This week I have been doing my bit for the #savelibraries campaign. I’ve been watching it from afar for some time without getting involved but this week I have finally been able to add my contribution. First up was an article for the Guardian Careers – Beyond books: what it means to be a 21st century librarian. I have been working on this with Katie Birkwood for the past 6 months. The idea to write an article about what it really means to be a librarian came from the comments on my Library Day in the Life Round 5 blog [...]
echolib
What do I do?
Over the past few weeks I have been mulling over the question of how librarians are viewed from outside the profession. A topic which has been much discussed on blogs and Twitter but always within the echo chamber. I am prepared to admit that I am absolutely useless at promoting the profession; I don’t know why but I just can’t talk about what I do. I am aware however that if we’re ever going to break down the stereotypes then people like me need to get bolder about talking about what we do and why it’s important. This seems more [...]
The Librarian as Consultant
Today I attended a Librarian as Consultant course. The overall message of the day was that as consultants librarians should be working to change the perception of our role from information provider to information adviser. I think one of the key challenges of this is getting our users to understand what skills we have and how we can use these to help them not only access information but evaluate and manage it as well. Throughout the day the thought that kept coming in to my mind was how this links to the echolib debate that is developing on Twitter. If [...]
