Brand librarian

It has been interesting to see the various comments on what we should call everyone. Have a look at the comments on the word of the day and on the post on what to call ourselves and each other.

I think that acceptance of the brand librarian must be a given. There is no alternative, and there is nothing wrong with the brand anyway. We have failed at creating an alternative brand, and our gambit to include the word "information" in everything has not worked. There is also a large amount of accumulated good will in the librarian brand (and the library brand) which we cannot easily recreate for an alternative brand.

But this does not mean that all librarians should have the title librarian. There are many circumstances where we may prefer or be required to use something different, or where it may just make sense, or be to our advantage - just as some accountants are called Chief Financial Officers rather than something with accountant in the name.

I have been thinking of developing some kind of statement with the heading "These people are librarians", or maybe "This is a librarian." It would include a list of people/positions who are really librarians, and a short description. The point is to make it clear to people the scope of the brand, librarian.

For example, I have collected several examples of situations where people have said to me "what we need in this job is a librarian." They were non-librarians, and they were right. These are three pieces of evidence about what OTHER people think are the core skills of a librarian.

The same is true of the term library. People intuitively use the term library in relevant contexts. My posting on the Mousebrain Project indicates that there is public use of the word library which is often right, but wider than ours. A recent example is the Atlas of Living Australia, which is described as "a biodiversity search engine providing access to information held in biological collections in museums and public research institutes across the country" (there is also to be a "mouse phenomics network"). The Atlas is to be affialiated with the Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. These are digital libraries.

What do you think?

More on the library workforce

Thank you to my correspondents for their comments. I think that if we can assume what Dana suggests, and what I suggested, that has quite some implications for library education. There is a core area of librarianship, which Dana loosely describes as censorship, access and classification. It would be good for educators in particular to set out what they see as this core. The other players are employers, and of course librarians.

Librarian Idol suggests that there is a wide variety of people and motivations in librarianship, and that is absolutely right. Just to ask the question "What makes a good librarian?" uncovers as many answers as "Why did you become a librarian?" I have always argued, for example, that working in libraries is a good job for introverts - there is a lot of work away from customers, the work with customers is often pretty defined with clear boundaries, and the environment is relatively safe. But in addition to the diversity, there should also be an identifiable and agreed common core of knowledge, culture and values.

Part of the current task of library education is to determine in consultation with employers and our professional association (representing us as members) just what this common core might be. A further role is to determine what skills and capabilities are required by employers and how these will be acquired - through formal education, or on the job, or some combination, different in the case of different capabilities. Consulting with people who are young enough to remember what they studied and old enough to be working might be a significant part of this - the new graduates, for example.

Let me know what process you think we should take to work our way through these issues.

Millennials: the Future Library Workforce

I enjoyed the event at the State Library of Victoria last night featuring three Generation Y speakers - also called millennials. These are people born from 1978 to 2000 according to the Wikipedia. In other words, they are aged from 7 to 29. However, some of them keep moving the date so they will stay in the group, and it has been taken back as far as 1970. This process should indicate one of the keys to understanding the concept of Generation Y - i.e. the fact that it may hide a semantic vacuum (I think I might have another post on the semantic vacuum, such an interesting concept). ALIA supported the event.

The question was asked, and answered: how do young people like to work, what motivates them and how can managers attract and retain them? The three presenters were Andrew Finegan, a Darwin librarian, Lili Wilkinson, a Victorian writer of youth literature working at the State Library of Victoria's Centre for Youth Literature, and Benjamin Tan, an Arts/Student active in the Oaktree Foundation (no blog).

The session was for "managers in the library and information professions" and perhaps for millennials themselves, although the former outnumbered the latter.

I summed up by quoting the famous Italian proverb - "We learn by making mistakes, like the doctors do" ("Imparo sbagliando, come i medici") The session demonstrated the quite unfair proliferation of stereoptypes whenever librarians and libraries are mentioned - it seems that we cannot escape them. And terms like Generation Y and Millennials are stereotypes themselves - I guess that a Generation Y librarian might feel stereotypes crowding in a little

Here's what the Urban Dictionary says about stereotypes:

"A stereotype is used to categorize a group of people. People don't understand that type of person, so they put them into classifications, thinking that everyone who is that needs to be like that, or anyone who acts like their classifications is one.

