Concerned Librarians of British Columbia

Librarians Unite!

2012-01-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

When a library association ceases to represent the interests of its 'community' - What does one do?

The 8 R's, of course:

Reevaluate
Recontextualize
Remind
Reinvigorate
Represent
Reorganize
Revive
Reassemble

Here are a few excerpts from the recent discussion on the relevancy of the Canadian Library Association.

The Canadian Library Association (CLA), which represents Canadian libraries and library workers who are members, sees itself as the “advocate” and “public voice” for “Canadian library and information community.”1 The association has a simple, straightforward2 “Code of Ethics” that outline the responsibilities of the CLA and its members. It is necessary for an association, especially one with members from disparate places and backgrounds, to have a clear code of ethics and responsibilities because it shows its members what the association stands for and what its role is. It is also necessary and expected that an association will follow through with their code of ethics by acting in according with them and advocating for causes that are in line with their ethics and mission. We should expect that an organization that represents Canadian libraries and library workers also takes these ethical principles and translates them into actions. However, recent issues, such as the cuts to the Toronto Public Library System, the librarian and archivist strike at UWO, and the altering of the mandate of Libraries and Archives Canada, show that the CLA chooses not to advocate and be the voice of the library community, but instead remains silent or attempts to be neutral.

“What exactly would it take for the CLA to take a stance and defend libraries?” The only recent statement that they have on their website that condemns an action20 is on the destruction of the People’s Library at Occupy Wallstreet in New York City.21 This suggests that in order to provoke the CLA, one must deliberately physically destroy a library; from the Toronto example “destroying” a library through cuts and branch closures is not enough to justify a statement.

By looking at these three issues, it is clear that the CLA is unable or unwilling to put its Code of Ethics into practice. Meanwhile, the CAUT and other unions are not just strong voices in support for librarians and library workers, but also libraries as a whole. Based on this, there is no point in trying to improve the CLA’s Code of Ethics or attempt to make the CLA follow these statements: the CLA has shown that it is not interested in representing librarians through its inaction and complicity on issues that its Code of Ethics indicate it should be actively promoting and defending. This may seem like a harsh judgement, but the CLA has no excuse: how can we not judge it for not upholding its own values? Why should we continue to support an association that does not support us? Instead of trying to overhaul the CLA, librarians interested in protecting and promoting the profession should spend their time and energy within the organizations that are already doing this work: their unions. CAUT and TPLWU have both shown that they will come up to bat on library issues and that they are capable of translating their support for librarians into real activism.

The problem with this situation is that it leaves librarians without a unified, national voice. This is why I call on librarians around the country to create a national professional organization that can be a real voice for librarians and the profession and take on the critical issues that the CLA has decided are not within its mandate.

LIBRARIANS - Take Action!

2011-11-15T14:07:00.000-08:00

Library & Archives Canada needs your help!

because:

"Incorporating business models into the management of academic and cultural libraries clearly leads to disaster, as evident at the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC). Librarians at the University of Toronto and other institutions have been distressed for some time over these developments.
— University of Toronto Academic Librarians."

Canadian Association of University Teachers launches campaign:
to Save Library and Archives Canada

(Ottawa, November 2, 2011) The Canadian Association of University Teachers today unveiled a national campaign to protect Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

The “Save Library and Archives Canada” is being launched by CAUT in response to funding cuts and internal managerial decisions that are threatening the quality and integrity of Canada’s only national public library and archives.

“Badly conceived restructuring, a narrowing of its mandate, and financial cutbacks are undermining LAC’s ability to acquire, preserve and make publicly available Canada’s full documentary heritage,” James L. Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers said at a news conference in Ottawa today.

These changes, Turk added, have already led to a reduction in the number of specialist archivists and librarians, reduced public access and services, and the loss of rare and important materials.

Liam McGahern, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers of Canada, said a growing number of Canadian materials are not being collected by LAC because of reduced funding and a change in its acquisitions policy.

“Canadians recently lost a unique and irreplaceable set of journals chronicling late 19th Century stories of settlers and First Nations people of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador Coast. This is just one of many examples,” McGahern explained. “Rare military documents, sheet music, and literature that would otherwise have gone to Library and Archives Canada are quietly all slipping away.”

CAUT is calling on the federal government to amend the LAC Act to ensure its mandate includes developing a comprehensive, not selective, collection of Canadian material.

“Our nation’s artistic, historical, and cultural heritage is at stake,” said Turk. “Genealogists, historians, researchers, graduate students, Aboriginal communities, and the general public are all affected by what is happening at LAC.”

The Canadian Association of University Teachers is the national voice of 66,000 academic and general staff at 120 universities and colleges across the country.

Sam Trosow, strike by librarians + archivists of UWO (resolved Sept. 23/11)

2011-09-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

Update:
Western Librarians and Archivists Ratify Collective Agreement
September 23rd, 2011

Unionized members of the UWO Faculty Association Librarians and Archivists bargaining unit voted 36 to 7, or 84% in favour of the deal.

A tentative contract agreement was reached Tuesday, September 20, following a 13-day strike that began September 8.

"I'm pleased to see that the membership has endorsed the deal," said Bryce Traister, UWOFA President. "I'm proud of the resilience they demonstrated during this strike."

The 51 unionized librarians and archivists at Western have been without a contract since June 30, 2011.

source: UWOFA

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Samuel E Trosow"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2011 6:15:16 AM
Subject: UWO Librarians & Archivists on strike

I hope you are all following the situation here at the University of Western Ontario where the Librarians and Archivists (L&As) are now officially on strike. If not, here is some background info, with some questions about the nature of professional reference services and how the library community outside of Western can help.

Some background:

Here at Western, both the Faculty and the L&As are in the same association (UWOFA, the University of Western Ontario Faculty Association) but we have two separate bargaining units (there are over 1,000 members of the faculty unit and about 50 members of the L&A unit). Last year, the faculty were within a few hours of hitting the picket lines, but there was a last minute settlement which averted the strike. Two years ago, the L&As also came close to a strike, but it too was averted at the last minute - - but they only agreed to a short contract. So here we are again.

The strike started last week and there was a picket line by at the two main entrances to campus and the city bus drivers are not crossing the line and are dropping riders off outside the gates. While classes are going on, we are without our librarians. Meanwhile, the administration is is trying to minimize what it means not to have librarians on the job.

So here is a question for the list......

Where do you draw the line between those reference services that are part of the jurisdiction of professional librarians (hence the work of the bargaining unit) and 'directional' or other non-professional questions? And where do you draw the line between typical (albeit hardball) management tactics and the unwarranted and harmful derogation of academic librarianship itself?

The Western admin is saying in its release...

" Highly subject specific, in-depth reference services are not available "

So what about 'somewhat' subject oriented reference services? Or what about the even more puzzling reference questions where the patron does not accurately "announce" the precise subject specialty that might be needed to service the query? What about reference services that are not necessarily "in depth" but are initial inquiries that could go in a variety of directions. What about reluctant or less formulated inquiries from patrons who have some pressing information needs but have not yet sharpened their query into a "subject specific request" that will lead to "in-depth reference services." Don't most patrons come to a reference desk without what the western admin characterizes as highly subject specific, in depth reference needs (even in an academic library)? There was an even more troublesome communication from the administration of the law faculty (where I also teach) that said:

"All services to students will carry on as usual."

I am not exaggerating, that's what they said. But, one wonders . . . if all services can carry on as usual without the professional library staff, why do we need a professional library staff? If anyone thinks this is not an issue in the minds of cost-cutting managers, then remember the notorious piece in AL several years back that asked “What if you ran your library like a bookstore?” (American Libraries, 29 (3) (March 1998)) .

Libraries without librarians (and archives without archivists) is hardly business as usual.

While it is not surprising that management will try to minimize the impact of a work stoppage in the context of a labour dispute, I think the UWO admin is going over the top in its denigration of the role of professional library services. In my view, they damage the credibility of the institution and it will have negative repercussions long after this particular labour issue is settled. When you consider the actual cost to the university of resolving this dispute (remember there are only 50 or so members of the bargaining unit) it seems apparent that there is something else at play here. It is unfortunate that the UWO admin has decided that in order to gain some short-term advantage, they will issue statements that denigrate the role of librarians more generally. This is not a good strategy for what purports to be world-class research university.

What can members of the broader library community do to help?

Once again, we see a situation where librarianship is under attack. There needs to be a better and more coordinated response. If our associations are to remain relevant, they cannot ignore issues like what is unfolding at Western (or in Toronto as I have addressed in a previous posting).

There are a number of ways you can concretely support Western's Librarians and Archivists:

1) If you are in the London area, you can join the picket line at the Richmond Gates and Alumni Hall entrances to campus, they run between 7:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m. weekdays. They are information pickets only, cars are not being stopped and traffic is not being impeded. Even helping for a few minutes will lend much-needed support.

2) Send an email expressing your support of the Librarians and Archivists to President Amit Chakma ( achakma@uwo.ca ) and Chair of the Board of Governor’s Frank Angelletti ( franka@filion.on.ca ). Keep the pressure on by continuing to re-send the letter (or new letters) daily or weekly until the strike is over. A sample email could contain something like the following:

Dear President Amit Chakma and Western Board of Governors Chair Frank Angeletti:

I am (identify yourself and your capacity) writing to express my support for Western’s Librarians and Archivists in their fight for fair and equitable treatment. Western’s libraries earn the university respect across the province and the country yet its librarians are earning 20% percent less than their colleagues at universities across Ontario. This gap gives the impression that Western is not interested in providing access to “in-depth, subject-specific” knowledge to either its students or faculty. I urge you to return to the bargaining table and seek a just and fair settlement. (you might want to add something from your own perspective about the crucial role that librarians/archivists play and how libraries without librarians cannot be considered business as usual)

3) Follow the developments in the social media. "Like" the UWOFA Facebook page and follow UWOFA on Twitter. “Favourite” UWOFA's tweets and retweet them to your own network.

UWOFA's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/UWOFA

UWOFA's Twitter: UWOFA

After you email your letter to President Chakma and Board of Governor's Chair Angeletti, please also consider copying and pasting your letter to the official UWO Facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/theuniversityofwesternontario
(you must click "like" to be able to post)

4) Write letters of support for the L&As to the London Free Press , the London Community News , the Western Gazette , and the Western News or to other papers.

I am also hoping that the CLA leadership will issue a statement in support, it's important that our professional associations support their members.

Samuel E. Trosow, Associate Professor
University of Western Ontario
Faculty of Information & Media Studies / Faculty of Law
strosow@uwo.ca

Deskilling - ALA Leading the Way? Progress or Decline?

2011-06-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

LLAMA of ALA is presenting the following conference session at the end of this month. Will the results of this research support the further erosion of the profession?

Hiring Non-MLS Librarians: Trends and Training Implications

Sun., June 26, 8–10 a.m. Libraries hire professionals from outside librarianship for positions traditionally held by MLS-degreed librarians. Hear results of ALA-funded research to examine hiring practices in public and academic libraries and the essential elements of an orientation for non-MLS hires in librarian positions.

We really need research on how to strengthen the MLS and stop this dilution of library staff.

Hear and protest! -- John Berry

Source: Library Journal, online

Losing Libraries -check out the site!

2011-04-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

Losing Libraries: Saving Libraries "Sometimes we have to know what is at risk before we can engage in saving it. This summer, as libraries continued to get budget hit after budget hit across the country, several readers asked for a comprehensive picture of the ravages of the recession on library service. Cindy Orr, a Cleveland librarian and editor of LJ’s Collection Development series, sent along a link to Paper Cuts, a website that documents the jobs lost at newspapers, and urged us toward gathering a similar national picture of cuts to libraries. In partnership with Movers & Shakers Laura Solomon and Mandy Knapp, LJ launched LosingLibraries.org.

The site maps the variety of cuts across the country from the start of the downturn in 2008 onward. It also gathers information on the numerous advocacy efforts waged against threats to funding. As it is populated with information from across the country, the Losing Libraries resource will inform a national view of the budgetary tug of war that is currently twisting this critical institution in its grasp."

2011-03-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

"I won’t apologize for making a living wage, for being able to visit a doctor when I need one, or for choosing a job that will help me build adequate retirement savings.

I deserve and expect those things….But that isn’t why I became a librarian….I became one because I wanted to give.

We need to speak up about the value we bring to our communities. We need to have a presence at community meetings, in the newspapers and—should it come to that—at protests.

Bad budgets and bad legislation will hurt us for a time. Silent acquiescence to the idea we are valueless to our communities will hurt us forever."

--Audrey Barbakoff, a librarian at the Milwaukee Public Library. Her response to Wisconsin's labour strife.

Article 19

2011-01-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 19 French

Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher, de recevoir et de répandre, sans considérations de frontières, les informations et les idées par quelque moyen d'expression que ce soit.

Artículo 19 Spanish

Todo individuo tiene derecho a la libertad de opinión y de expresión; este derecho incluye el no ser molestado a causa de sus opiniones, el de investigar y recibir informaciones y opiniones, y el de difundirlas, sin limitación de fronteras, por cualquier medio de expresión.

第十九条 Chinese

人人有权享有主张和发表意见的自由; 此项权利包括持有主张而不受干涉的自由, 和通过任何媒介和不论国界寻求、接受和传递消息和思想的自由。

Gadgets change but the purpose of the Library will never change!

2010-11-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians

On March 26th, Darien Library hosted an event called “In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries” at which participants were instructed to “come prepared to help sketch out the role librarians should play in defining the future of libraries”. The two speakers, John Berry and Kathryn Greenhill, provoked a conversation among me, Kathryn and Cindi Trainor that began in my office the next day and spilled out across the ensuing week.

In companion posts, Kathryn and Cindi have beautifully captured the spirit in which this was written. Be sure to read them.

Below is the resulting document (CC License). It’s meant to be grand, optimistic, obvious, and thankful to and for our users, communities, and the tireless librarians who work the front lines every day, upholding the purpose of the Library.

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians
Written and endorsed by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor

The Purpose of the Library

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.

The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change.

The Library is infinite in its capacity to contain, connect and disseminate knowledge; librarians are human and ephemeral, therefore we must work together to ensure the Library’s permanence.

Individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the Library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.

Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.

A clear understanding of the Library’s purpose, its role, and the role of librarians is essential to the preservation of the Library.

The Role of the Library

The Library:

* Provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment.
* Encourages the love of learning.
* Empowers people to fulfill their civic duty.
* Facilitates human connections.
* Preserves and provides materials.
* Expands capacity for creative expression.
* Inspires and perpetuates hope.

The Role of Librarians

Librarians:

* Are stewards of the Library.
* Connect people with accurate information.
* Assist people in the creation of their human and information networks.
* Select, organize and facilitate creation of content.
* Protect access to content and preserve freedom of information and expression.
* Anticipate, identify and meet the needs of the Library’s community.

The Preservation of the Library

Our methods need to rapidly change to address the profound impact of information technology on the nature of human connection and the transmission and consumption of knowledge.

If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.

As librarians, we must:

* Promote openness, kindness, and transparency among libraries and users.
* Eliminate barriers to cooperation between the Library and any person, institution, or entity within or outside the Library.
* Choose wisely what to stop doing.
* Preserve and foster the connections between users and the Library.
* Harness distributed expertise to serve the needs of the local and global community.
* Help individuals to learn and to use new tools to create a more robust path to knowledge.
* Engage in activism on behalf of the Library if its integrity is externally threatened.
* Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.
* Identify and implement the most humane and efficient methods, tools, standards and practices.
* Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not.
* Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.
* Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.
* Trust each other and trust the users.

