Defending Librarianship

Career development aids and advice on preparing for the future seem to be everywhere at the moment. The New Professional’s Conference has a theme of professionalism and activism, the SLA’s theme for this year is being ‘future ready’, and this afternoon our MA/MSc programme cohort had a talk from @Lyndsay2020 and @Kathyennis which rounded up a lot of what different channels have been saying and transformed it into an engaging and useful session. I thought I would blog a little of what was covered.

One point which really stuck with me from the session was something that echoed what @theREALwikiman mentioned in a talk that was delivered by himself, @LexRigby and Joel Kerry on behalf of CILIP’s Career Development Group the other week. This was the importance of not shying away from explaining what a librarian is and does.  Too often we dilute what we do, either using an alternative title, or comparing it to another, possibly more familar role.

The session today picked up on this and to illustrate the problem, we were asked to draw what we thought a librarian looked like (in an abstract sense) and annotate our creation, explaining the abilities we had given them. Unfortunately I don’t look have any pictures of our super-librarian, but we included suggestions along the lines of the ability to juggle numerous tasks and situations, and a hat stand with a variety of headwear symbolising the diverse roles librarians can find themselves in. One drawing also clutched a bear to symbolise the work librarians do with the young- thankfully it didn’t look like this though:

Thankfully Ive never met a librarian who looked like this! Image c/o stopthegears on Flickr

Lyndsay and Kathy then highlighted how many of the skills that we had illustrated in our librarians were transferrable to a number of professions, as were the skills that we had said we hoped to learn whilst on the course. This showed both how important it is to nail down just what makes a librarian important, and how difficult it can be. Along the same lines, if a group of librarians-in-training highlight abilities that can be seen as generic to a number of professions, who knows what users and clients think?!  To help remedy this we then focussed on drawing out abilities that could be used to defend a professional position within a firm and truly justify the role of a librarian or information professional. Some of the skills highlighted were as follows:

• Research abilities
• Collection management and development
• Community profiling
• Classification and cataloguing
• Use and control of metadata
• Thesaurus construction

It was stressed that skills such as those above should be differentiated from others such as time management and other general personal traits as whilst they are skills you pick up during a professional course, they are not what makes a librarian unique. The emphasis was on what is learnt as part of a librarianship qualification that cannot picked up on another course.

What I need to work on following the session is ensuring that I do not dumb down librarianship to people, something that it is all too easy to do when its been a long day and someone asks what it is that I’m studying. We must ensure that librarians take the credit  deserved in return for the training and effort invested in developing those core skills.

Another big thanks for @Kathyennis and @Lyndsay2020 for taking the session and raising the above points. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

PS. As a complete aside… I was going to entitle this ‘In defence of librarianship’ but it brought back too many memories of Richard Evans’ “In Defence of History’. A module I took as part of my undergrad in History called ‘Historical Argument and Practice’ made sure I didn’t want to discuss that book ever again. So I changed it.