Why am I a librarian?

I don’t normally do memes, but I ran across this in Walt at Random and his response made me want to respond as well. I wandered around the interweb looking for responses from various people who had been tagged. Steve Lawson, Rikhei, Iris, and Barbara Fister.

First, the bit from Walt that hit me:

I’ll use “library professional,” which is part of a phrase I’ve used in the past: “I’m a library professional but not a professional librarian.” That is, I don’t have an ML[I]S and am increasingly unlikely ever to get one–but I’m not a “paraprofessional” or “support staff,” and indeed I’ve been in exempt (”professional”) positions for longer than I can remember, always either within a library or working on behalf of libraries. And my ALA card says “Continuous Years 34.”

The whole librarian, library professional, paraprofessional thing has bugged me for years. I consider myself a librarian, but I am not. In fact, unlike Walt, I am not even a library professional. I’m support staff. I run the circulation desk and supervise the student assistants.

I have an MLS that I got in 1979 from a non-ALA accredited program that no longer exists. At the time, the accreditation thing didn’t matter much to me, because I wanted to work in secondary education so I needed certification, but not the ALA label. Spent 1 year as a school librarian and realized that I really didn’t like being in education. I’m not a teacher and I got the hell out. I did other things for awhile and realized that I was basically screwed professionally, but I could still be a Civil Service employee at the University which is where I have been since 1986.

UIUC GSLIS Grad at LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/02/hello-sonya-and-chris.php

Sonya Green is bringing her Illini style to LT for Libraries. Congratulations…

John Berry on librarianship today

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6529375.html

John Berry talks about the way librarianship is being eroded by librarians and new library models that make libraries feel like supermarkets and turn librarians into bookstore clerks at best (although, goddess only knows that a good bookstore clerk is worth hir weight in paperbacks.)

Even though he is talking mainly about the public library, I can see this happening in our academic libraries as well. As long as we have wireless access and keep the printer filled we supposedly have done our job. Not true, sez I. Locating, processing and synthesizing information is important and the thing that library schools (IMHO) need to concentrate on is reference, what is now called “informatics”

Definition of informatics from wikipedia:

Informatics includes the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process and communicate information. It also develops its own conceptual and theoretical foundations. Since computers, individuals and organizations all process information, informatics has computational, cognitive and social aspects, including study of the social impact of information technologies.

Sounds like reference to me.

Edited to add KG Schneider’s response to Berry .  Apparently I need to read things more carefully.

more on reference-a new definition

Dances With Books notifies readers of the new RUSA definition of reference, a definition in plain english

reference collection dinosaur?

http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2008-02-05-voa37.cfm

the effing librarian makes a point

I love the effing librarian

information is not necessarily power…assimilation is power.

and

3. If you post something stupid on the Internet, it’s stupid for a long, long time. If you have an argument with some friends and you say something dumb, and your friends say you’re an idiot, you can take it back, say “sorry” and say you heard someone else say that, and you didn’t mean it, and you’re really not stupid, or maybe you are stupid, but you didn’t mean it, and everyone would be cool with that. As long as you didn’t become an ass about it. But posting stupid stuff on the Internet, for as free and open as we think it is, can get you in lots of trouble.

zotero & the Internet Archive

http://www.dancohen.org/2007/12/12/zotero-and-the-internet-archive-join-forces

It’s enough to make my poor little head spin…This is wonderful, and my guess is that a huge percentage of scholars will ignore the chance to dive in and participate.

(I have to say that I am torn between Zotero and Refworks, because I can use Refworks from any computer that is linked to the web and Zotero files rest on the machine, but Zotero is open source and Refworks is licensed so one must be affiliated with an institution to use it.)

I’m not even sure why I find this so fascinating, as I haven’t written a scholarly paper in decades.

The whole thing…Open Content, tagging, creating bibliographies from worldcat or amazon searches, LibraryThing for goddess’ sake…it’s amazing.