We have faith that the citizens of our communities will continue to fulfill their civic responsibility by preserving the Library.

via blyberg.net

Without Borders

2010-09-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

Architects Without Borders, Canada

Builders Without Borders

Clowns Without Borders

Dentists Without Borders

Designers Without Borders

Doctors Without Borders

Engineers Without Borders

Farmers Without Borders

Firefighters Without Borders, Canada

Lawyers Without Borders

LIBRARIES ACROSS BORDERS -- what's wrong with this picture?

Pharmacists Without Borders, Canada

Potters Without Borders, Canada

Reporters Without Borders

Teachers Without Borders, Canada

Veterinarians Without Borders

Librarian Niche

2010-09-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

Our niche and how to get back into it
by: Rory Litwin, Aug. 18/10

More and more, I find that the library profession’s efforts to stay relevant in the age of information technology are in fact eroding our relevance. As a result of these efforts, it is becoming less and less clear what we offer that is different from what everybody else offers in the information economy. The reason is that our response to change around us has mostly been to repress those aspects of librarianship that are not directly reflected in new technological tools that other people claim as their domain more securely than we do. We keep saying that as librarians we are web designers, information architects, web searchers, information scientists, user experience experts, and on and on, when each of those things is already a profession filled with people who make a stronger claim to it than we do. What we can claim is librarianship, yet most people – not only outside but within the profession – have forgotten what that consists of other than “books.”

In ALA, accreditation standards for masters degree programs in library science still refer to areas of competency that can be taken to define the profession. Yet in nearly all other ways, ALA is attempting to sell libraries and librarians on the basis of skills that everybody knows other people offer more distinctly, and so, it seems, are most library bloggers and magazine commentators.

Despite the relative consistency in accreditation standards over time, it is presently a challenge to point to practicing librarians in order to demonstrate to people what it is that librarians do that others can’t do so well, simply because, and I hate to say it, most of us are not so exemplary. There has been intense pressure on librarians for decades to focus on technology at the expense of something that is now difficult even to remember, that being a set of intellectual components to what we do that concern our knowledge of what is IN our libraries (physical and digital) and a well-practiced insight regarding the connections to be made between that information and our users.

Consider the great and not-so-great librarians you have known. In my experience, the great ones are great (I am thinking about reference librarians here, just to be clear, because that is who I have worked with) because of a combination of an enthusiastic desire to help, good communication skills, insight, general knowledge (not to be underestimated in its importance), and a compound of skills at connecting the dots between the particularities of users, their needs, the clues, the relevant bits of knowledge in memory, the access points, the information structure, and the hermeneutics and heuristics of helping. A library school curriculum providing a mix of traditional librarianship and intellectually challenging multidisciplinary studies (instead of the busywork that is challenging mainly for the physical stamina it requires) can support these defining skills. (Even if there is no strong case to be made for the existence of a tested knowledge base that we can called “library science,” it is still necessary to support the work of librarians on the basis of relevant theory and research, and to teach it in master’s degree programs. Because of librarianship’s theoretical foundations, multidisciplinary though they may be, we are able to make a claim to professional status, and we are able to claim a degree of autonomy in institutions that allows us to do work that matters.)

Now, we all have good days and bad days, but how many of us know as much as we really should to be good at the “librarian” part of our jobs? I have a good idea of how I use my knowledge of our resources, and I know that I wish I knew more. I don’t wish I knew more about our search tools – those are designed to be easy to use for librarians and the public alike, and I don’t regard our ability to use them as anything special. Where I feel that greater knowledge would help me to be a better librarian is across the board – within my assigned subject areas, yes, but in all subjects, and particularly about things like scholarly communities, the research into reading behavior, learning theory, media studies, and all of those fields that are connected to what we do. I think that improving my general knowledge and working to improve my insight into people are the most effective ways I can work to become a better librarian.

The place I return to for an idea of librarianship that is singular yet multidisciplinary, and humanistic yet technological, is Jesse Shera’s work in the field, specifically his text from the early 70s, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship. Shera had his greatest impact as an early developer of library automation systems in the 50s and 60s, but following that he worked to define librarianship per se in its new technological context. His view of librarianship was in part based on the idea that automation should give librarians time to focus our attention on the problems of communities and their information needs, and how to connect to them, freeing us from technical busywork. He lived long enough, however, to see the profession become machine-oriented and dedicated to refining these tools of efficiency. As he wrote in the decade before his death, “Librarians would do well to remember Moses or Pieta and think somewhat less frequently of Shannon and Weaver,” and “Librarians persist in sublimating librarianship to the lure of the machine.” (From “Librarianship and Information Science,” in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, ed. by Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield. Published by Wiley, 1983.)

There is no Jesse Shera for our time, but I can echo Juris Dilevko’s call to “re-intellectualize the profession” (The Politics of Professionalism: A Retro-Progressive Proposal for Librarianship) and recommend Richard J. Cox’s thorough diagnosis of contemporary library education (The Demise of the Library School: Personal Reflections on Professional Education in the Modern Corporate University). I recognize that librarianship should be different from what it used to be, but I think it ought to be more than what it has recently become.

Source:Library Juice

Librarians, engines of democracy!

2010-07-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Marilyn Johnson believes librarians and libraries still play a role in North American society. Her comments follow:

"I've spent four years following librarians as they deal with the tremendous increase in information and the many ways we receive it. They've been adapting as capably as any profession, managing our public computers and serving growing numbers of patrons, but it seems that their work has been all but invisible to those in power. I've talked to librarians whose jobs have expanded with the demand for computers and training, and because so many other government services are being cut. The people left in the lurch have looked to the library, where kind, knowledgeable professionals help them navigate the government bureaucracy, apply for benefits, access social services. Public officials will tell you they love libraries and are committed to them; they just don't believe they constitute a "core" service.

But if you visit public libraries, you will see an essential service in action, as librarians help people who don't have other ways to get online, can't get the answers they urgently need, or simply need a safe place to bring their children. I've stood in the parking lot of the Topeka and Shawnee County Library in Kansas on a Sunday morning and watched families pour through doors and head in all directions to do homework or genealogical research, attend computer classes, read the newspapers. I've stood outside New York city libraries with other self-employed people, waiting for the doors to open and give us access to the computers and a warm and affordable place to work. I've met librarians who serve as interpreters and guides to communities of cancer survivors, Polish-speaking citizens, teenage filmmakers, veterans.

The people who welcome us to the library are idealists, who believe that accurate information leads to good decisions and that exposure to the intellectual riches of civilization leads to a better world. The next Abraham Lincoln could be sitting in their library, teaching himself all he needs to know to save the country. While they help us get online, employed and informed, librarians don't try to sell us anything. Nor do they turn around and broadcast our problems, send us spam or keep a record of our interests and needs, because no matter how savvy this profession is at navigating the online world, it clings to that old-fashioned value, privacy. (A profession dedicated to privacy in charge of our public computers? That's brilliant.) They represent the best civic value out there, an army of resourceful workers that can help us compete in the world.

But instead of putting such conscientious, economical and service-oriented professionals to work helping us, we're handing them pink slips. The school libraries and public libraries in which we've invested decades and even centuries of resources will disappear unless we fight for them. The communities that treasure and support their libraries will have an undeniable competitive advantage. Those that don't will watch in envy as the Darien Library in Connecticut hosts networking breakfasts for its out-of-work patrons, and the tiny Gilpin County Public Library in Colorado beckons patrons with a sign that promises "Free coffee, Internet, notary, phone, smiles, restrooms and ideas."

Those lucky enough to live in those towns, or those who own computers, or have high-speed Internet service and on-call technical assistance, will not notice the effects of a diminished public library system — not at first. Whizzes who can whittle down 15 million hits on a Google search to find the useful and accurate bits of info, and those able to buy any book or article or film they want, will escape the immediate consequences of these cuts.

Those in cities that haven't preserved their libraries, those less fortunate and baffled by technology, and our children will be the first to suffer. But sooner or later, we'll all feel the loss as one of the most effective levelers of privilege and avenues of reinvention — one of the great engines of democracy — begins to disappear."

Marilyn Johnson

Eye on the Future

2010-04-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

by Rory Litwin, April 26, 2010

The “assessment piece” and reference strategy

"I want to suggest a possible strategy for reference departments in academic libraries.

I think a lot of library administrators who have an eye on the future see less of a role for reference, at least in the way we currently understand it. As they see it, it seems to me, it’s a waste of money to have someone with a graduate degree sitting at a reference desk helping only a few people throughout the day. And as they see it, the demand for reference service is declining. They’re ready to staff the desk with paraprofessionals or students, and they’re ready to outsource much of collection development and consolidate that function to a smaller group of staff members. There is a vague idea of deploying MLIS holding librarians in new ways, but also a sense that they can save a lot of money by employing fewer of us. As I see it, that puts reference librarians in the position of having to strategize a future path and determine a role for ourselves that we actually want and that is suited to our particular expertise as the library’s connection to faculty and students.

At the same time that we are facing that challenge, there is a trend in higher ed that I think we can use as an opportunity. It’s the emphasis on assessment. It is an opportunity because the assessment mandate gets worked out to favor activities that have measurable learning outcomes and disfavor those that don’t. An accreditation body visits a university and asks them to improve its assessment practices. The university responds by asking units – academic departments and others – to develop their own assessment plans based on a list of educational objectives. The template for the assessment plan is designed with academic units in mind, and non-academic units may complain a little and treat the requirement as a bureaucratic hassle and a meaningless task, since they are not directly involved in producing educational outcomes the way academic departments are.

The opportunity for reference, and for the library as a whole, is to use the new assessment plan to secure a role where information literacy objectives (or related objectives) are emphasized. We can elaborate on what it is we teach in classrooms and while we are helping students at the desk or in our offices in order to create assessment measures that support what we want to do.

We can describe research skills that are not taught outside the library. ACRL’s information literacy standards talk about them in very general ways. I like to think about how we help students understand aspects of the bibliographic landscape of a field. Teaching them to make sense of their search results in the context of their own research problems is important educational work. The assessment piece gives us the opportunity to tell campus administration that we want them to hold us accountable for teaching students how to do research. The process tends to be designed to allow us to set our own objectives, so it gives us an opening and an opportunity to be proactive about our future in our institutions. We can take the bull by the horns."

World Book and Copyright Day

2010-03-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

23 April
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23 April is a symbolic date for world literature for on this date in 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors such as Maurice Druon, Haldor K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo.

It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference, held in Paris in 1995, to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity. In this respect, UNESCO created both the World Book and Copyright Day and the UNESCO Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance.

A Reminder ...

2010-01-01T00:18:00.000-08:00

From IFLA ---
"a collection of professional guidelines for librarians and other library employees adopted by national library or librarians associations or implemented by government agencies."

Demonstrates concern for the profession of the librarian, the high social status of librarianship and its authority. (Armenia)

Library and information personnel should maintain high standards of professional integrity and should not engage in conduct, which could prejudice the standing of their profession. Nor should they advance their own personal interests at the expense of their employers, colleagues or user communities. (Hong Kong)

Librarians provide for the implementation of the basic principles through professional activities, particularly advocating the following:
-preserving status, dignity and integrity of the profession. (Croatia)

Our professional competence guarantees the trust and respect of society towards the library and our profession. (Estonia)

Librarians safeguard the prestige of the library profession, take part in the activities of the professional community and co-operate with their colleagues. (Hungary)

The librarian has an obligation to encourage potential users of the library under his/her care to be aware of the existence of the library and how to use its services. (Israel)

It is the duty of the librarian to promote, both individually and collectively, the efficiency and the independence of the library service as an instrument of democracy. (Italy)

The librarian, in all his/her professional activities, must be guided by the principle of service rather than personal expediency or gain. (Jamaica)

Librarians fulfill their duties as professionals by means of thorough awareness of the professional knowledge and protection of autonomy. (Korea)

Librarians, in case a standpoint of the parent organization is against the principles of the professionalism, are responsible to oppose to this position based on their professional beliefs. (Korea)

Librarians always maintain honest attitude and self-esteem. (Korea)

Should uphold the principle of intellectual freedom and allow users to have free and equal access to sources of information without discrimination, within the limits of the law. (Malaysia)

Must treat co-workers and fellow librarians with respect, fairness and goodwill(Malaysia)

Librarians' actions and decisions should be based firmly on sound professional practice. (New Zealand)

Librarians should not directly or indirectly assist in the unauthorized practice of librarianship. They should report any violation of any provision of existing laws, rules and regulations. (Philippines)

Librarians should be vigilant in the protection of all library property and resources. (Philippines)

Librarians should refrain from associating with, or allowing the use of their names by any persons or organizations whose relationship therewith would cast a doubt on their integrity and reputation. (Philippines)

Librarians and information professionals' task is to recognize, satisfy and develop informational, educational, scientific, cultural, esthetic and entertainment needs of the users. Their particular duty is the creation of opportunities for free public access to national and international information resources as well as the preservation and public transmission of the cultural and scientific heritage.(Poland)

Resignations should be made long enough before they are to take effect to allow adequate time for the work to be put in shape and a successor appointed.(Singapore)

The librarian shall strive to provide access to users’ collective heritage and to information, regardless of medium.(Sweden)

We live up to the principles of intellectual and informational freedom;
We oppose the attempts to censor reading and library collections (Ukraine)

Members’ primary duty when acting in the capacity of librarian is to their clients, i.e. the persons or groups of persons for whose requirements and use are intended the resources and services which the members are engaged to provide. In all professional considerations the interests of the clients within their prescribed or legitimate requirements take precedence over all other interests.(United Kingdom)

Does your library staff have freedom of expression? Really?

2009-11-21T08:34:00.000-08:00

A reminder to those who set the rules and often disregard them --- these fundamental rights should be enjoyed by all ----- including library staff! The irony is incomprehensible.

Intellectual Freedom

"All persons in Canada have the fundamental right, as embodied in the nation's Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to have access to all expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual activity, and to express their thoughts publicly. This right to intellectual freedom, under the law, is essential to the health and development of Canadian society.

Libraries have a basic responsibility for the development and maintenance of intellectual freedom.

It is the responsibility of libraries to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable. To this end, libraries shall acquire and make available the widest variety of materials.

It is the responsibility of libraries to guarantee the right of free expression by making available all the library's public facilities and services to all individuals and groups who need them.

Libraries should resist all efforts to limit the exercise of these responsibilities while recognizing the right of criticism by individuals and groups.

Both employees and employers in libraries have a duty, in addition to their institutional responsibilities, to uphold these principles."

More information:

Canadian Library Association
200 Elgin Street, Suite 602, Ottawa, Ontario K2P 1L5
Telephone: (613) 232-9625
Fax: (613) 563-9895

2009-10-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

“Libraries are important. But librarians are more important,” Lee emphasizes.

“Libraries can have phenomenal collections and cutting-edge technology, but without professional librarians, users will not fully exploit them.”

---Sandra Lee, Librarian at University Canada West in British Columbia

For more information on University Canada West, head to http://www.ucan.ca or visit us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/UniversityCanadaWest and Twitter http://twitter.com/UCANedu.

About University Canada West

University Canada West (UCAN) is a progressive post-secondary institution offering a number of undergraduate and post-graduate degrees, including BCom, BA and MBA programs. Degree programs are available at campuses in Vancouver, Victoria and Singapore, as well as online.

Strike, a possibility

2009-10-26T21:27:00.000-07:00

London, ON - Unionized librarians and archivists at the University of Western Ontario have voted overwhelmingly to support strike action to back their bargaining goals of fair evaluations, job security and equitable salaries and benefits.

