. I am the person that people in my institution come to for advice about copyright. I also sometimes give advice about data protection and disability regulations. If I give bad advice, the university could get in huge trouble. To this end, I also have to write policies for the library that align with the law and UK university regulatory bodies. * Data analysis. We collect loads of statistics that I am expected to analyse. I then have to produce reports for senior management. * Staff management. * Stakeholder management. I have to manage a very tenuous relationship between the senior managers in my institution and the librarians in our parent library. * Marketing. * Contract negotiation with suppliers. * Customer service management. When a customer is unhappy about something, I have to deal with it. * Service development. I have to think creatively about what services we can introduce/expand within a limited budget. I am currently working on a website, video guides and interactive resources. These require me to teach myself a lot of new skills. * Thinking on my feet. People will often come to a library with a question when they don't know where else to go. I have helped with all kinds of crap I'd never even considered, because someone needed help and I'm not about to turn them away.

Other librarians also get involved with research, events management, curriculum design, and loads more stuff that I'm not aware of.

All of this is stuff you could learn on the job. However, it would probably take decades to move around enough to gain experience in all these areas at a library assistant level (and in the UK, there are ways for library assistants with extensive experience to get qualified without a master's). There's no way I could do this as my first professional post, at the age of 23, without my MA.