Librarians are Librarians

A sad blog subscriber

The six of you who “keep up” with this site deserve an apology for the dearth of information trickling your way.  Nevertheless, this librarian was encouraged by, of all things, a blog post about what we might call the “librarian-ness” of the librarian.  Turns out librarians are selling themselves as “web designers, information architects, web searchers, information scientists, user experience experts, and on and on, when each of those things is already a profession filled with people who make a stronger claim to it than we do” [1].  We are not those things.  We are librarians.

What that means is not easy question to answer:  “There has been intense pressure on librarians for decades to focus on technology at the expense of something that is now difficult even to remember.”

Rory Litwin, the post’s author, suggests that great librarians we’ve known seem to testify to the full character of a good librarian:

a combination of an enthusiastic desire to help, good communication skills, insight, general knowledge (not to be underestimated in its importance), and a compound of skills at connecting the dots between the particularities of users, their needs, the clues, the relevant bits of knowledge in memory, the access points, the information structure, and the hermeneutics and heuristics of helping.

The picture here is rare because the librarian begins to look like one of the few professional non-specialists.  Many professionals have been trained toward expertise within disciplines, e.g, writing a dissertation on something no one has ever written a dissertation on before.  But the librarian feigns speciality in order to serve a community, because a community by definition is multi- and inter-disciplinary.  We need expertise, the stones, but we also need cement.

There is a great deal more to say about the utter necessity (yes) of the librarian and other non-specialists.  But we have difficulty imagining what that might be because of Jesse Shera’s observation in the earliy eighties, “Librarians persist in sublimating librarianship to the lure of the machine.”  This coming from a man who made his first great impact on the library world in the realm of automation.

His view of librarianship was in part based on the idea that automation should give librarians time to focus our attention on the problems of communities and their information needs, and how to connect to them, freeing us from technical busywork. He lived long enough, however, to see the profession become machine-oriented and dedicated to refining these tools of efficiency.

The problem is obviously not the technology, per se, but the eclipsing of the librarian’s full work by the tools she uses.

So when there those long blog silences inevitably arise, take heart — I’m being a librarian.

Note:

[1] Rory Litwin, “Our niche and how to get back into it” Library Juice, August 18, 2010, http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=2349

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