A total of 88% of UWOFA-LA members voted in favour of authorizing their union to call a strike.

Who we are.

• We are the 54 professional information specialists at Western who help graduate and undergraduate students and faculty find the information they need for their research and courses.

• Librarians and Archivists are highly trained professionals: Librarians have at least a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science, and Archivists have at least a Master’s Degree with a specialization in archival studies. Many have additional Master’s degrees in other fields or hold teaching certificates as well. Ours are highly regarded professions. Western is one of two universities in Ontario and seven in Canada that offer a Library and Information Science Master’s Degree while three Canadian universities offer a Master’s Degree with a specialization in archival studies.

What are we asking for?

• We're committed to ensuring that students and faculty continue to have access to the quality information and resources they need from a world-class research library system. That means we need to be treated with respect – respect for our profession and the important contribution Librarians and Archivists make to ensuring Western maintains its status as a top notch research-intensive institution that London and Canada can be proud of. What we don’t want is a “big box” library system where our job security is compromised and our professions and expertise are devalued.

• Western’s administration is proposing what we see as an arbitrary approach to evaluating our work – we want a fair approach using transparent criteria applied evenly to all Librarians and Archivists.

• The administration also wants what we see as an arbitrary approach to reassignment – they want to be able to reassign us, without notice, from one library to another, or face termination. This would be like ordering someone with years of experience working in a biology lab to relocate to the economics department or lose their job. This approach would ignore the expertise we have, and eliminate our job security.

• Librarians and archivists at Western rank 91st out of 113 research libraries in North America when it comes to salaries and benefits. We deserve parity with our colleagues across Canada so that Western can continue to retain and attract the professional expertise essential to any world-class university.

Mixed Message - ?

2009-10-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

The Special Libraries Association. SLA is engaged in an onomastic and epistomological exploration. It would appear that the "antiquated" descriptors "librarian" and "library" will be soon be de-selected.

But rest assured that this "Alignment" exercise, as it's properly called ----- will, "Help SLA advocate for the information professional." Now how one defines "information professional" is another debatable issue.

According to the sophists of SLA:

THE WORD “LIBRARIAN” SENDS A MIXED MESSAGE
The word “librarian” has some positive connotations, however it is not associated with the positive attributes that employers value. The word “librarian” was found to be “dusty” and “antiquated” in several contexts.

The term “special librarians” is not understood by key audiences and is not associated with the positive attributes that employers value.

WHAT DO WE NEED IN A NAME?
• Memorable
• Value-driven
• Unique
• Differentiated

WORDS THAT WORK
• Knowledge
• Strategic
• International
• Advantage
• Insight
• Association
• Professional

For more information, contact one of the Alignment Embassadors

Who Defends Intellectual Freedom for Librarians?

2009-09-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Too Cautious?
However, the ALA’s leadership has taken a maximally cautious approach over the years to the connection between librarians’ professional responsibilities and rights and the means of protecting the professional enactment of them. For example, the ALA has systematically refused to take any action or make any comments on what have been termed “local management issues.” That means that the ALA has felt obliged to make no statement when local book selection decisions were taken from an entire state’s libraries and librarians and outsourced to one vendor (as I discussed in my 2003 book, Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy) or when controversy erupted over the dumping of thousands of volumes from a large new municipal library’s collections and the stifling of staff protests (as Melissa Riley and I discussed in our 1997 article in Progressive Librarian, “Notes from the Front Line at San Francisco Public Library”). These were both deemed “local management issues.”

The ALA Code of Ethics calls upon librarians to act on their responsibilities: one must act to make services and access equitable, and one must act to protect privacy—that is what is meant by the phrase in the code stating our “special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.” The ALA historically has sidestepped responsibility in protecting that duty to act. For example, the most conservative legal theorizing was applied by the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom to an early proposal on workplace speech, essentially saying that it was counter to employment law to take a stand on intellectual freedom as a library workplace right or goal. Instead of “permit[ting] and encourag[ing] a full and free expression of views by staff on library and professional issues,” as the original proposal stated, the proposal was thus watered down after the Office of Intellectual Freedom and the ALA’s leaders objected: “Libraries should encourage discussion both among librarians and library workers and with members of the library’s administration of nonconfidential professional and policy matters about the operation of the library and matters of public concern within the framework of applicable laws” (quoted in “ALA Resolutions: Workplace Speech, Gay Bias, and Disinformation,” www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA623045.html). That is not exactly a ringing endorsement of academic or intellectual freedom in our work. In contrast, the AAUP argues for those protections in the name of the greater good in exception to common employment law (that is, the “framework of applicable laws”).
No Teeth

Further, the ALA officially states that it might help defend librarians if their employment rights are denied in the process of defending intellectual freedom (for example, in opposing local censorship) but not when they exercise intellectual freedom within the workplace. We seemingly have intellectual and academic freedom in our work, but the ALA has proposed no means of policy enforcement. Indeed, enforcement is cast as an activity beyond the scope of the ALA’s work. This view is further articulated in the ALA’s explanatory “Questions and Answers on Speech in the Workplace”: librarians have ethical obligations to question policies “detrimental to the public interest or to the profession,” but the ALA cautions that it “does not at this time provide mediation, financial aid, or legal aid in response to” workplace disputes, which are subject to local employment policy, nor does the ALA investigate and publicize abuse as does the AAUP. Its stance on librarians’ ethical obligations is hortatory at best.

If the ALA is not willing to stand behind putting intellectual freedom into action in libraries, why should the practicing librarian do so? As I argued in Dismantling the Public Sphere, the ALA itself has clamped down on internal association expression both through its round - tables and divisions with demands from ALA legal counsel for disclaimers on statements and through the Office of Intellectual Freedom’s virtual monopoly on interpreting the application of intellectual freedom principles. In short, in its corporate actions, the ALA does not substantively support putting the Code of Ethics into action by librarians and does not practice good intellectual freedom principles inside the association.

The ALA’s “Standards for Faculty Status for College and University Librarians”—a document that has served as a model for ethical and academic freedom protections within the profession—has been diluted in the process of revision over the years. The standards for performance, peer review, self-governance, and tenure, and even the recommendation that librarians be faculty members in the first place, are weaker now than when they were formulated in 1971. For example, the language has subtly shifted from clear statements in the 1971 standards that academic librarians “should adopt an academic form of governance . . . similar to that of facult[y]” and that they “must have the protection of academic freedom [and their] professional judgment must not be subject to censorship” to the following statements in the 2007 “Guidelines for Academic Status for College and University Librarians”: “The library exists to support the teaching and research functions [and] thus librarians should also participate in the development of the institution’s mission, curriculum, and governance,” and they “are entitled to the protection of academic freedom” as defined by the 1940 Statement of Principles.

The bottom line is that librarians (academic or otherwise) are unwilling, through their premier professional association, to shame those involved in the most egregious violations of intellectual freedom when the violations occur within the profession. This unwillingness to engage academic and intellectual freedom within libraries has resulted in a serious bifurcation: such protections exist for the users of libraries and in building, maintaining, preserving, and providing access to library collections of all types, but they do not cross the desk in practice to the professionals who must stock those collections and serve those users. Academic and intellectual freedom in the library workplace is, primarily, a rhetorical value and an object lesson to those who take academic freedom for granted or misunderstand it. It is a reality only for those librarians fortunate enough to be faculty members—and to be taken seriously as such.

Full article: Academe Online, Sept. - Oct. 2009>

John Buschman, a former member of the AAUP’s national Council, is associate university librarian for collections development, preservation, and scholarly communication at the Georgetown University library.

A Quarter, gone! Poof!

2009-09-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

Provincial budget cuts announced Sept. 1 will have dramatic consequences for public libraries according to Think City chair Neil Monckton.

Joined by author Yann Martel and seven other Canadian authors, Think City is urging citizens to sign a new petition online calling for the restoration of library grants.

"You can't cut provincial library grants by 22 per cent without seeing a dramatic impact on library services," said Think City chair Neil Monckton. "Today, with the help of prominent Canadian authors, we are launching our online petition through Facebook and Twitter to encourage the public to visit www.stoplibrarycutsnow.ca and send a message to the Premier that BC's libraries matter."

"Libraries are the memories of a literate society," said Man Booker Prize winning author Yann Martel. "Without libraries, a literate society has no future because it can't pass on its knowledge, or amuse its children, for that matter."

Martel has also recorded a voice message to be broadcast to nearly 20,000 households in Vancouver asking people to sign Think City's online petition against the cuts to library grants. Well-known Canadian authors Steven Galloway, Susan Juby, Chris Humphreys, Shaena Lambert, Mark Leiren-Young, Andreas Schroeder, and Arthur Slade have also signed-on to support Think City's petition.

"By cutting core library services that have been publicly funded for 90 years, the BC Liberal government is attacking one of the cornerstones of democracy in this province," said Monckton. "The provincial government grants have been essential for funding local libraries in British Columbia since 1919, they pay for the provincial library network that allows all libraries in BC to share resources and provide services that community libraries would otherwise not be able to afford."
Funding for public libraries was a key priority identified in Think City's 2009 Citizen Budget survey of Vancouver residents. Out of 1,754 people surveyed, 92.1 per cent said they supported increasing or maintaining funding for civic libraries and 51.5 per cent said that public libraries are a very important policy priority.

Provincial library grants support services such as interlibrary loans, online resources and subscriptions for magazines and newspapers, literacy programs, and the BC OneCard that allows borrowers access to all libraries in BC. The loss of 22 per cent of library grants will result in reduced hours, cuts in service, fewer acquisitions, fewer on-line resources and subscriptions, and reduced investment in current technology.

Source: Think City, Sept. 01, 2009

Attack on BC Libraries, HELP!

2009-07-26T00:26:00.000-07:00

"BC provincial public libraries have not yet received their 2009 annual operating grants from the provincial government, nor have they been told how much money they will be receiving – both of which usually happen earlier in the fiscal year. There have been strong indications that the Province has decided to stop funding libraries and that this funding may be cut from the current and subsequent budgets.

During this economic downturn, there has been a significant increase in the usage of BC public libraries. Residents know that their libraries offer more than free books to read – they are using the Internet and computer systems to do research, hunt for jobs and more. Without provincial grants, significant cuts will result."

Help us save our libraries, please sign the petition at:

Don't Pull the Plug

source: BC Library Trustees Association

Activist Librarian

2009-07-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

"The information industry has the technology to control information, but its price tag on information distribution and its profit goal create a bias in what information is made available and how it is dispensed. Only the nonprofit organization, the library, dedicated to a total community service goal with trained experts, librarians, running the operation can provide the full scope of information for the total population in a fair and objective manner."

--Library civil rights activist, administrator, author, and educator E. J. Josey, founder of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (ALA) and the ALA's second black president (1984-85).

Debate

2009-06-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled to take sides in the debate about the MLIS (or whatever monogram is given to our basic credential). Like the others, I give it lip service and even recruit students to get it and join our profession. I have high hopes for it. I don't think librarianship or any other profession is some kind of subdiscipline of that ill-defined, overbroad field of “information.” Those who do think that way, though, ought to revisit the literature of that “discipline” and see how difficult it has been to define the term information or decide what should be taught in its schools. I believe the shift of once “professional” duties to folks without the MLIS is more often driven by budget woes than good management. We've been debating those issues forever. It's time to do something about them.

While we wait, I'll assert that librarianship is a profession because it has an ancient body of knowledge, a set of valid core values, and a broad practice that improves the lives of its clients. The MLIS at least tells an employer that a candidate has learned that much." ---- John Berry, Library Journal

Source: Taking Sides on the MLIS

External Pressures

2009-06-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

A coalition of unions and professional associations came together Wednesday [May 20, 2009] at the National Press Club to announce the start of Professionals for the Public Interest (PftPI. The new organization intends to help nurses, teachers, librarians, scientists and a range of other professionals respond to outside pressures and challenges to the integrity of their work."

"What we're doing today is reframing this issue," said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, noting that when individual professionals try to defend themselves against budget-cutting or other measures that would harm their ability to work, "it gets framed as that individual has an axe to grind." PftPI, said Weingarten, would say that person "is fighting the fight for quality or for professional integrity." The newly formed PftPI has built a website where professionals can submit stories about defending their professional integrity against external pressures."

Colliding Agendas

2009-06-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

In response to today's Library Journal article on the future of the MLS/MLIS degree and all that it encompasses including the theme of deskilling ---- The Committee of Concerned Librarians would like to bring attention to a published study by Dr. Roma Harris and Victoria Marshall. Even though technology speeds along in nanoseconds and is often touted as an impetus for library 'reorganization' ---- agendas and economies more accurately describe the reasons for these 'changes.' Interestingly, not much has changed since this study was completed, now more than a decade ago!

Reorganizing Canadian libraries: A giant step back from the front.
Library Trends, Winter98, Vol. 46, Issue 3

A few excerpts appear below:

Abstract

The nagging question of who does what in libraries has been exacerbated in recent years by significant restructuring initiatives, driven by ongoing budgetary pressures and constant technological change. In the study reported here, senior administrators as well as middle managers and front-line librarians in public and academic library settings were asked to describe the nature of organizational change in their workplaces and how new technologies affect or fit into the pattern of restructuring.

Background
In the 1990s, libraries are undergoing unprecedented change deriving from a combination of accelerating prices of library materials and space, an enormous increase in the amount and types of materials available, and rapid developments in electronic technologies (Cummings et al., 1992). Library decision-makers have employed a number of common strategies to manage this change, particularly with respect to the deployment of staff. For example, following the passage of Proposition 13, a limitation on property tax that severely curtailed the revenue of local governments, Willett (1992) found that, although managers in four California libraries varied in their ability to represent their organizations well to funders and maintain good relations with their staff, all of them attempted to deal with declining resources by restructuring library services, reducing programs and materials, cutting back on staff, and deprofessionalizing work (i.e., assigning tasks formerly done by professional librarians to less expensive nonprofessional staff). Similarly, Crist (1994) reported that six academic library administrators, who were interviewed about their approaches to organizational change, used managerial strategies that included reducing the staff complement, redeploying professional staff away from functional roles such as reference, and establishing work teams in order to flatten the organizational structure (i.e., reducing the proportion of managerial positions and pushing decision-making responsibilities lower in the staff hierarchy). Neal and Steele (1993) described similar methods in the Indiana university libraries, where reorganization was designed on the basis of the assumption that continued budgetary restraint and a move from "automated to electronic status" would involve a "contraction of staff size and greater expectations of staff" (p. 93). Each of these examples illustrates that current managerial practice in libraries almost inevitably involves staff redeployment, especially through the assignment of greater responsibility to staff working in the lower-paid, lower-status ranks of the organizational hierarchy. Too, as a result of the use of new technologies, these staffing decisions take place within a context where many of the traditional work roles performed by library workers are being altered significantly.

Expectations concerning what an investment in new technologies should achieve for libraries, and the perceptions of library staff as to the impact and efficacy of restructuring initiatives, have not been widely explored. Although several recently published papers suggest that libraries should be organized differently in order to respond to the stresses of a rapidly changing external environment, few provide any empirical evidence to support the efficacy of new organizational forms. Most rely on interviews or mail surveys of a few library directors, case studies of a small group of similar libraries or, in some instances, a description of the change process undertaken in a single library (see for example, Jacobson, 1994; Lawson et al., 1989; Shapiro & Long, 1994). In the study reported here, an effort was made to provide a somewhat more substantial base of observations about the perceived connections among restructuring, staffing, and technological change in libraries. The investigation involved face-to-face interviews with directors of academic and public libraries, followed by a survey questionnaire mailed to librarians working in major academic and public library systems across Canada. This project builds on the findings of an earlier study of retrenchment in Canadian academic libraries during the 1970s and early 1980s (Auster, 1991).

