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 post. We wrote a pitch and sent it to Radio 4 and Guardian Careers. Then we waited. And waited. Finally I was contacted by the co-ordinator of the Behind the Job Title series and the rest as they say is history. At the current count this article has been shared 156 times on Twitter and 458 on Facebook. I call that a success and everyone’s favourite wikiman and father of #echolib calls it “a proper bonafide Echo Chamber escape”

  by  Phil Bradley 

Next was an article for the Open Rights Group Zine – Everybody loves surfing. For this, I was approached (via a comment on this blog) by the zine’s editor Iman Qureshi. The idea was for an article on how and why technology is valuable to libraries and library users. I refined this and started to think about how technology is changing the role of libraries. Given that the article was to be part a book themed week on the zine in support of the Bookseller’s Fight for Libraries campaign I used public libraries as my focus.

If you want to get involved and help to save our libraries a good place to start would be to attend a read-in at your local library this Saturday, 5th February. For more information about campaigns in your area visit the Voices for the Library website.

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 important now than ever. If I don’t speak up when I get the opportunity then people are going to continue to believe in the stereotype and underestimate the value of librarians.

The recent KPMG report on public sector reform famously misunderstands and misrepresents the role of the librarian suggesting that we could easily be replaced by volunteers. The authors of the report clearly took no time to find out what librarians actually do and this started me wondering whether people I know have any idea of what my job actually entails. So I sent out an email to ask them and I was pleasantly surprised by their responses. Here is a Wordle of the content of their emails (click on the image to see a larger version):

I sent the email to 10 people and got 6 responses (not a great sample I know but hey this isn’t proper research). I asked them to write a few lines off the top of their heads about what they think I do day to day as a librarian. The only information I gave them, which they probably already know, is that I work in an academic library. As I said before, I was pleasantly surprised by the results; partly because it means that I might not be so useless at advocating for librarians but mostly because it gave me some hope that the profession isn’t as undervalued as I feared. The greatest surprise was that one respondent practically wrote out my job description in her reply!

Finally, in their own words, here is what some of my friends and family think the main aspects of my job are:

• making sure students can access sources of information they need as easily and readily as possible through a variety of media.
• your job is to help facilitate others to find the answers and information that they are seeking even when perhaps they don’t know what it is they are exactly looking for. This means you have to be well organised and know where to find things in books/databases/www etc.
• you help to make information available to people at the university from a variety of sources, and that you help select and define the materials in the library. Also that you use media to convey information, and that you’re partly responsible for training your colleagues.
• a librarian helps people to locate sources of information – previously mainly in the form of books but also newspapers/magazines/periodicals. Now, presumably also in other media, especially those retained electronically.
• librarians have to devise systems for finding and producing information but also to connect with their users – again probably in the past over an issue desk or catalogue but now via email, sms etc. I suppose the real skill is anticipating users’ needs and devising systems in advance which open up sources of information, speed up access and begin to shape users’ habits to make the process effective.
• you manage the learning resources for the business school. These can be reading texts (as in books, journals and the like) but also online resources.
• you help to ensure that stock is recorded, catalogued/classified and that there is a robust security system in place for lenders so that stock doesn’t go missing.
• you know tonnes about online communication and information sourcing, online education tools and otehr things I don’t understand at all!!!
• helping students and or staff who are researching when they are looking for particular information.
• ordering new books/periodicals/research papers when lists are given to you by various departments to ensure the library content matches the curriculum and the demand.
• cataloguing new information.
• keeping your website up to date.
• dealing with requests from all over the world I guess via the internet, or telephone.
• ensuring that library systems are maintained and developed.
• requesting grants or funding for your library.

After all of that there was only one mention of the stereotypical librarian with her glasses, cardigan and bun…. and that was from my mum who was getting me back for years of teasing her about the stereotypes in her job!

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 you’ve not yet heard of this here is Ned Potter’s summary of the main issue which is taken from his blog post on the topic:

“The echo-chamber problem as it applies to the information profession, just to be clear, is good ideas being conveyed to like-minded people who then repeat it back to other like-minded people, who all agree about the ideas, but the whole process doesn’t ever reach the people who were not of like mind to begin with.”

I think that this is easily applied to the idea of librarians as consultants. It is easy to help those who already see the value in the work of librarians. What is not so easy is to make yourself and your skills visible to those who don’t know that librarians can offer more than simply being the providers of information.

So how do we change that? Obviously there’s no easy answer or quick solution otherwise I’m sure we would have found it already. However, after today I have some useful starting points.

In my library I think the biggest potential difference can be made with faculty. It is with this group where I feel that I am most often preaching to the converted but I feel there is one simple change I can make to reach a wider audience. At the moment when a new academic starts they are sent a welcome pack from the library which includes a collection of guides to get them started. This is sent with a letter of introduction and offer that if they need any help with the resources they can contact the subject team. This isn’t good enough, we need to be more proactive. The simple change to make is to follow up these packs with a meeting with one of the subject team to discuss the academic’s information needs. Even if they have no immediate need for our help I hope that by catching them early and making ourselves visible we will be the logical place to go when they need help with information in the future.