Another blowup over celebrity in librarianship, this time over at Jenny’s and Walt’s. There’s a lot tied up in all this, more than I was really thinking about when I wrote my post about fangirling. For my own sake, mostly, I want to try to untangle some of it.
Part of what’s going on, I think, ties into the profession’s love-hate relationship with computers. (I refuse to say “technology.” My dad’s an anthropologist, so I have a much broader definition of that word than most. Ink-on-paper books are a technology, damn it!) Librarians who work with computers get an aura around us, whether we want it or not. We are perceived as more marketable, more glamorous, more change-oriented (often too much so), but less librarian-ly. So Jenny calls us “movers and shakers,” and Walt objects strongly to the equation of computer-librarians with movers and shakers, and isn’t that a crystal-clear example of the disconnect?
It’s frustrating, sometimes, being set apart like that. There’s a lot less glamour in this business than is perceived, anyhow. I’ve spent the last two weeks cleaning up other people’s HTML into decently-archivable form, and trying to ferret out why DSpace has been dumping a rash of errors into my email (don’t double-click on the click-through license, please!), and throwing together a quick intro to digital preservation, and—look, my job is a lot of things and I love my job, but glamour ain’t the attraction. And no amount of glamour makes up for being treated like an outsider. On rereading some of the “how to lose your techs” posts, I see a strong strain of “Hey! Treat me like a librarian, not a lusus naturae!”
I think the not-a-freak element plays into some of the warfare over library-school curricula. You’re not a librarian if you don’t study MARC cataloguing. You’re not a librarian if you don’t study reference service. You’re not a librarian if you don’t study library management. But that freaky-ass metadata and database and Web and programming shiznit? Not only is that not required, schools that require or even emphasize it aren’t library schools. Which inevitably implies that folks who do it aren’t librarians.
Ouch.
In my opinion, the library world should have embraced the I-schools, and the professions and locales I-school graduates work in. One way to keep a profession vital is to narrow its entry pool. Another way is to widen its sphere of influence. Librarianship persists in refusing the latter course of action, and I find that deeply disturbing. I don’t have a solution, though. The American Library Association won’t play this kind of ball, more’s the pity; if (as I’ve said) they were focused on the professionals instead of the buildings, things might well be different.
Another facet of the current disturbance is spotlight. Recently the spotlight has been falling on the crossroads between Web technology and public service. FRBR doesn’t get the ballyhoo because it’s not a Web technology; institutional repositories don’t because they’re not public service. Frankly, I think FRBR and the wave of libraries-as-publishers that IRs are a part of bid fair to have a greater and decidedly more disruptive impact on academic librarianship (note the adjective, please) than MySpace or IM or wikis or blogs or any of the Web/Library 2.0 stuff. Over the course of my career, I expect them to change some pretty fundamental things about what a lot of us do and how we do it. (Am meditating more posts on this subject, in fact.) So spotlight isn’t necessarily the best measure of long-term importance, and vice versa.
That leads to trying to measure whether the spotlighted-people-of-the-moment deserve the amount of attention they’re getting. This gets ugly. There’s inevitably envy involved, and where there’s envy, there’s grandstanding and backbiting and clique formation and all the stuff that LiveJournal calls “drama.” Broadly speaking, though, I see two main irritants: young and/or new librarians earning attention over and above that received by their elders, and a sense that notoriety is being earned by adherence to a particular hot tech rather than long service, hard work, serious research, or intelligent insight.
If there are any genuine milkers in all this, people more focused on their own advancement than their field’s or their patrons’, there certainly aren’t many. Even so, some people on all sides are handling this better than others. I know one librarian caught up in it who’s swearing up and down to disengage from it shortly lest useful professional exposure turn into one-trick-ponyism. I know others who are consciously disengaging from the drama; they are probably wiser than I am being just now.
For my part, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m less enamored specifically of institutional repositories than the larger phenomena they’re a part of: digital librarianship, open-access scholarship, learning-object management, all the signs and signals that academic libraries are stepping up their involvement in scholarly information production and management. It’s a slow thing, though, a drudge thing. I suspect it’ll be the sort of thing historians of librarianship look back on and wonder how nobody saw it coming. I could, of course, be wrong about that; if I’ve bet on the wrong horse, midstream is coming. Another inherent danger of computer librarianship.
I do hope, though, that what I do becomes a staple of academic librarianship, and of the practice of scholarship generally. I confess that I don’t especially like feeling outcast.