Results
The Interviews

The recorded interviews with the library directors were transcribed, providing a rich source of background information about the motivation of senior decision-makers who bear much of the responsibility for the direction of change in their libraries. All seven were concerned about the future health of their libraries, both with respect to their financial stability and their political viability (within the setting of local government or the universities in which they are located). All suggested that libraries are losing their competitive edge due to financial cutbacks which have resulted in a decline in services and staff. All shared the view that the future of libraries depends on whether these institutions are able to capitalize on the opportunities presented by new technologies.

New Roles for Librarians. According to the directors, the situation facing libraries demands change; consequently, the proper preoccupation of professional librarians should be the management of change. A recurring theme in their remarks is that it is no longer enough for librarians to simply fit new technologies into the traditional framework of professional roles and activities because these roles and activities are no longer valid. As one of them put it, "the change that's happening isn't at all like the automation change we went through when we took something we did one way and did it another way. It's a fundamental kind of change to who we are and what we do." This type of reasoning justifies shrinkage in the proportion of professional librarians within the total complement of library staff. One of the directors claimed, for example, that rather than hiring new graduates from library schools, it makes more sense to upgrade library assistants because: "[New graduates] . . . don't have the kind of skills we need. There is no recognition that this is a political world and that librarianship is not a sheltered place where you can escape reality . . . we are customer driven . . . we are politics driven. This is not some kind of aristocracy."

Another director admitted that when positions become vacant she asks: "Is there some way to fill this job other than with a librarian for whom there is so much overhead?" All seven directors regard professional positions as a great expense to the library requiring major scrutiny, not only with respect to productivity but according to new criteria about the actual jobs to be performed. As one of them said, the distinction between librarians and nonprofessional staff has become "very blurred. The real difference is that the librarians get paid more." All indicated that, in return for the library's investment in professional staff, they want something more and different from that which most librarians were trained and once expected to provide. While each director used somewhat different words to describe just what that "something different" might be, all agreed that the correct role for professional librarians is to provide leadership and training, vision and goal setting, quality assurance, and performance measurement.

The role of the professional librarian is becoming redundant. Other levels of staff can do their jobs. The need is for managers. The key roles are in management. Unless librarians can become managers they are faced with extinction. Paraprofessionals can do most of what professionals used to be needed for. . . . Catalogers are today's dinosaurs and librarians are becoming tomorrow's dinosaurs.

With respect to reference, it is not clear that increased user independence necessarily leads to an improved outcome. Some investigators report that, while users may be capable of working more quickly and getting better results through the ability to search electronic resources, many may not be able to make the best use of these resources without a librarian's assistance in choosing the correct database, constructing searches, and finding the best subject headings (see, for example, Bucknall & Mangrum, 1992; Mendelsohn, 1994; Kramer, 1996). Nevertheless, some library administrators appear convinced that there is little need for professional librarians in the future provision of direct reference service to users. One of the directors in this study remarked, for example, that, with proper training, library technicians could be taught to handle reference questions "without running to mommy." This remark betrays disdain, not just for the technicians but for the persons to whom they might turn for help. "Mommy" suggests that the next level up the staffing hierarchy is occupied by women. Implied in the remark is the implication that traditional professional roles are "women's work," thus not too important and probably overrated. This is echoed in the comments of another of the directors who observed that

some of the things about what librarians are supposed to do really puzzle me. All the cachet involved in cataloging and selection. . . . It's not enough. It's a larger thing that makes a librarian. And it's got something to do with management, and commitment, and analysis, and adapting to change, but it doesn't have to do with those little things.

This minimizing of traditional professional functions in the language of senior managers is a means by which they can protect themselves from accusations of professional betrayal. If the work traditionally performed by higher paid women in the library system is really over-rated, "little," or silly, it makes good sense to pass it on to other women who are a little lower-paid, and who can, with training, take on increased responsibility. This leaves professional librarians with an opportunity to embrace a less infantilized or feminized role, that of "manager," which, we are given to understand, is bigger, more important, and more far-reaching. Hence, fewer people should do it, only those who remain in a select managerial cadre at the top of the organizational hierarchy.

Conclusion
Fueled by financial constraint and opportunities for the application of new technologies, a radical restructuring of library work is underway. A recent study by Leckie and Brett (1997) reveals that, of all the work roles performed by librarians, the opportunity to be in direct contact with patrons remains the most highly regarded, yet the work of librarians is rapidly being reorganized in such a way that this opportunity for contact may become increasingly rare. As the data from the present study reveal, when para- and sub-professional staff are "empowered" to assume more front-line tasks formerly carried out by professionals, librarians are leaving behind what, for many, are the most significant roles in their work repertoire, thereby taking a "giant step back from the front."

References
Auster, E. (1991). Retrenchment in Canadian academic libraries. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Canadian Library Association.

Bucknall, T., & Mangrum, R. (1992). U-search: A user study of the CD-ROM service at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. RQ, 31(4), 542-553.

Crist, M. (1994). Structuring the academic library organization of the future: Some new paradigms. Journal of Library Administration, 20( 2), 47-65.

Cummings, A. M.; Witte, M. L.; Bowen, W. G.; Lazarus, L. O.; & Ekman, R. H. (1992). University libraries and scholarly communication. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Dunkle, C. B. (1996). Outsourcing the catalog department: A meditation inspired by the business and library literature. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 22( 1), 33-44.

Hardy, C. (1990). Strategies for retrenchment and turnaround: The politics of survival. New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Harris, R. M. (1992). Librarianship: The erosion of a woman's profession. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Harris, R. M. (1993). Information technology and the deskilling of librarians. In A. Kent (Ed.), Encyclopedia of library and information science (vol. 53, pp. 182-202). New York: Marcel Dekker.

Jacobson, S. (1994). Reorganization: Premises, processes, and pitfalls. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 82(4), 369-374.

Kramer, E. H. (1996). Why roving reference: A case study in a small academic library. Reference Services Review, 24( 3), 67-80.

Lawson, V.; Miller, G.; Niemeyer, M.; & Slattery, C. (1989). Information technology: Impetus for organizational change in libraries. Show-me Libraries, 41( 1), 11-15.

Leckie, G. J., & Brett, J. (1997). Job satisfaction of Canadian university librarians: A national survey. College & Research Libraries, 58( 1), 31-47.

Mendelsohn, J. (1994). Human help at OPAC terminals is user friendly: A preliminary study. RQ, 34( 2), 173-190.

Moon, B. E. (1988). Reorganization of libraries: The United Kingdom experience. LIBER Bulletin, 31, 85-98.

Neal, J. G., & Steele, P. A. (1993). Empowerment, organization and structure: The experience of the Indiana University Libraries. Journal of Library Administration, 19( 3-4), 81-96.

Oder, N. (1997). Outsourcing model-or mistake? The collection development controversy in Hawaii. Library Journal, 122(5), 28-31.

Shapiro, B. J., & Long, K. B. (1994). Just say yes: Reengineering library user services for the 21st century. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 20(5-6), 285-290.

Willett, H. G. (1992). Public library directors in the organizational environment: Four case studies. Library and Information Science Research, 14( 3), 299-339.

Winter, M. F. (1988). The culture and control of expertise: Toward a social understanding of librarianship. New York: Greenwood Press.

Raised-by-wolves feral professionals

2009-05-16T17:20:00.000-07:00

Librarians Confront New Uncertainties Over Training and Jobs

"How many academic librarians does the world need? More than it’s likely to have in a few years, as the baby-boom generation ages out of the work force, the prevailing theory has been. But the economic crisis may be changing that, and the job prospects and skills of tomorrow's librarians were hot topics at the 14th biannual conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries... held in Baltimore."

“We’ve been hearing for a long time about the impending crisis in the library work force,” said José-Marie Griffiths, dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Griffiths, who spoke on a panel on trends affecting libraries, helps lead a long-term study, “The Future of Librarians in the Workforce,” being conducted under the aegis of the Institute for Museum and Library Services."

For now, uncertainty rules. Word at the conference was that many academic libraries have moved slowly to fill vacancies, reluctant to make new hires until they know for sure what budgetary constraints and cuts they face.

“There are just a lot less jobs than there were even three months ago,” Paul Solomon, an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, said in a conversation after he took part in a panel on recruiting and retaining the library work force of tomorrow.

Another member of that panel, Barbara B. Moran, a professor at Chapel Hill's library school, also noted openings were scarcer. “The entry level is hurting,” she said in response to a question from a recent library-school graduate. "It is a tough job market this spring.”

Ms. Moran also mentioned “deprofessionalization” at academic libraries: a shift away from hiring workers with degrees in library and information science.

That development came up again at a staged debate on whether the master’s in library science has any relevance for the future of the academic library. The moderator, James G. Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University, referred to the growing role of “raised-by-wolves feral professionals.”

“We’re seeing a softening of the announced requirements for academic-library positions,” Mr. Neal said, calling that “a change of some significance.”

It grows out of increased demand for library workers with skills in many different arenas, not all of them digital. If you need to hire a Tibetan-studies librarian, as Mr. Neal did last year, a candidate with a Ph.D. in that subject area may be a better fit than one with an M.L.S. or M.L.I.S. degree.

Source: an article by Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education

see also: Association of College and Research Libraries, ACRL

Have we forgotten?

2009-05-05T23:20:00.000-07:00

Too often we forget that we are obligated, as librarians, to uphold certain professional standards. These ethical guidelines, especially true of institutions in the public realm, override the interests of all others.

Following is an excerpt to illustrate this from CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, UK.

Code of Professional Conduct

d Members’ primary duty when acting in the capacity of librarian is to their clients, i.e. the persons or groups of persons for whose requirements and use are intended the resources and services which the members are engaged to provide. In all professional considerations the interests of the clients within their prescribed or legitimate requirements take precedence over all other interests. It is recognised that the persons or groups of persons to whom this duty is owed will vary according to the nature of the employment which members undertake. In particular it is recognised that different considerations will apply where members are working at a place to which the public has right of access from those where they are working in an environment where the public is excluded or given only limited access.

Professional Integrity!

2009-04-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

ROCKETING TOWARD A LAUNCH: MAY 20!

On May 20, The Department for Professional Employees, DPE will participate with 18 other national (including the American Library Association's Allied Professional Association, ALA-APA) and global organizations in launching:

Professionals for the Public Interest: Associations and Unions Defending Professional Integrity (PftPI).

Over the last two years, outreach by DPE brought together eight professional associations and 10 national and international unions. All endorsed a consensus statement, Defining Common Ground on Professional Integrity. Taking into account the interests of the public, doing the job right, and fending off external pressures to do otherwise, resonate across disciplines and organizations.

In March, DPE hosted the latest meeting of the Joint Working Group (JWG) for PftPI, which approved an outline for a joint website and finalized a plan for the public launch. DPE began building the website and identifying media outreach specialists from the endorsing organizations in consultation with the communications subgroup. With the activities subgroup, DPE also refined a possible focal point for federal action.

For more information about Professionals for the Public Interest or the Joint Working Group, please contact DPE President Paul E. Almeida, palmeida@aflcio.org, 202-638-0320, or Executive Director David Cohen, dcohen@dpeaflcio.org, 202-638-0320 extension 113.

See also:“Strengthening Professionalism in the Public Interest” Meeting, June 5, 2008

Darien Statement

2009-04-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians
April 3rd, 2009, written by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, Cindi Trainor

On March 26th, Darien Library hosted an event called “In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries” at which participants were instructed to “come prepared to help sketch out the role librarians should play in defining the future of libraries”. The two speakers, John Berry and Kathryn Greenhill, provoked a conversation among John Blyberg, Kathryn and Cindi Trainor that began in his office the next day and spilled out across the ensuing week.

Below is the resulting document (CC License). It’s meant to be grand, optimistic, obvious, and thankful to and for our users, communities, and the tireless librarians who work the front lines every day, upholding the purpose of the Library.

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians

The Purpose of the Library

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.

The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change.

The Library is infinite in its capacity to contain, connect and disseminate knowledge; librarians are human and ephemeral, therefore we must work together to ensure the Library’s permanence.

Individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the Library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.

Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.

A clear understanding of the Library’s purpose, its role, and the role of librarians is essential to the preservation of the Library.

The Role of the Library

The Library:

-provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment.
-encourages the love of learning.
-empowers people to fulfill their civic duty.
-facilitates human connections.
-preserves and provides materials.
expands capacity for creative expression.
-inspires and perpetuates hope.

The Role of Librarians

Librarians:

-are stewards of the Library.
-connect people with accurate information.
-assist people in the creation of their human and information networks.
-select, organize and facilitate creation of content.
-protect access to content and preserve freedom of information and expression.
-anticipate, identify and meet the needs of the Library’s community.

The Preservation of the Library

Our methods need to rapidly change to address the profound impact of information technology on the nature of human connection and the transmission and consumption of knowledge.

If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.

As librarians, we must:

Promote openness, kindness, and transparency among libraries and users.
Eliminate barriers to cooperation between the Library and any person, institution, or entity within or outside the Library.
Choose wisely what to stop doing.
Preserve and foster the connections between users and the Library.
Harness distributed expertise to serve the needs of the local and global community.
Help individuals to learn and to use new tools to create a more robust path to knowledge.
Engage in activism on behalf of the Library if its integrity is externally threatened.
Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.
Identify and implement the most humane and efficient methods, tools, standards and practices.
Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not.
Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.
Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.
Trust each other and trust the users.

Library, an obsolete term?

2009-03-23T21:42:00.000-07:00

The Debate at Rutgers: Should School Drop "Library" from Its Name?

-- Library Journal, 3/23/2009

"A distinguished alumna warns of denying history and denigrating the role of women. The school's dean argues that the revision focuses on commonalities.

Last month, the decision by faculty of Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) to change the name of the school to the School of Communication and Information garnered significant criticism among librarians, even though library faculty at Rutgers generally supported the change.

The Executive Board of the New Jersey Library Association, for example, approved a resolution asking for the name change to be reconsidered, arguing that the deletion of the name does not clarify—as Dean Jorge Reina Schement contends—but rather obfuscates the purpose of the school."

Mary K. Chelton, professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York, and a double alumna of Rutgers' programs, shared with LJ [excerpt below] a letter she wrote to school administrators. She warns of denying history and denigrating the role of women."

"It is even more dismaying to find that people who talk about words being social action are pretending they are not taking any, that this is just some sort of cosmetic change that will gain external resources (from whom is not stated) with nothing changing underneath this new “absent totality.” My experience with this action in other professional contexts says not to believe it.

It sounds as if the Dean really wants to say that librarians are female and poor and mostly wedded to a diminishing public sector, and SCILS wants private money and therefore has to appeal to private money biases, or to academic administrators who share these biases, all the while reaping the headcount of the MLIS students.

I find this contemptible and do not support it."

Library Workplace Speech, a modern irony!

2009-02-21T21:32:00.000-08:00

The Push for Library Workplace Speech
by Toni Samek

On June 26, 2005, the American Library Association (ALA) adopted a precedent-setting Resolution on Workplace Speech. It concludes: “Libraries should encourage discussion among library workers, including library administrators, of non-confidential professional and policy matters about the operation of the library and matters of public concern within the framework of applicable laws.”

