Newswire Feature: Veteran Librarians

Jenna Freedman, Coordinator of Reference Services and Zine Librarian at Barnard College Library, New York -- Library Journal, 7/2/2009

Jump straight to the Q&As:
Part One (July 2) | Part Two (July 9) | Part Three (July 16) | Part Four and Conclusion (July 23)

After reading Scott Carlson's article, "Young Libarians, Talkin' Bout Their Generation" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (10/19/07), I got to wondering what more experienced librarians would have to say on the same and additional questions. As a member of Generation X, a bridge generation, I am jazzed by what the Millennials are up to, but also sympathetic to mindset of the Baby Boomers. Perhaps because I read a lot of library blogs, it seems to me that the younger-than-mes are actually doing pretty well for themselves as far as getting their thoughts out there.

Another factor in my somewhat out of character interest in my elders' opinions was my time on ALA Council. While I sincerely believe that ALA and its governing body would benefit from having more young and front lines librarians on it (i.e. people who actually select and/or catalog stuff, deal with the public and/or the machines, etc.), after having served on Council, I came to have a lot more respect for library directors and other veteran librarians than I'd had before. Sometimes there's just no substitute for experience—logging the years to see it all, gaining knowledge through surviving mistakes—and the confidence experience gives.

The truest motivator for this article, though, is probably my contrary nature. If youth is lauded—I want to recognize experience. Therefore, I wrote to librarians I knew or knew of who had at least twenty years of experience, at least some of it in an academic library and asked them if they would answer a few of questions. I tried to include a variety of interviewees with regard to job description and race, but I intentionally selected a majority of women subjects in order to reflect librarianship's 80% female population.

The considered perspective
I expected to hear that nothing ever changes, that there is always a generation gap, and that everything was better back in the day. Basically, that librarianship is going downhill, fast. So it was nice to learn that most of the librarians in my poll, while identifying some differences in generational mindsets, are fairly confident about the future of our profession.

I cannot entirely leave my pessimism aside, however. For one thing, even though we are pretty good at keeping up with and even staying on top of technological developments, eventually the effort might become too much. Then, as Sha Fagan suggested, librarians may be forced to retire before they really want to. I wonder if the half life of library careers is shrinking.

My other fear is that with all the emphasis on technology, we are losing our focus on service. If we try to compete with IT groups for technology savvy, they will always win. We may or may not win on teaching, but where I hope we will always be champion is on the human element. Answering the question asked, or helping the question to be asked—not turning our users into "tickets" and forcing them to follow a tightly controlled trouble shooting script.

Below you’ll find the links to the veteran librarians’ responses, with each section containing one of Carlson's questions and one of mine.

Part One (July 2)
Part Two (July 9)
Part Three (July 16)
Part Four and Conclusion (July 23)