Comments on: My Maverick Bar: A Search for Identity and the “Real Work” of Librarianship

By: Dana Longley

Dana Longley — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:00:18 +0000

I would add to what NAomi said on this excellent post: to me, what we do goes beyond connecting people and knowledge. Why do people seek information & knowledge? To create new knowledge. To me, our ultimate core function is facilitating the creation of new knowledge. If all we did was ensure people could find information, but they had no idea how to use that information effectively, I would argue that librarianship as a profession would have died off long ago.

I would argue the various things librarians do, such as preserving and organizing and teaching how to effectively and ethically interact with existing information, are essential to the knowledge creation process, which in itself is essential to the functioning of any modern society. That core library value/function is not going away; it might even be argued that it’s importance (to knowledge creation, to facilitating societal improvements) might increase over time.

Just my 3 cents…

By: John M. Jackson

John M. Jackson — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:15:46 +0000

This is a wonderfully insightful post. I like what T Scott said about connecting knowledge to people: this is what drives me. Personally, I value knowledge, its preservation and access. Professionally, I value the role that knowledge plays in people’s lives and in the lives of society. And so, I see my primary role as bring people and knowledge together.

Thank you, Kim, for sharing your thoughts and giving me something valuable to contemplate this morning as I travel across the country. =)

By: Felix Chu

Felix Chu — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:15:21 +0000

This is something that I have also thought about over the years. I work primarily as a cataloger. My personal mission is: “I intend to be the best intermediary possible in connecting people and needed resources.” I was at a gathering recently where Nancy Foster, Director of Anthropological Research, River Campus Libraries of the University of Rochester said that perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking our users what they want, we need to understand how they do their work and help them do good work. What she said and what my personal mission says are the essence of what we do. As Kim said above, our roles (and technology) have changed and will continue to change, but we need to keep out focus on our values. Technology and our roles are the process of implementation.

By: Melanie

Melanie — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:26:12 +0000

I don’t think you meant to do this, but at one point you seem to imply that all those primary roles that Bales mentions are no longer relevant, which is incorrect. I sit next to the people involved in identifying, selection, and acquiring; I myself am one of the organizing librarians, which is a big job all by itself; my cubicle is a few floors above the ones involved in retrieving and conserving. Scholarship happens based upon the choice of the individual librarian.

Eventually this may change (I don’t really think so, but I admit the possibility), but at this point, all these duties continue to occur, regardless of whether the resource is physical or electronic. And you cannot do your job of sharing knowledge until all those other jobs have been done first. Thus my work is as fundamental to the purpose of sharing knowledge as the reference librarian who is actually engaged in conversation with the patron.

There has been a major shift over the last few hundred years and more that has democratized access to information, which I think is a good thing, and has added to the work of the librarian. But that means that librarianship has added new roles, not that it has lost those historical ones.

My identity as a cataloger is solid — to me, at least — because I know that regardless of format, information still needs to be organized and made accessible. (How can you use it if you cannot find it?) Computers still do not replace human beings, and until there is real artificial intelligence, they never will. The title may change, but the fundamental nature of what I do as a librarian has not changed.

Maybe the difference in identity crisis is because you are in one of those “newer” roles for librarians. We’ve only been serving the general public for a few hundred years, and we are still figuring out what that means. In another few centuries, maybe we will understand ourselves better.

By: NAomi

NAomi — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:41:41 +0000

Real work begins when students start thinking and producing their own work! It’s the synthesis, evaluation, and reflection on the process that is our real work. The selecting and sorting and locating all gets the party started! I’m a new MLIS grad and I’m about to start a real job and discover the real world of librarianship!

By: Clare McKenzie

Clare McKenzie — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:32:15 +0000

This is an extraordinarily insightful piece of writing and I thank you wholeheartedly for publishing it. Along with some 2 dozen others in (mostly downunder) libraryland I am currently engaged in a project called #blogeverydayofjune and while some of us are blogging on a personal level it is inevitable that the issue of professionalism and librianness has surfaced. Your piece will become a valuable part of that discussion (as I intend to bring it into said discussion post haste).

I’ll also be looking up T Scotts reference as I found those comments equally inspiring.

More than anything I’m grateful to be involved in a profession where I get to think about and act on these issues everyday: http://newgradlibrarian.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/getting-paid-to-have-fun/

By: T Scott

T Scott — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:34:09 +0000

Librarians tend to confuse means with ends. And while you’re close to identifying the core work, I’d phrase it as connecting people to knowledge. That is the point of what librarians do — connect people to the recorded knowledge that they need for a whole host of purposes — education, entertainment, community… In the print world, the best way to do this turned out to be to build big buildings, fill them full of stuff, organize the stuff well and preserve it. But over the course of a couple of centuries, we began to think that our core work was to collect, organize and preserve documents, and we lost sight of why we do that. Those tasks were never the point, they were just the means to a greater end.

That end is just as important as ever, but as we move into the digital world, the means are radically different. Consider that all of the processes, procedures, systems, policies, staffing, etc., that underlie the daily work of the library in the print world are focused on tracking the movement of physical objects in and out of buildings. Now, we need to achieve the same greater good, but we’re no longer dealing with physical objects.

Thus, it may well be that “libraries” as we have understood them, will become irrelevant as we move further into the 21st century. That may be a cause for a bit of nostalgic mourning among those of us who love the world of libraries that we grew up in, but in terms of the larger cultural and societal needs that librarians fill, there is no need for any gnashing of teeth. Librarians are more necessary than ever, because the information space has become so incredibly complex. I tell my staff that this is the best time in five centuries to be a librarian because we have the incredible opportunity to reinvent librarianship with a set of information tools that were literally unimaginable a generation ago.

I wrote a post about this a couple of years ago that I think remains very relevant to this discussion: http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2008/08/libraries-or-li.html

And I ended a presentation awhile back with this phrase: “It may be that the great age of libraries is ending; but the great age of librarians has just begun.”