The Canadian Library Association (CLA) has no such policy. However, the CLA’s Code of Ethics begins with the directive to uphold the CLA’s Statement on Intellectual Freedom. Since at least the 1970s, our librarians have embraced a core value of intellectual freedom, which includes the freedom to read. But while our librarians have been longstanding advocates of their patrons’ freedoms, they have been historically less clear about intellectual freedom as it applies to their own institutional or “inside” culture.

The librarian’s practice is arguably limited if she or he cannot exercise fully the freedoms of thought, conscience, opinion, and expression in the workplace—all of which are human rights that underlie intellectual freedom. These limitations detract from the librarian’s ability to provide the best collections and services possible. Canadian librarians are now scrutinizing their situation in light of the ALA’s 2005 resolution.

At the CLA’s annual conference in Vancouver in 2008, participants discussed the following questions: Whose voices are coming through the library channels (workshops on policy development, conference sessions, library journal articles)? To what extent is self-censorship or “inside” censorship common? What is and is not acceptable when librarians participate in citizen journalism that criticizes employers in the blogosphere? And in a profession that holds intellectual freedom so dearly, why did the ALA see the need to adopt its Resolution on Workplace Speech? Should the CLA adopt a sister resolution?

At the CLA session, panellists debated the pros and cons of resolutions on workplace speech for libraries. They discussed what such resolutions might look like and mean for the CLA and library administrations. Panellists also discussed the implications for the daily life, recruitment, and retention of Canadian library and information workers in the twenty-first century. About 70 people attended the session; perspectives from the United States and Canada were heard.

We considered whether the CLA may someday opt to censure libraries that do not uphold its core values, as the Canadian Association of University Teachers can do when it deems that academic freedom is not upheld. We acknowledged that the ALA’s resolution is a persuasion and consensus-building tool, but it does not reflect enforcement authority in libraries. We also discussed a model clause in the Saskatoon Public Library agreement that directs the institution to uphold the CLA’s Statement on Intellectual Freedom—for both the library’s outside publics and inside workers—and the newly amended Code of Conduct for Vancouver’s libraries, which mentions criticisms of policy and city officials.

The location and timing of the CLA’s conference was significant because Vancouver’s public library had had its first strike in 2007 (which was followed by a lockout at Victoria Public Library). The strike in part prompted the CLA to pass a related resolution on pay equity; the executive council approved the Canadian Library Association Position Statement on Equitable Compensation for Library Workers on October 5, 2007.

The question for the future is, Without freedom of speech in the library workplace, can our librarians be effective advocates for everyone else’s intellectual freedom?

Toni Samek is a member of the Canadian Library Association. From 2005 to 2008, she was the convenor of the CLA’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom. A longer version of this article first appeared as “Cultivating a Culture of Freedom of Expression in the Library Workplace” in Progressive Librarian #31 in the summer of 2008.

Source: Freedom to Read, 2009

And relating to this a blog entry from John Berry:

Too Nice "NewLib"
March 10, 2009
There is a sad message from many of the "mentors" on NEWLIB-L, a discussion list for new librarians that is one of my favorites. The list has a home page at NEWLIB-L. The message in several posts is to "express yourself with great care not to offend anyone else who reads the list." Several posts have ranted about postings that were considered "unprofessional" or "off topic." What they really tell the "new" librarian is that free expression doesn't apply in professional discourse, only out in the street or in your personal debates. This same syndrome haunts many discussion lists from ALA units and others. It is as if free expression must be limited or at least tempered if it is to be allowed online. It is the wrong message, especially in a profession where so many have sacrificed so much for free expression. Hope that the new technology isn't wasted on an excess of amenities, niceties, and free advice that is worth the price. If those "mentors" can't take the heat, tell 'em to get out of the kitchen.

Our Professional Duty

2009-01-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

The librarians of CCL, often lonely in their attempts to bring attention to the significance of their profession, are encouraged by articles such as this.

Finding Our Voices in an Internet World
by Stephen Abram
Originally published in Information Outlook, December 01, 2008.
--reprinted with permission of the author

Although it might change, at this point search engines and electronic information do a very poor job of sensing the end user's specific context.

We're still hearing that hackneyed old comment, "Almost everything's available on the Web now, so exactly why do we need librarians?" It's coming from all quarters, especially in these financially tumultuous times. It's time to assemble some quick ways to respond to comments like that.

Make no mistake. It's not an option to leave these challenges unaddressed, whether they're explicitly spoken or just lay there as assumptions in conversations. If we don't respond, we put our organizations at risk. We have a professional duty to educate and inform our world about the role of librarians and information professionals.

So, here's a modest attempt to develop a few strategies for talking to key folks in our world who may try to hurt our organizations and the society at large because they haven't thought through the real-world issues of the Internet. Principally, the Internet:

* Contains too much information;

* Has no clear bias toward quality or authority;

* Is subject to manipulation by third parties through search engine optimization;

* Offers potentially different answers, depending on your geographical location, personal profile or previous search behaviors;

* Is primarily focused on meeting the needs of its primary customers-advertisers-which may include your competitors; and

* Is available to everyone, which means that you have absolutely no competitive advantage.

So, what kind of story can we tell that gets our point across in the context of those folks who would seek to cut our staff, slash our budgets or eliminate our roles entirely?

We have an interesting relationship with financial professionals. Organizations value their role as keepers of statistics and measures, and for making money-based analyses of our overall enterprise or specific programs. As a general rule, they look for cost savings. Often they have an incomplete understanding of the operation of some units beyond the ledger. This isn't bad; it's an opportunity for education. When one of your valued bean- counter colleagues comes up to you and utters the dreaded question, "Almost everything's available on the Web now, so exactly why do we need librarians?," don't run screaming from the room and don't leave the question unanswered. People love being agreed with. Agree that it's a valid question, then suggest that there are greater opportunities for savings. As their eyes widen in anticipation, note that bigger saving would come from putting a calculator on everyone's desk, thus drastically reducing the ranks of number crunchers in the organization. After all, if putting free content and information tools on every desktop instantly made all workers information literate, then a calculator that contains all the numbers and formulae in the world would clearly endow everyone with the ability to perform advanced bookkeeping, budgeting, auditing and financial analysis.

Some Important Lessons

Putting tools on desktops merely gives people tools, and giving people content merely supplies them with content. The magic is in making sure they're the right tools, that they are used properly, and that they align accurately and competitively with the organization's mandate, vision and need for productivity. The lesson: Tools don't come with the knowledge to use them.

Years ago, an administrative officer at a major national law firm closed the firm's library and laid off nearly all of the librarians in favor of the Web and the Intranet alone. Knowing that the work of attorneys involves information based decision making, the world of librarians was appalled. Of course, it wasn't long before librarians started trickling back into the firm. The experiment was a disaster, though there was no public admission.

In parts of my career, I was involved in projects that placed a very significant number of common law cases, statutes, treatises and analyses online. By most counts, there is more electronically based legal content in North America than any other kind. That being the case, why do we need librarians? Again, does anyone feel it is now pointless to consult a legal professional for legal advice? After all, everything is there for the searching. The lesson: Clearly, there is a difference between access to content and knowledge-a big difference!

I often tell the story of a major illness I once lived through. I believed at the time that I was a somewhat talented information professional and decided to search the Web and the well-known databases like MEDLINE about my illness and treatment options.

Aside from the law, a huge corpus of medical literature and major medical reference books are also easily available, and lots of information and many answers are out there for the searching. It was a personal disaster. I scared myself halfway into a depression as I learned every awful thing that could happen, every contraindication, every potential for death and how long and cruel the journey there would be. I fled into the warm embrace of an excellent local consumer health information professional, who provided me with just enough information at my level of information literacy and put me back on the road to health.

Although it might change, at this point search engines and electronic information do a very poor job of sensing the end user's specific context. Google cannot tell the difference between a youngster in ninth grade searching STDs for his health project and a worried adult needing a support group. It's just a big stupid empty search box. Personal service easily senses the difference. The lesson: Information has context and so do end users.

We are undeniably entering a world where the best jobs, the best positions and the best strategies are in the field we have chosen-libraries and information science. It's time for us to find our voices and use them.

Tough times call for tough people.

STEPHEN ABRAM, MLS, is the president of SLA and is vice president, innovation, for SirsiDynix. He is chief strategist for the SirsiDynix Institute. He is an SLA Fellow, the past president of the Ontario Library Association, and the past president of the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003, he was awarded SLA's John Cotton Dana Award. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen's Lighthouse blog. This column contains his personal perspectives and does not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of SirsiDynix. You may contact him at stephen.abram@sirsidynix.com.

Is this happening in your library?

2008-12-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

TAKING STOCK: THE FUTURE OF OUR PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICE

September 2008, United Kingdom

-- An independent report for UNISON
by Steve Davies,
Senior Research Fellow
Cardiff School of Social Sciences

"As part of an attempt to cut costs, some authorities are deskilling the library service, replacing professional librarians with less skilled staff and permanent library staff with volunteers. Skills possessed by qualified librarians should be valued and deployed effectively, rather than regarded as an unfortunate over-head. Staff training should be increased for all staff and a discussion opened up with the union both nationally and locally, involving the library schools, on the skill set likely to be required of tomorrow’s library staff.

One of the great strengths of the library service, and a source of the trust with which it is regarded in the community is that it is not a commercial service. Public libraries are an integral part of local public services and should remain so. The public library service should build on its past successes; learn from the failed experience
of contracting out other public services and go forward as a well-funded, publicly provided, top quality public service fit for the 21st century.

UNISON branches report that cost-cutting is dictating a decline in the numbers of qualified librarians employed in the service. Posts are being reclassified, professional librarians not replaced or replaced by managers rather than qualified staff and key vacancies left unfilled. For example, in Havering, branch librarian posts were downgraded and redesignated branch manager posts not requiring librarianship qualifications. In Essex, restructuring led to qualified librarians’ posts being replaced by ‘Service Development Officers’ who did not need to have a
library qualification. Essex also has various library service managerial posts which do not require the holder to have a librarianship qualification.

This downgrading of professional skills is a short-sighted decision by councils, but if there are elements of the current skills mix that the government feels need to change then there should be an open consultation and negotiation with the staff’s union representatives and involving the library schools."

Full report at:
Taking Stock...

guardians

2008-11-17T14:32:00.000-08:00

Here are a few excerpts from President-Elect Barack Obama's keynote speech at the opening general session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, June 23–29, 2005, while a U.S. senator from Illinois. This article, published in the August 2005 issue of American Libraries, is an adaptation of that speech, which drew record crowds and garnered a standing ovation.

Bound to the Word
Guardians of truth and knowledge, librarians must be thanked for their role as champions of privacy, literacy, independent thinking, and most of all reading. -- Barack Obama.

If you open up Scripture, the Gospel according to John, it starts: “In the beginning was the Word.” Although this has a very particular meaning in Scripture, more broadly what it speaks to is the critical importance of language, of writing, of reading, of communication, of books as a means of transmitting culture and binding us together as a people.

More than a building that houses books and data, the library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward and the human story forward. That’s the reason why, since ancient antiquity, whenever those who seek power would want to control the human spirit, they have gone after libraries and books. Whether it’s the ransacking of the great library at Alexandria, controlling information during the Middle Ages, book burnings, or the imprisonment of writers in former communist block countries, the idea has been that if we can control the word, if we can control what people hear and what they read and what they comprehend, then we can control and imprison them, or at least imprison their minds.

Some of you may have heard that I gave a speech last summer at the Democratic convention. It made some news here and there. For some reason, one of the lines people seem to remember has to do with librarians, when I said, “We don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states, or the blue states for that matter.”

What some people may not remember is that for years, librarians have been on the frontlines of this fight for our privacy and our freedom. There have always been dark times in our history where America has strayed from our best ideas. The question has always been: Who will be there to stand up against those forces? One of the groups that has consistently stood up has been librarians. When political groups tried to censor great works of literature, you were the ones who put Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye back on the shelves, making sure that our access to free thought and free information was protected. Ever since we’ve had to worry about our own government looking over our shoulders in that library, you’ve been there to stand up and speak out on our privacy issues. You’re full-time defenders of the most fundamental liberty that we possess. For that, you deserve our gratitude.

Full article:Bound to the Word

Canadian Library Month

2008-10-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Library Association / Association canadienne des bibliothèques (CLA/ACB) is pleased to announce that October has been designated as Canadian Library Month! The idea for a month dedicated to library and information services in Canada was developed by library partners from across the country to help raise public awareness of the valuable role that libraries play in the lives of Canadians."

"This year’s theme of Your Library: Your World supports the important role that libraries play in our lives. Libraries are key partners in supporting literacy and are leaders in providing access to information to all users regardless of age, gender, race, religion, social status, language or location."

"Libraries are centres for life-long learning, also referred to as cradle-to-grave learning. They are information and community centres where people learn, engage, discover and connect. Their life-long learning role means libraries have a direct impact on the lives of Canadians each and every day. Libraries are where new Canadians study for citizenship tests, parents and children learn songs and stories, students learn critical thinking and literacy skills, businesses research the marketplace, readers pick up the latest bestsellers, and children are supported in their love of reading."

"There are approximately 23,000 librarians and library clerks working in over 22,000 libraries in Canada. Libraries partner with organizations and government to provide information and services to meet community needs thus acting as gateways to the libraries of the world. Libraries help people find their way in a large and increasingly complex world."

It's all in the posting!

2008-09-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

Humour and truth can be found in unlikely places, in librarian postings for example.

Here are a few:

*Hosts a blog.
Work is typically performed indoors.
Some exposure to dust and mechanical and electrical hazards.
Must be able to lift up to 50 pounds.

*Proactively approaches, greets and assists customers throughout the library.
Monitors customers in the Library and reminds them of Library policies as required to ensure that the resources of the Library are fully accessible to all patrons.

*Experience in library field is a valuable asset.
Provide expertise in library science.
Excellent phone manners.

*City Librarian Estevan Public Library Branch
Ability to sustain cooperative, productive relationships with staff, trustees and the general public; demonstrated ability to operate office equipment including computers; keyboarding speed 30 wpm with a maximum error rate of 2%.

*Ability to work days, evenings or weekends.

*Must have and maintain a good driving record in accordance with the driving standards as established by the City of Rowlett. Must report all traffic citations to the City Manager within two working days of receipt.

*Commitment to a service ethos.

*Direct experience optimizing a library system.

*Stay current in professionallibrary literature and participate in professional activities.

*The Library, however, is more than the sum of its collections. Indeed, our true value is realized thanks to our staff, whose expertise and dedication provide our users with excellent resources and services.

Librarian in a Day! 9:15 - 17:00

2008-07-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

MLIS - why bother? There is a cheaper way!

Can anybody work a reference desk? No, but with a little training, a day's worth in fact, according to
The Chartered Insitute of Library and Information Professionals

--- ANYBODY can "undertake in-depth desk research."

Here's a description of that course:

Desk research skills
17 September 2008, London - U.K.

More and more library and information staff are being asked to carry out detailed desk research but have never had any formal training in the skills required to do the job well.

This course is designed for anybody in an information role who is required to undertake in-depth desk research and who would like to learn how to achieve the best results.