Stereotype for Goths are black clothes, black makeup, depressed, hated by society.
Stereotype for Punks are mohawks, spikes, chains, menace to society, always getting in trouble."

You can add your own line if you like
"Stereotype for Librarians are . . ."
"Stereotype for Generation Y librarians are . . ."
This is not a competition, but please feel free to contribute. (Please do not post to this blog pointing out errors of grammar or syntax in the Urban Dictionary).

I suspect that it is not necessary to create a new concept, Generation Y (impatient, vocal, mobile, outspoken, technologically native, high maintenance, cool, show-offs, not from Frankston) to account for these characteristics in a group of articulate, ambitious and vocal young people.

In the end, as I suggested, despite the identity issues which exist for contemporary library workers, there is a very important set of values which should characterise people who work in libraries, values relating to the free flow of information, equitable access to information, sceptical about copyright and other statutory restrictions, supportive of diversity and pluralism, collaborative and community-focussed.

We are probably destined to live with stereotypes too. Declining attention spans and the dominance of the media with its dramatic tendency to oversimplify and trivialise mean that the stereotype has become a common currency for much of our communication. We cannot develop new library stereotypes which appeal to everyone. As I suggested, three year old boys admire what is big and red, but we can't re-brand everything that way without alienating those people who like their libraries homely and muted, or stylish and hip, or something else other than red.

Disclaimer: I am from Frankston.

Leadership

Who leads libraries in Australia? I don't know the answer to that (except that it is plural), but the National Library roadshow in Melbourne on Friday was great. The NLA senior management all rocked up, and spent the morning telling us about what the NLA is doing.

There are lots of exciting things going on. Newspaper digitising is exciting - imagine being able to search the full text of a daily newspaper back a century and a half. The work on a new-style library catalogue is striking, and the NLA is pioneering something we all want - Google meets the catalogue. People Australia looks a good service. Picture Australia has been operating for quite a while, and is now up to 1.2 million images. Although it doesn’t and won’t have as many images as FlickR (now about 300 million), PA has done a very successful pilot with Yahoo, and is using FlickR contributions to make substantial additions to PA. And Libraries Australia is something which no other country really has - when Libraries Australia is equipped with a new user friendly front end next year, say, it will be a stunning achievement. The NLA technical strategy is flexible, sensible and innovative.

And the National Library is certainly now more national in its reach than it ever has been. Margy Burn pointed out that in the most recent year 600,000 people used the library in person, and 300,000 physical items were used, but as many as 13 million online transactions dwarf this in-person use. Canberra-centric no longer?

As you can see, I’m an admirer. The National Library is a clear national leader in library technology and innovative drive than anyone else in Australian libraries.

I've just added Lorcan Dempsey's blog to my list of links because his is the best library blog, and he says very nice things about the National Library of Australia. The other link is Kevin's blog - Kevin is also contesting the position of vice president of ALIA, and he has a link to my blog.

The Unconference had some ideas about where library staff come from

Where do librarians come from? It is said that 60% of professional library graduates are graduates of Charles Sturt University. Is this true?

I ran a session at the Unconference on 2 March on library training, and it was a very lively session too. Everyone had a point of view - and not the same point of view, either. Jenelle Cleary from the Victorian Parliamentary Library kindly took notes, which I will pass on to the organisers. Margie Anderson and Indra Kurzeme have been collaborating on work on this very question.

I had three takeaways from the session, and some other thoughts too. One point made strongly was the need to promote libraries as a career. Another thought was the need for more paths to accreditation. And the third was the desirability of employers getting together with training institutions to work out where we all want to go - what kinds of people and skills does our industry need?

I will write some more about this, but in the meantime, Gill Hallam's major survey is working its way through the system, and she will be speaking about it in Melbourne on 29 March.