Veteran Librarians Q&A Part One

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

Inspired by Scott Carlson's article, "Young Libarians, Talkin' Bout Their Generation" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (10/19/07), but feeling that the youth perspective has been somewhat privileged of late in librarianship, I asked a number of librarians with at least 20 years experience to answer Carlson's questions and a few of my own. See the introductory post of this four-part series for more background and links to each section.

BLOCK: Right: brilliant leadership on digital scholarship... e.g. the University of Michigan, but also University of Illinois, which among other things paired with UM to create OAIster to make scholarly open source collections searchable and ultimately Googlable.

Wrong: Most academic libraries don't market themselves worth a damn. I suspect there are some that are still passively waiting for students and faculty to come to them. It's essential for librarians to prove their worth every day and then trumpet their successes to faculty and administrators.

SCHUMAN: Organizing knowledge and making it accessible--right. Wrong--not promoting that enough.

FISTER: I think we're right about open access, protecting privacy, and defending civil liberties (though of course we often fall down on all of these). Having an FBI agent complain to a New York Times reporter about radical, militant librarians makes me proud. The Connecticut librarians who challenged a national security letter make me proud. The NIH's effort to make publicly funded research public makes me proud.

What are we doing wrong? I don't think we're imaginative enough about the good we could do for people who aren't naturally drawn to libraries, and we don't think often enough beyond the library and its concerns to focus on transformative learning that will matter when students are no longer students. So much of our information literacy work is devoted to helping students be students, not helping them be free and fulfilled human beings.

FAGAN: Libraries are not good at advocating for themselves outside the immediate constituency. Libraries serve a very useful function but are often taken for granted.

Freedman Question: Is academic librarianship in danger? Is the prognosis better or worse than when you entered the profession?
BLOCK: An academic library's funding is certainly at risk from any college president or board that labors under the delusion that everything's available free on the internet. But that simply means 1) librarians have to work a lot harder at demonstrating that that's not the case, and 2) demonstrating their value to faculty.

FISTER: I think the prognosis is better - in that we have more interesting issues to deal with and there's so much opportunity to collaborate with people, particularly to think about better ways to help students learn.

SCHUMAN: I think it is better in that it is more diverse--women and minorities. It is worse I think because in a fight for status there seems to be less emphasis on public service.

CORBY: Perhaps I'm too optimistic, but I would say better. Library research was such an onerous mission when I started as a librarian that mostly it was reserved for grad students and faculty. A librarian might interact with some of them occasionally, but mostly if they needed something they knew how to find it and they came in and got it.

With no email or other types of daily correspondence for keeping up to date these folks found themselves needing to use our indexes and printed collection much more often than they do now. ... We were important for helping the undergrads navigate to resource for a paper and for inducting new grad students into research techniques, but the faculty mostly did their own research.

Now there are so many sources and search interfaces change so rapidly that we are in constant demand. There was a lull of a few years, while people adjusted to how open the spigot of information had become and did not turn to the library. But our persistence in saying we can help is beginning to pay off. More and more people are just too overwhelmed and are asking for help.

Of course what we are doing has changed some but our reference interaction numbers are beginning to go up again too. Among the things we're doing that we didn't used to: designing information literacy units for classes, helping get students up to speed with connectivity issues, copyright permissions, technology availability and support. As long as libraries accept that what we do is help facilitate access to information (as opposed to providing a storage space) we will be needed for a long time to come.

TOBIN: Yes, in danger, but not from technology so much as from a disinclination to position ourselves within the university's teaching and research missions. Our roles are, indeed, changing, but we have yet to make clear to provosts, presidents, etc what our skills add to the teaching and research processes. Twenty years ago, it seems, many were predicting end of print--in fact our provost basically said 20 years ago that we should ask for new spaces or renovations, as the entire library would fit under his desk. ...

Librarians, I believe, will remain essential to the institutions of higher learning of all kinds, because we can concentrate on the use of metadata and structure searching within specified arenas to get results that are consistently on target and save the time of the researcher while educating them about the choices they have in finding scholarly or other information, knowledge, data, images, etc.

Our growing role in the developing solutions for the preservation and long term access to to digital objects of all kinds and creating the appropriate metadata for locating them is essential to a research university. The digital revolution just keeps creating more challenges and more opportunities for librarians to contribute solutions. Our collaborations with publishers and other content producers is also essential as we grapple with the issues around intellectual property rights and the use of the knowledge developed inside and outside the academy.

WOLVEN: I think the prognosis is better than ever – with another caveat. I see so many new opportunities opening for academic libraries: closer engagement with educational technologies; building institutional repositories; converting collections to digital form and re-imagining their use; building services to support scholarly research and publication; organizing, preserving and connecting all of these forms. The question is, what will it mean to be an academic "librarian?"

Even when I started, there were non-librarians performing some of the roles: scholars doing cataloging; programmers creating the MARC format and automated systems. Now, though, that trend is much greater, and I have less sense of what it will mean to be a librarian in this context. I suspect library schools (or information science schools or knowledge organization programs) face the same challenge of redefining the discipline and profession. I am, however, tremendously optimistic.

Also see:
Part Two (July 9)
Part Three (July 16)
Part Four and Conclusion (July 23)