Benefits of attending
The day will cover:

-understanding the research brief
-research methodology
-identifying information sources
-researching and using specialist libraries
-key sources of information
-using the Internet for research
-presenting research findings

Who should attend?
Anybody in an information role who is required to undertake in-depth desk research

Programme
Registration & coffee 09.15
Start 09.45
Lunch 12.45
Close 17.00

Types of research
-Understanding the research brief
-Research aims and objectives
-Desk research strategy
-Finding and accessing specialist libraries
-Finding and using indexes and abstracting services
-Internet search strategies
-Internet resources for academic information
-Internet resources for official information
-Internet resources for business information
-Internet resources for special interest groups
-Internet resources for media information
-Evaluating Internet resources
-Presenting research findings

Ex Libris publishes CCL History

2008-06-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

The Ex Libris Association, ELA --founded in 1986 -- at the University of Toronto published an article about CCL in its newsletter, ELAN, Spring 2008.

An excerpt follows:

The Committee of Concerned Librarians, CCL – a brief history

"Librarians are the fierce defenders of the principles of intellectual freedom and access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity. We are the champions of equitable service policies and users’ rights to privacy and confidentiality. Yet we have failed to defend the value of our own profession both internally and externally. The fervor librarians exhibit for libraries and their collections, whether in print or electronic formats, is noticeably weak if not absent when it comes to advocating for ourselves. A reason for this? One might argue that libraries are comprised of all classes of employees, from librarians to clerical assistants to paraprofessionals and it cannot be understated that each plays an integral but differing role in the success of any library but relinquishing our role, our influence, our value to the library, as librarians is irresponsible."

Eradicating our Roots

2008-05-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

Before I landed a position in reference and then my current professional post, I was a circulation manager. I was told time and time again that my staff and I were unnecessary because there are automated checkout systems and patrons don't really care to deal with a human. Most of the patrons at our service desk weren't checking out books. They had questions no machine could answer.... Librarians are responsible for some of these trends, particularly those who are “too important” to work a desk and hide in their cubicles chasing tenure while uninformed graduate students and undergraduate clerks staff the reference desk. At my current institution, even our dean works the reference desk (as does every librarian, no matter their specialty)....

Fewer and fewer “librarians” are taking any but the basic reference course in “library” school. Programming and technology classes are pushed.... This leaves us with few reference librarians who can master both the electronic and what some might call the archaic—like the skills to know and use print indexes. In the academic library...we may think that the dispersal of service desks, staff, and professionals working in public areas goes unnoticed. It does not. It is noticed by students and faculty, particularly those who were accustomed to knowledgeable professionals and good service. As libraries change to a more businesslike model, with more automation and more outsourcing, student achievement at our universities is declining. That is a very disturbing trend of which we should be wary....

What concerns me is the laissez-faire attitude often taken when making field-altering decisions and the disappointed faces of patrons when they don't like what we're doing. It is fine to evolve and adapt, but to do so by eradicating our very roots and the reasons our profession exists is shortsighted at best.

—Colleen Harris, Asst. Prof., Reference & Instruction Libn., Univ. of Tennessee, Chattanooga

-- Library Journal, 3/15/2008

Employee Expression in the Library Workplace, encouraged or censored?

2008-05-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

CLA 2008 Annual Conference

Inside Talk: Freedom of Speech in the Library Workplace
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Speakers: Maurice Freedman, Kathleen de la Peňa McCook, Sam Trosow, Paul Whitney

Convened by: Toni Samek

What are library and information workers talking about on the job? Whose voices are coming through the library channels? To what extent is self-censorship or inside censorship a common practice? What is and is not acceptable when librarians participate in citizen journalism that criticizes employers in the blogosphere? And in a professional community that holds intellectual freedom so dear, why did the ALA see the need to adopt a 2005 Resolution on Workplace Speech which states: “Libraries should encourage discussion among library workers, including library administrators, of non-confidential professional and policy matters about the operation of the library and matters of public concern within the framework of applicable laws?” Should the CLA adopt a sister-resolution? And what about our library administrations? The pros and cons of resolutions on workplace speech for library institutions are up for debate with panelists Kathleen de la Peňa McCook, Sam Trosow, and Paul Whitney, who will discuss just what resolutions on workplace speech might look like and mean for the CLA, library administrations, and Canadian library and information work in the 21st century. Audience participation is highly encouraged in this timely, reflective look inside our very own institutional culture. Organized by the CLA’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom.

Learning Outcomes:
-What is “workplace speech” in the context of library institutions?
-What is the history and context of ALA’s 2005 Resolution on Workplace Speech?
-The pros and cons of adopting sister statements in the context of the daily-life, recruitment, and retention of Canadian LIS workers in the 21st century.

Convenor:
Toni Samek
Convenor, CLA’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom
Associate Professor & Graduate Coordinator
School of Library & Information Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta
SLIS, 3-15 Rutherford South, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA T6G 2J4
E-mail: toni.samek@ualberta.ca

advocate

2008-05-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

(ædvkt) --- lit. One called in, or liable to be called upon, to defend or speak for.
(Oxford English Dictionary)

Advocacy for librarians is advocacy for libraries ---- not new to the librarians of CCL or ALA's president-elect.

Camila "Alire will become president-elect at the American Library Association annual conference next month, and will take the top spot the following year.

In an April interview with Library Journal, "Alire stressed advocacy training for librarians." She "will push for enhancements to what she calls “grassroots advocacy” by front-line librarians. That means getting the front-line people, both librarians and other staff, involved."

Source: Library Journal

World Book Day, April 23

2008-04-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

23 April: a symbolic date for world literature for on this date and in the same year of 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors such as Maurice Druon, K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo.

It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity.

Source: UNESCO

Professional Ethics

2008-03-04T22:34:00.000-08:00

What follows is an excerpt from the "Code of Professional Conduct" of the Chartered Institute of Library Professionals, CILIP (UK)

--- a reminder of our primary obligation!

d Members’ primary duty when acting in the capacity of librarian is to their clients, i.e. the persons or groups of persons for whose requirements and use are intended the resources and services which the members are engaged to provide. In all professional considerations the interests of the clients within their prescribed or legitimate requirements take precedence over all other interests. It is recognised that the persons or groups of persons to whom this duty is owed will vary according to the nature of the employment which members undertake. In particular it is recognised that different considerations will apply where members are working at a place to which the public has right of access from those where they are working in an environment where the public is excluded or given only limited access.

Source: IFLA

Victoria Librarians Locked Out!

2008-02-14T10:06:00.000-08:00

Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2008, Vancouver Sun

VICTORIA -- "All nine branches of the Greater Victoria Public Library are expected to be closed starting Sunday as a labour dispute between the Greater Victoria Labour Relations Association and its unionized workers escalates.

The GVPL board voted today to lock out Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 410, in a bid to bring an end to the five-month-long labour dispute.

Ed Seedhouse, president of CUPE Local 410, said the membership of close to 300 is "angry, determined and resolved" in bringing about a satisfactory agreement.

I think the GVLRA are making a big mistake if they think we are not resolved and that we're not determined," Seedhouse said Wednesday.

"Unfortunately, I think a lot of people in Victoria who are innocent bystanders are going to have to suffer over the loss of their library services."

Key issues are pay equity with Victoria municipal workers and fair treatment for auxiliary workers.
Library staff began strike action on Sept. 7, 2007, but had remained on the job.

The labour dispute "is to the stage where the library can no longer operate viably," Ron Brunsden, chief negotiator of the GVLRA, said today.

The union's decision to stop collecting late fees and fines have cost the library $50,000 a month in revenue, he said, "and that's over half a million dollars a year - there's no facility to make that up."

There's no real pressure because the employees are still going to work, he said. "They're not providing the programs they're paid to provide to the public and we're still paying them full wages. They're working at 75-per-cent efficiency. No business can carry on like that for very long."

Source: Canwest News Service

See also: Love Your Library, CUPE 410

And Library Journal, Norman Oder's recent article: As Labor War Escalates, Victoria, BC, Library To Close Indefinitely

Essential facets of Librarianship

2008-02-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from Rory Litwin's blog entry,
Annotated list of things not to forget (in the 2.0 craze)...

Posted by RL: January 6, 2008, Library Juice

"I’ve been brainstorming about some essential facets of librarianship - skills, roles, services, problems - that while they have not lost any relevance have lately been ignored, passed over, forgotten, swept under the rug, or declared obsolete and old-fashioned by the vocal minority of librarians whose main concern now seems to be to create a new librarianship that is not saddled with the old baggage. I will say, editorially, that I think much of the energy behind Library 2.0 springs from insecurity about the usefulness of what we do as librarians and insecurity about the seriousness of the knowledge base that it involves (a problem that may derive in part from a decline in standards in library education)."

More...

Academic Librarians Say Their Work Is Satisfying

2008-01-31T22:57:00.000-08:00

"How they came to their careers is as varied as the people themselves, but despite some clear challenges for college and university librarians in the digital age, academic librarianship is good work, according to Library Journal's recent Job Satisfaction Survey (examined in Take This Job and Love It ). The overwhelming majority of the 1,209 academic respondents—some 70 percent across all age groups and institution size—reported being either “very satisfied” (32.1 percent) or “satisfied” (37.9 percent) with their jobs. Just under a quarter reported they were “somewhat satisfied” (23.4 percent). Only 6.7 percent admitted they were dissatisfied with their career choice.

The survey, however, also amplified some persistent challenges facing librarians, including keeping up with rapidly changing technology, stressed budgets, management and career advancement issues, campus politics, concern over their role in the academic enterprise, and, of course, low pay.

No surprise: when asked about job satisfaction—or dissatisfaction—answers frequently involved money. Overall, 50 percent of respondents said they were underpaid; 48 percent said they were fairly paid (and yes, two percent said they were overpaid). The survey results also suggest a solid correlation between salary and job satisfaction levels: those who said they were “very satisfied” with their work had an average annual salary of $63,800, while those who said they were “not satisfied at all” averaged less than $50,000. In addition, 70 percent of those who said they were unsatisfied also said they were underpaid.

Advancement, in terms of pay and rank, also emerged as a vital, complex job satisfaction issue. A glaring majority (62 percent) rated their chances for advancement at their institutions as “fair to poor.” The survey also found that although advancement was a challenge, jobs nevertheless are changing, mostly driven by external factors. Just two percent said their jobs changed owing to their own initiative or other proactive measures such as a library expansion or earning an advanced degree. On the other hand, 49 percent said their jobs changed because of technology, followed by staff reengineering (36.3 percent) and downsizing (17.4 percent). More than 10 percent said they had to leave their library for another to have a chance to advance.

Despite challenges in their careers, academic librarians clearly value their jobs. Three out of four respondents said they planned to remain in librarianship until retirement. Only 3 percent said they would likely abandon the profession; 86 percent said they would choose librarianship again if they had it to do it all over again and 87 percent said they would recommend a career in academic librarianship to a young person entering college. That bodes well for the future. In fact, the change and uncertainty that can cause uneasiness on the job were also cited by many as draws. “I wanted a career that changed and evolved,” commented one respondent, “where I wouldn't know everything I needed to know within a year of starting.”

The academic survey is the second in a three-part series on job satisfaction based on a comprehensive survey by LJ. For the October overview of the entire survey results see Great Work, Genuine Problems. The next article, forthcoming in March 1 issue of LJ will focus on those who work in public libraries. The full results of the survey will be online after the third installment is published."

Source: Library Journal, Academic Newswire Jan. 31, 2008

Librarians Push for Pay Data in Job Postings

2008-01-15T22:53:00.000-08:00

"The bulk of the more than 10,000 librarians attending the midwinter conference of the American Library Association in Philadelphia over the past four days have packed up and gone home. But some committed ALA members were still around this morning. About half a dozen of them—on the Committee on Status of Women in Librarianship—gathered to discuss gender-equity and other issues affecting librarians. One issue the librarians discussed was pay. They want the ALA to allow job advertisements in the group’s American Libraries magazine and other publications only if the postings include minimum and maximum pay offered. The librarians said it’s difficult for their colleagues to negotiate with employers for higher salaries without this information.

But many employers, particularly academic institutions, refuse to include this information in their job postings. Some of the librarians said the ALA is reluctant to force colleges to include salary ranges for fear they will pull their ads, thus reducing the library association’s advertising revenue. The women’s group wants to push the ALA’s governing body, though, not to [be] cowed by higher-education institutions on this issue.

The women’s group also is concerned that speakers at ALA conferences are more often men than women. The group wants to gather data for the past several years on the gender of conference speakers and see if its suspicion is true." —Andrea L. Foster

Source:
The Chronicle

Generation Y biggest user of libraries

2007-12-30T14:42:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from a Dec. 30, 2007 Reuter's article:

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said.

"These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.

"Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries," she said."

"We were surprised by these findings, particularly in relation to Generation Y," said Lee Rainie, co-author of the study and director of the Pew project. In 1996 a survey by the Benton Foundation found young adults saw libraries becoming less relevant in the future.

"Scroll forward 10 years and their younger brothers and sisters are now the most avid library users," Rainie said.

The survey of 2,796 Americans was conducted by telephone from late June through early September and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. It was funded by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that offers federal support for U.S. libraries and museums.

Reporting by Julie Vorman; Editing by Bill Trott
Reuters December 30, 2007

Who needs libraries in the digital age?

2007-12-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

"Some have questioned the need for physical libraries in the age of digital information. But all the evidence we have gathered in studies of the library’s facility needs has led us to conclude that the library, as a place, will be even more highly valued in the future than it is today.

Our new and expanded libraries will do much more than store books. They will provide an environment in which people and ideas in all formats can come together. This environment will foster intellectual exploration and the pursuit of knowledge.

We are social creatures and we crave human interaction. Our libraries will be the social and intellectual anchors of our community, essential gathering places that will never be replaced by Internet chat rooms, web sites or other “virtual” environments."

Source: Allen County Public Library

See also: Library Journal article, "Library Buildings 2007: Going, Going, Green"

Renewing Professional Librarianship by Dr. Bill Crowley

2007-12-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

Publication date: March 30, 2008.

"Can professional librarianship exist, let alone thrive, in the 21st century? Does accreditation protect the profession, or reduce it to a minor component of information science? The prognosis is not good, claims cultural pragmatist Bill Crowley, with worse to follow unless library studies and information studies are viewed as separate cognate areas. While an information-centric definition may be appropriate for corporate information specialists, he notes that academic, public, and school librarians are already suffering the effects of devaluation. The remedy is to embrace a concept called lifecycle librarianship, the ability to meet crucial public needs "from the lapsit to the nursing home," by honing the library's time honored role as a vital resource for reading and lifelong learning; and he concludes with a series of recommendations for library associations, library and information education educators, and practitioners and a challenge for the reader to do something with them!"

More info. at: Greenwood Publishing Group

A Profession Worth Defending: A Call for Advocacy!

2007-11-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

An opinion piece by The Committee of Concerned Librarians (CCL), a Canadian advocacy group for librarians.

Originally published by ALA-APA's, in its online newletter, Library Worklife, Volume 4, No. 6 • June 2007 HR Practice

Librarians are the fierce defenders of the principles of intellectual freedom and access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity. We are the defenders of equitable service policies and users’ rights to privacy and confidentiality. Yet we have failed to defend ourselves. The fervor librarians exhibit for libraries and their collections, whether in print or electronic formats, is noticeably absent when it comes to advocating for our own profession. One might argue that libraries are comprised of all classes of employees, from librarians to clerical assistants to paraprofessionals. The absence of a significant number of librarian-only associations seems to support the stereotype of the "mild-mannered librarian": selfless, inclusive, democratic and -- less flatteringly -- timid or apathetic. This all-too-prevalent stereotype has accelerated deprofessionalization. Also undermining the status of librarians is the trend of forcing libraries to conform to corporate models.

