One of the best things about my job is that I have my own librarian. Ok, she’s not ‘my’ librarian. Her name is Tam and she’s more OCLC’s librarian. But it still feels like I have my own personal librarian because I email her questions and she just, like, answers them. Rright away. It’s amazing! I’m such a happy patron right now.
Anyway, one of the projects I’m working on (with my colleagues here at the WJ, including ‘my’ librarian) is gathering some basic info about librarians in the US. Who are we? What do we do? Where do we work? How many of us are there? Frankly, though I don’t often come right out and say it, I’m generally not all that interested in numbers, but this project proved to be pretty interesting and so I thought I’d share some of our findings:
Two ideas emerge from these stats. First, if the bulk of retiring librarians is at the director level, who will the profession promote to those positions? Even if the post-MLIS force keeps up with retirees, will they be ready for the positions they’re asked to fill? Second, if MLIS students are increasingly moving into non-traditional environments instead of taking traditional positions in public, school, academic or other types of libraries, where does that leave us institutionally?
I’d like to append to these facts and figures with an impression that has developed for me through conversation with colleagues over the last several years. Some of my friends in LibraryLand, many of whom are extremely innovative, ambitious, and eager to contribute to the profession, are often struggling in their library jobs. They seem unsupported by their institutions, sometimes specifically by their library directors and senior colleagues. Age, along with tech savvy or advocacy and a shift towards community-based authority or expertise layers in additional divisive factors, sometimes widening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I have personally benefited from relationships and mentoring with elders in our field – I won’t call them traditionalists! – as well as from very strong institutional support from my employer for my work. But I’m wondering if there’s a way to shift our culture as a profession so that my experiences along these lines are more of a norm, rather than an exception.
And so, how can we bridge these gaps in our daily work? Can we create inter-generational or inter-experiential dialog and (two-way) mentoring so that the library profession, and our institutions, can thrive (not just survive) in the midst of this particular change?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach this. At least two projects in the works so far! Stay tuned…
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Maybe seasoned veterans would be better than elders ?? Personally, I am one of the strange breeds of librarians – I only have 10 years of experience in library work, but am almost 50.
I had this discussion with steve who runs the Digital Curation Centre in the UK a couple of years ago; about how institutions come and go, with libraries (in their various forms) being some of the longest running institutions. Institutions get top heavy before they start to shrink. (implode)
Your focus on the US offers an interesting perspective of how the old National traditions lock librarians into yesterday’s mindset, in a rapidly globalizing world.
How do you “change a culture”? I think your doing a pretty good job, considering the great number of older people in the US compared to counties below the equator, and considering the conservatism of librarians, who by their nature, MUST be conservative.
You might like to consider, E.g., as i suggested a while back, that if you are going to run a Spanish speaking outreach program, then it should be run from (hosted on) a site which ends in .es, and whose host is situated in spain (or mexico, or..) WJ might find that the cultural change you would like to inspire is simply a matter of finding ways to help global peers to find one another, so they can communicate.
So do us a favour will you? If yu do have a project in the works, would you talk about it (above the radar) before you start working on it in middle America? This grumpy old man is getting bored with watching the reinvention of wheels on the (world wide) web, and that’s just in three languages = English, American and Australian.
PS Do you have any figures on the trend of (bilingual)graduates employed as (general) Media specialists?
very good suggestion. not all of my seasoned mentors are elders in terms of our relative age.
webjunction is very interested in expanding our services to non-english speaking librarians. stay tuned … we’ll announce anything of the sort as soon as we know we’re doing something along those lines (no specific plans are yet in place, but spanish is one of the most common discussion points around here).
we will typically talk about (announce) our grant-funded projects as soon as our funding for them is secured, which often involves a little bit of negotiating between our “legal people” and the funders’. we’re not secretive, i promise, and are as anxious to tell as you are to hear, i assure you.
finally, i’m looking into that bilingual library/media professional question; thanks for raising the focus in this post on US, english-speaking library staff. you’re very right that there are many many ways and reasons not to reinvent the wheel. cheers!!