David McMenemy describes the trend as it applies to public libraries:

"In my own mind there is no question that public libraries are dumbing down. However, I see this is a symptom of a larger, potentially fatal illness that has infested all discourse on how public services are provided and how their value should be measured. Our profession is being strangled by managerialism. If we have the courage to slay this beast we will solve the dumbing down quandary. Simply put, public librarianship is being killed as a profession by attempts to turn librarians into managers first and foremost. When that fails, as it rightly has as public librarians seek to practise the real profession, then, like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the public librarian is replaced by another type of professional. Or worse, we are told that libraries no longer need librarians, and they are replaced by non-professionals.Managerialists go on about value for money, efficiency, quality of service. What they really mean is that we must do things as cheaply as we can. Questioning such notions makes you old-fashioned, out of touch with users. Their user manual is entirely corporate in its approach, with the irony being that many of them would last five minutes in the corporate world where they really mean the things public sector managerialists pretend they understand. The managerialist sees no problem in acting like they are running a mini-corporation and getting rid of the old ways of doing things."1

What Is Deprofessionalization? - this concept that has yet to appear in the average dictionary but whose usage abounds in socio-political and economic discussions?

Deprofessionalization, in its simplest form, describes the process by which highly educated and skilled professionals are first displaced then replaced with individuals of inferior training and compensation. This phenomenon is not
characteristic or limited to any particular profession, so it’s quite democratic in this respect. Examples of deprofessionalization and deskilling can be found in social work, medicine, education and journalism to name a few professions.

But What Do Librarians Think about This Trend to Deprofessionalize or Deskill?

At a Canadian library planning session not long ago, a professional consultant asked participants to list current and future “threats”to library service. The usual suspects were paraded: inadequate budgets, disintermediation, competition from mass media, lack of political visibility and service promotion. But when one participant proposed that “cheap-labor deskilling” threatened library service, the room responded with stunned silence. When asked to clarify, the participant suggested that there was evidence of a growing trend by administrations to replace professional librarians with less qualified people to do the same work for less money. After another awkward silence, the consultant duly added the suggestion to the threat list but never mentioned the topic again.The uneasy silence over this issue has proved difficult to break. Library educators, workers and administrators seem to ignore the blurring of labor roles of professional and non-professional staff. Apart from the emerging cheap labor motivation, the avoidance stems largely from the fears of charges of elitism. After all, librarianship is not a recognized profession in North America. (One exception, the state of Georgia, reportedly licenses the “profession” based on holding a degree from an ALA accredited library school; but we know of no other state that does this). In this context, “librarianship” does not exist except in the eyes of local library boards, and as a result there is no legal basis for developing common divisions of labor as one finds among nurses, teachers, and physicians. This lack of official recognition is part of the rationale of 'managerialists' for arguing that librarians should only be hired for management positions.

The Issue That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Judging by the amount of mention in the official Canadian and Provincial library organs, concern about deprofessionalization and “cheap labor deskilling” does not exist. When queried a few months ago, library school faculty seemed either oblivious, noncommittal or in defensive denial. But an increasing awareness in the U.S. and British library world has made ignoring the issue more and more absured.2 Of course this issue has a much broader social and economic context than libraries. Even in those last bastions of the public good there
have been those who were not so naïve as to imagine they would be bypassed by the promoters of corporate globalization fueled by the eternal quest for cheaper labor. They just didn’t anticipate de facto support for it coming from their own administrators.

Where Are the Library Schools in This Debate?

One would think that library schools would be interested in this issue since it presumably has implications for enrollments—or maybe they feel the demand for library-manager graduates will be sufficient to justify their existence.

Allies?

Labour unions representing library workers would seem a natural ally of those who question the quality (ethics aside)of decision-making by administrators who work to replace librarians with cheaper staff, but they are conflicted (some administrators will say supplement rather than replace but this is a bit of dissembling for reasons that are obvious). Most library unions in Canada represent both librarians and non-librarian staff. Cheap-labor librarian replacements,or staff that receive a minimum of 30 hours of reference training in one local example, are often paid more than previous clerical positions in the same institution (though, of course, less than the librarians they replace). So it seems a step up for the lower paid clericals who form the majority of members represented by the unions. But why should these people be exploited by doing the same work for less money? One administrator argued that many clerks "do a better job on the desk than do librarians.” Why, then pay them less?" One problem faced by administrators who follow the cheap-labor path is getting rid of librarians fast enough that non-librarians working beside them don’t start asking why they are being paid less to do the same job. That the administrators may be failing at this is evidenced by this recent email survey conducted by a Canadian Library Technicians interest group:

“If a library technician is willing and capable of taking on the job tasks that normally go to a librarian,
should he/she be paid the same rate as a librarian? Why or why not?”

Advocacy for the Profession Is Advocacy for Libraries!

It is apparent from such examples that it falls on library workers to define librarianship to governments, library managers, library boards, and users. The importance of retaining librarians in the forefront of services and collections in whatever form they exist, now and in the future, cannot be understated. The Committee of Concerned Librarians urges you to connect with other librarians to establish a dialogue on the topic of deprofessionalization, lobby governments for official recognition, establish a college of librarians, encourage library schools and library associations to play a greater advocacy role and educate the public, university & school administrators about the profession’s unique education and skills.

Respect your profession to the degree that you’ll make every effort to defend it. This begins with advocacy! Engage in a bit of self-promotion. Your users and collections will thank you!

The Committee of Concerned Librarians (CCL): A Brief History

Five librarians met at an informal setting in December of 2004 to discuss amongst many concerns, the gradual deskilling or deprofessionalization of librarians. It was agreed that this issue, and others of a professional nature, went largely unrepresented. It was recognized that this was, in part, due to the absence of a solely professional organization to advocate on behalf of librarians. As the group grew to include librarians from various municipalities and as these concerns and situations echoed throughout these various library systems, The Committee of Concerned Librarians (CCL) was formed. Although loss of subject expertise, the weakening of collections and the replacement of librarians at the reference desk with clerical staff was clearly the catalyst by which these professionals came together, it was their shared concern for the profession and the future of libraries, their collections and services, that united them. The group has met numerous times since the winter of 2004. Progress has been slow but enthusiasm and optimism have never been lacking.

With the creation of such an association, the group hopes to:

-affirm that librarians are highly educated and trained,
-advocate on the behalf of librarians in terms of pay equity and professional recognition
-ensure that the profession’s core values remain valid.
One such core value is stewardship, which former ALA President Michael Gorman described when he said, “We are responsible for the human transcript today and tomorrow.”

The group maintains a blog that features many comments on the topic of deprofessionalization.

Please visit it at:
www.concernedlibrarians.blogspot.com.

The group would also like to thank its many supporters from Canada, the United States and Europe!

References
David McMenemy (David.McMenemy@cis.strath.ac.uk ) is Lecturer, Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Strathclyde University. He is the author of the forthcoming Facet Publishing title The Public
Library. And he is co-author of Librarianship: the complete introduction (Facet, September 2007).
www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2007/april/opinionplr.htm
1.
Library Worklife http://www.ala-apa.org/newsletter/vol4no06/hrpractice.htm

2.
See: www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/search/display.var.1441831.0.library_service_under_review.php, www.thisisbasingstoke.co.uk/mostpopular.var.1343131.mostviewed.county_bid_to_shelve_term_librarian.php and http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Defend-libraries/ for more information about Hampshire Library’s (UK)restructuring, which includes elimination of the librarian title and 17 library positions and emphasize customer service rather than librarianship skills for those who remain employed in the system.

Special Librarians Day - October 25th

2007-10-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

Proclamation by the Canadian Library Association

Special libraries provide customized information retrieval, collection and analysis services to their parent organizations: corporations, government, and not-for-profit organizations.

Special libraries tend to be small, and Special Librarians often manage a library by themselves. They are the cataloguing, collection development, database manager and reference specialist, all rolled into one. As such, they deserve to be recognized for their significant contributions to their employing organizations and their profession.

During Canadian Library Month, Thursday, October 25, will be recognized as Special Librarians Day.

Special Librarians Day acknowledges the valuable services provided by all special libraries personnel and information specialists in Canada.

On behalf of the Canadian Library Association/Association canadienne des bibliothèques, I proclaim October 25, 2007 as “Special Librarians Day”.

Alvin Schrader
President, CLA
Link: Special Librarians Day

October is Canadian Librarians Month

2007-10-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

October is the month to celebrate the significant role libraries play in our communities. October is also the month to acknowledge the contributions of Canadian Librarians!

What is a Librarian?
"A librarian is a trained information specialist who holds a university undergraduate degree and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree.
As information experts, librarians search for and find information, collect and organize information, and implement systems and vehicles that make information easy to access from long or short-range locations.

Librarians are trained to find and collect all types of information - books, newspapers, magazines, databases, websites, CDs, videos, government publications and any other type of publicly available data. They are also trained to develop systems to organize and manage this information so that it can be easily retrieved. Librarians design and deliver information services for their client groups as well.

Librarians have a variety of roles available to them, depending on the type of library or setting they are working in. In more traditional settings, such as a public library, librarians can specialize in reference, collection development, cataloguing, children's collections, youth services and library computer systems, to name just a few. In a small special library, at any time librarians may be called upon to work with collections, reference, cataloguing, instruction, or computer systems. This 'jack of all trades' approach is an aspect that appeals to many librarians. In alternative job settings, beyond traditional libraries, librarians are increasingly playing roles as website developers, corporate information officers, and information brokers.

Librarians are the oldest information profession. Now, in the information age, their field is growing rapidly. As the field changes and evolves, those who study library and information science will have many opportunities in the information and technology sector, as well as in different types of libraries."

Source: Saskatchewan Libraries

See also: Candian Library Month

September 28, 2007

2007-09-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

RIGHT TO KNOW DAY

"On 28 September 2002 Freedom of Information organizations from various countries around the globe meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, created a network of Freedom of Information Advocates (FOIA Network) and agreed to collaborate in promotion of the individual right of access to information and open, transparent governance. The group of FOI Advocates also proposed that 28 September be nominated as international "Right to Know Day" in order to symbolize the global movement for promotion of the right to information. The aim of having a Right to Know Day is to raise awareness of the right to information. It is a day on which freedom of information activists from around the world can use further to promote this fundamental human right and to campaign for open, democratic societies in which there is full citizen empowerment and participation in government."

See also:
http://www.infosummit.ca/

The Committee of Concerned Librarians, CCL - its brief history.

2007-09-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

Five librarians met at an informal setting in December of 2004 to discuss amongst many concerns, the gradual deskilling or deprofessionalization of librarians. It was agreed that this issue, and others of a professional nature, went largely unrepresented. It was recognized that this was, in part, due to the absence of a solely professional organization to advocate on behalf of librarians.

As the group grew to include librarians from various municipalities and as these concerns and situations echoed throughout these various library systems, The Committee of Concerned Librarians, CCL was formed. Although loss of subject expertise, the weakening of collections, and the displacement of librarians at the reference desk were clearly the catalysts by which these professionals came together, it was their shared concern for the profession and the future of libraries, their collections and services, that united them. The group has met numerous times since the winter of 2004. Progress has been rather slow but enthusiasm, and the belief that the creation of a professional association is a possibility, has never been lacking.

What the group hopes to accomplish with the creation of such an association?

-to affirm that librarians are highly educated, highly trained
-to advocate on the behalf of librarians in terms of pay equity, professional recognition, etc.
-to ensure that the profession's core values remain valid.
For example: stewardship, which former ALA President Michael Gorman described in these words, "We are responsible for the human transcript today and tomorrow"

The group maintains this blog that features many comments on the topic of deprofessionalization as well as others of a professional nature.

The group would also like to thank its many supporters from Canada, the United States and Europe!

Discrimination thriving in BC!

2007-08-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

Librarians and library workers deserve
PAY EQUITY!

What is pay equity?

"Pay Equity is equal pay for work of equal value. The Pay Equity Act requires that jobs be evaluated and work mostly or traditionally done by women be compared to work mostly or traditionally done by men. If jobs are of comparable value, then female jobs must be paid at least the same as male jobs. Female jobs are jobs mostly or traditionally done by women such as librarian, childcare worker or secretary. Male jobs are jobs mostly or traditionally done by men such as truck driver, firefighter or shipper."

"The value of jobs is based on the levels of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions involved in doing the work."

Of note, issues of pay equity are handled by this office in Ontario -- notice the words "Anti-Discrimination"

Anti-Discrimination Programs Branch
Canadian Human Rights Commission
344 Slater Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 1E1

Telephone: (613) 995-1151
Toll Free: 1-888-214-1090
Web Site: http://www.chrc-ccdp.ca/
E-mail: info.com@chrc-ccdp.ca

Source: Pay Equity Commission, Ontario

**The Case for Pay Equity: submission to the BC Task Force on Pay Equity (Nitya Iver, Chair), December 2001**

PAY EQUITY IN BC - cancelled 6 years ago!

BC women's organizations issued an open letter to Gordon Campbell dated Aug. 15, 2001 condemning repeal of pay equity, childcare laws
Vancouver, B.C.

AN OPEN LETTER TO
THE HONOURABLE GORDON CAMPBELL, MLA
PREMIER OF THE PROVINCE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Dear Premier Campbell:

We are writing to express our dismay at your betrayal of BC women through the repeal of pay equity and subsidized childcare.

Working women, young women, poor women – all had hope that soon they would have an avenue to achieve equal pay for work of equal value. Your government's repeal of pay equity was not only unnecessary, but also goes against the promises and commitments you made during the election campaign. The repeal of this important piece of legislation was unnecessary, because it would not even have come into full force and effect until 2002.

Contrary to your statements, this action does not fulfill the commitments made during the election, because then you claimed to fully support pay equity for women in BC. Your party also claimed that any actions you took would follow a full and complete consultation with all those affected.

Yes, you stated your intention to review this legislation and pay equity in general, but after years of fighting for access to equal pay, you have put women back to square one. And women have no indication of where you intend to go.

For the grossly underpaid women in our workforce, those who are about to begin working and those who no longer have affordable childcare, your actions give a frightening foreshadow of your intentions.

Although your Attorney General seems to believe pay equity affected only private sector women, this legislation also offered pay equity protection to women working in the broader public service as well.

With one piece of legislation, you have wiped out two of the most important gains for working women – pay equity and subsidized childcare -- and all you have to offer in their place are yet more reviews and studies.

We don't think those studies will help working women put food on the table when they get home from work each night.

We demand you live up to your commitment to the women of this province and let our voices be heard.

Yours truly,

ANGELA SCHIRA
Secretary-Treasurer
B.C. Federation of Labour
Source: BC Federation of Labour

Vancouver Librarians -- Walk off the Job!

2007-07-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

ON STRIKE!

"Vancouver library workers walked off the job today for the first time in their 77-year history, effectively closing the city's 21 branches.

“This is such an unusual position for library workers to be in, we've never been on strike before, but we've never been in a position where our local issues have been so thoroughly ignored,” said Alex Youngberg, president of CUPE 391, which represents the city's library workers.

The main issue the union is concerned about is achieving pay equity for its female-dominated work force. Ms. Youngberg said that librarians in Toronto, where pay equity was achieved several years ago, earn $7 per hour more than those in Vancouver.

The union has been in a legal strike position since Monday afternoon, but only staged one-hour walkouts at various branches until today. Around 770 union members have started picketing across the city, including the Central branch at library square. They join the over 5,000 municipal workers in Vancouver and North Vancouver who are also on strike.

The library union made a presentation to the Library Board, it's employer, last night on pay equity, but received no response, Ms. Youngberg said, prompting today's strike action. The union has asked the board to come back to the bargaining table but has not yet received a response."

LAURA DRAKE - Globe and Mail Update
July 26, 2007 at 1:42 PM EDT

Pay Equity: A Recipe for Disaster
- a Plutocracy Educational Movies presentation

Overdue: Pay Equity for Library Workers

2007-07-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

"The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) represents more than 2,500 public library workers in communities throughout British Columbia. Those workers are the lifeblood of community libraries, providing vital information and education services such as cataloguing, document processing, research, children’s services, information technology support, binding, mending, graphics and much more."

"Unfortunately, the wages paid to library workers in communities across B.C. are chronically low given the importance of the services provided, the educational requirements for many positions and the wages paid to library workers in some other provinces. Library workplaces in B.C. are predominantly female- dominated. The sad truth is that, as in other female-dominated workplaces, the jobs in B.C. libraries are woefully underpaid."

"This report will illustrate how poorly paid library jobs are in comparison to male-dominated municipal and educational jobs. We believe that the low wages are the result of gender discrimination and that employers must take action to reverse this discrimination. Pay equity adjustments are long overdue for library workers in B.C."

"Over 3 years, entry-level library jobs are paid between $21,000 and $41,000 less than comparable municipal jobs. This income is enough for a down payment on a house or condominium, or for putting 1 or 2 children through university."

"Library workers have benefited from pay equity elsewhere in Canada for over a decade. Pay equity legislation in Ontario led to job evaluation in Mississauga in the late 1990s. There, a Library Assistant II saw a $5,000 increase in salary, while Senior Librarians, received a $10,000 increase in salary. In Toronto, entry-level library workers received pay equity improvements of 24%, while other positions improved by 17-20%. Similar pay equity gains applied to Ontario provincial library employees. Federally, library workers benefited from the PSAC Pay Equity court settlement more than any other group in PSAC: averaging more than $5,000 more per year."

"Municipal librarians in Vancouver and Toronto have seen an increasing gap in their wages after Ontario pay equity legislation, as Table 6 indicates. There is a $7/hour wage gap for librarians in these locations. Further, it takes 25% longer for GVRD librarians to reach the maximum wage level than librarians in Toronto."

Original report released, June 2007, revised July 2007 (see link below)

Full report by CUPE BC

ALA-APA features comments by CCL

2007-06-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

A Profession Worth Defending: A Call for Advocacy!

An opinion piece by The Committee of Concerned Librarians (CCL), a Canadian advocacy group for librarians.

Librarians are the fierce defenders of the principles of intellectual freedom and access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity. We are the defenders of equitable service policies and users’ rights to privacy and confidentiality. Yet we have failed to defend ourselves. The fervor librarians exhibit for libraries and their collections, whether in print or electronic formats, is noticeably absent when it comes to advocating for our own profession.

One might argue that libraries are comprised of all classes of employees, from librarians to clerical assistants to paraprofessionals. The absence of a significant number of librarian-only associations seems to support the stereotype of the "mild-mannered librarian": selfless, inclusive, democratic and -- less flatteringly -- timid or apathetic. This all-too-prevalent stereotype has accelerated deprofessionalization. MORE (a subscription is required to view the whole article)

Source: http://ala-apa.org/newsletter/current.html

Dumbing down is a consequence of worshipping management skills

2007-05-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Dumbing down is a consequence of worshipping management skills instead of practising the true profession
writes David McMenemy.

"A recent article in the Washington Post treated the topic of the dumbing down of public libraries. It observed: ‘In an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.’1 So this is a debate we are having not only in the UK.

In my own mind there is no question that public libraries are dumbing down. However, I see this is a symptom of a larger, potentially fatal illness that has infested all discourse on how public services are provided and how their value should be measured. Our profession is being strangled by managerialism. If we have the courage to slay this beast we will solve the dumbing down quandary.
Simply put, public librarianship is being killed as a profession by attempts to turn librarians into managers first and foremost. When that fails, as it rightly has as public librarians seek to practise the real profession, then, like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the public librarian is replaced by another type of professional. Or worse, we are told that libraries no longer need librarians, and they are replaced by non-professionals. Just ask Hampshire.

The logical end result is the same. Public libraries have a limited shelf life not because of anything the public or the librarians themselves have done, but because as a profession we have allowed management skills to be the professional competence we deify.

The harsh reality is that the well-educated, principled, vocal professional threatens the managerialist mentality. Professionals have allegiances way beyond the day-to-day running of their service. They see their role as having the best interests of their community and society at heart, even when that community does not know what is good for it.

They know the real value of the service; the profession’s core values are the same as when the profession was created. Professionals will fight for the good of the service society actually needs rather than the service it or a politician says it wants.

Managerialists go on about value for money, efficiency, quality of service. What they really mean is that we must do things as cheaply as we can. Questioning such notions makes you old-fashioned, out of touch with users. Their user manual is entirely corporate in its approach, with the irony being that many of them would last five minutes in the corporate world where they really mean the things public sector managerialists pretend they understand. The managerialist sees no problem in acting like they are running a mini-corporation and getting rid of the old ways of doing things.

Librarians do not have the skills to manage libraries we are told. This must be news to the world-class chief librarians who made our public libraries the envy of the world for 150 years. How would such luminaries as W.C. Berwick Sayers survive in today’s library world? There is no room for the scholar librarian in the modern public library service, which is why there is little real consideration of the scholar.

The managerialist believes the corporate sector is always right. The way public libraries buy books is wrong, because PwC has told us so. We must now accept that public libraries are actually bookshops – or should be – because we have a government with a managerialist mindset that has infected professions at dangerous levels.

Living in a professional world where Jade Goody is used in a major campaign to promote libraries, can anything else surprise us? A Street Corner University with Jade as its Vice Chancellor? And Richard and Judy its librarians?
We’re closer than we think!"

Source: CILIP

Reference
1 Lisa Rein. ‘Hello, Grisham – So Long Hemingway?’ Washington Post, 2 January 2007, p. A01. (www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100729.html ).

David McMenemy (David.McMenemy@cis.strath.ac.uk ) is Lecturer, Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Strathclyde University. He is the author of the forthcoming Facet Publishing title The Public Library (June 2007; 192pp; hardback; ISBN 978 1 85604 616 9; £31.96 to CILIP members). And he is co-author of Librarianship: the complete introduction (Facet, September 2007).

The Dangers - Deprofessionalisation

2007-04-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from: "What would you do? Reflecting on the Importance of Ethical Values in Librarianship" by David McMenemy

"The increasing deprofessionalisation of library work in certain sectors should be a major cause for concern for anyone who cares about the quality of professional practice. I could beat around the bush on this issue, but instead I will come out and say it; the library profession itself is potentially the biggest threat currently to the future of the profession. Let me qualify that by simply saying that across the country, librarians have been complicit in the deprofessionalisation of front-line services, especially in public libraries. The arguments posited that we do not need librarians to staff public counters, hold keys for buildings and the like may well be valid on paper, but they threaten the long-term viability of the profession. Moving professional posts into areas of policy looks good again on paper. Allowing librarians to develop initiatives and have them delivered in service points is a good use of the librarian’s time. Yet at any point across the country library users are interacting with front-line staff, blissfully ignorant of the position of that member of staff in the hierarchy. You may think big deal! Yet it is a big deal if the user assumes that the member of staff is a qualified librarian and is offering advice and service on that level. Even the best members of paraprofessional staff are unlikely to have been educated in the values that underpin the profession; therefore we cannot expect them to deliver a service knowing what libraries mean to society, even if we are semi-confident that they do. Of course good staff will, but the expectation that all will is a dangerous one. Furthermore, the increasing drive to remove the librarian from the most important part of the job, the interaction with the library user, threatens to create a service where librarians risk not knowing, ‘anything of the ways in which the need for knowledge arises, nor how their libraries fail to meet the need once arisen’ (Foskett, 1962).
Of course, this is all in addition to the growing mantra that you do not even need a librarian to lead a library service. The arguments that, ‘we need different skills from the past’ or that ‘librarians sometimes have limited skills for modern service provision’ are all the more disappointing when spoken from the mouths of librarians.

Ethical Values and Philosophy as Strength

The solution is for us to embrace once more the writings and ways of working of a bygone era. We must revisit Ranganathan, Foskett, and the scholar librarians who thought just as much about librarianship as they practised it; and we must take ownership back of our professional values.
Study and absorb CILIP’s ethical code, have it in your mind every time you provide a service to a user, regardless of the sector you are part of. Fight for the rights of the user to have their access to information championed. Consistently argue the benefits of libraries and librarians; even in the face of the ignorant and the prejudiced, and doubly so if the ignorant and prejudiced are part of our profession and the services we work in. We urgently need to reinvent and revalue the notion of the scholar librarian – the librarian as thinker, not merely the librarian as management consultant and bean counter.
We should never feel the need to apologise for our values, no matter how politically inconvenient it may be to champion them. We compromise on those values at the expense of our professional souls. Perhaps more importantly, society will lose much as a consequence of our complicity.

Professionals in the global economy

2007-04-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

"Deprofessionalization" is occurring in more and more fields these days as the North American economy attempts to seek its real level in the new global economy, particularly with regards to somewhat higher quality goods from Southeast Asia and cheaper goods & services from Mexico, China and the Third World. What we are facing must surely be an overall drop in per capita income as library professionals are replaced by paraprofessionals and technicians or outsourced altogether, doctors are replaced with nurse-practitioners, and lawyers are reduced to TV salesmen with a lot of clerical staff left behind to do the work.

A lot of professional-level work is being handed down to people who don't have the paper qualifications (although some may have the capacity) and therefore the professional imprimatur guaranteed by our professional associations through certification of degrees or individuals. Society is taking a chance with quality in the name of economy and is basically *expecting* professional results. In some, perhaps many, cases they get these results. In some, perhaps many, cases they didn't get professional results from those bearing that label. If the latter is the case, then our certification apparatus has failed. On the other hand, it is more likely that supporting the apparatus (professional associations through dues, schools through certification fees and membership dues, individuals through the cost of education and certification) has just proved too costly an overhead for employers pressed to meet taxpayers' and shareholders' expectations.

It is clear that libraries expect professional input in decision-making, as they are maintaining professional managers in most cases. Yet, these professional managers rose through the ranks of Acquisitions or Cataloguing or Reference departments and gained the wider picture necessary to this class of personnel through networking with colleagues in their professional associations and at other regional institutions. Where will the next generation of library managers come from? Or will history merely repeat itself, with technicians and library assistants (who are already organizing professionally) seeking to protect their profession through certification as we (and doctors and lawyers) have already done?

Author: Charley Pennell, April 19, 1996
Principal Cataloger for Metadata Metadata and Cataloging
North Carolina State University
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/cpennell/

Note: Although these comments were made over a decade ago the situation has not changed significantly!

Deskilling of another kind!

2007-04-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Employers who seek cheaper labour options appear to be on the increase.
See the latest example below:

"The recent firing of 3,400 senior staff at Circuit City in the United States to make way for younger, cheaper employees and, now, the suggestion by Canadian National Railway Co. that its older employees are rigid, pension-focused and responsible for the company's labour problems have raised alarms among advocates for 'mature' workers.

The electronics retailer Circuit City, for instance, announced this month that it was firing its better-paid employees -- not because they were doing a poor job, but because their wages were above the national average for retail jobs.

The company, which announced plans to replace the discarded employees with 3,400 new employees at lower pay, now faces an age discrimination law suit in the U.S."

Source: Globe and Mail, April 13, 2007
Alarm raised on attitudes toward older workers
CN, Circuit City cited as latest examples of employer bias against aging work force

Deprofessionalization, updated figures!

2007-03-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

"Between 2004 and 2014, the number of librarians is expected to increase by 4.9%, while library technicians increase by 13.4% and library assistants by 12.5%. Total employment in the U.S. is expected to increase by 13% over this period.

These projections for library workers are all lower than the previous projections for 2002–2012, when the number of librarians was expected to increase by 10.1%, while the number of technicians increased by 16.8% and the number of library assistants by 21.5%. But the overall trend of jobs for librarians [is] growing more slowly than those for library technicians and assistants is the same.

This trend points to “deprofessionalization”: Work once performed only by librarians is now performed by support staff. In a recent American Library Association Support Staff Interests Round Table (ALA SSIRT) survey of 212 library support staff, 73% stated that they are now performing tasks previously performed by Masters of Library Science (MLS) librarians at their library, or have the same or similar duties as MLS librarians at other institutions."

Source: Department of Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, 2006

CCL would gladly post Canadian equivalents. Please forward any information to our email: CCL

Legislative Library, the Internet and the Idiots

2007-03-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

Dark day for legislature library

Les Leyne
Times Colonist

March 16, 2007

"The B.C. Legislature Library is closing down to make room for a reception area for visiting dignitaries and more office space for politicians and their staff.

The 29 staff in the 90-year-old building attached to the back of the Legislature Building were informed of the decision Thursday. The bulk of the library's vast collection of historical documents will shipped to a warehouse. A core collection of essential materials will be moved to another government building on Superior Street, just behind the Legislature. Significant staff reductions are expected, but librarians have been told work will be found for anyone laid off.

The closure is apparently driven by space restrictions brought on by the steady increase in the number of politicians who inhabit the buildings. The number of MLAs has increased from 65 to 79 over the last 20 years. An electoral boundaries commission currently reviewing B.C. constituencies could increase that by another four.

The library was founded in 1863 for the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island and includes hundreds of thousands of historical documents, microfilmed newspaper archives going back 100 years and a reading room. It now primarily serves the needs of the MLAs and their staff and researchers.

The reorganization of the venerable institution has outraged a former head librarian. Joan Barton, who ran the library for more than 30 years, said that successive legislatures have ignored the space problems in the building. "It was the optics. They were worried about building grand new offices for politicians."

Several plans were drawn up over the years to build new quarters and make more room, but nothing was done. "Now they're in crisis mode, and the premier's office is driving this agenda." Premier Campbell and senior staff spent some time touring the library several weeks ago.

One of the arguments advanced in favor of the reorganization was that much of the reference material often asked for is available on line. But Barton scorned that explanation.

"There is no such thing as 'everything is on the Internet.' When you say that to a librarian, they're too polite to say so, but their first thought is; 'I'm dealing with an idiot."

Legislative Library website

Deprofessionalization exposed

2007-03-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

CCL's been trying to bring attention to this issue for the past two
years. It appears that it's finally being debated.

The Embattled MLS
by John Berry

"My initial, knee-jerk reaction was to be alarmed at the growing number of reports of both academic and public libraries assigning duties once performed by credentialed librarians (MLS holders) to support staff. I would also cringe when I heard about reference and circulation desks being combined, materials selection being centralized or worse, outsourced to a vendor. I would cry out when a division of the American Library Association, which accredits LIS programs leading to that MLS, would initiate a certification program to certify folks who don’t have an MLS as public library administrators. I’m still deeply concerned, for even if these are rational changes in the nature our our profession, they should not be adopted without debate and discussion among all of us. The erosion of the power or our basic credential, or entry-level degree, and the replacement in jobs once held by those with that credential by Ph.Ds in other fields, paraprofessionals and support staff, or simply by vendors is not a local matter. It is a profession-wide concern, if we are to be able to call ourselves a “profession.”

While I no longer have that knee-jerk reaction, I still feel it is urgent for us to address these changes as a profession, and to ensure that our practice is carried on with the rigor and standards of quality that have endowed it with reservoirs of public support, and support by other experts and professionals in other fields and disciplines.

I asked a public library director what jobs he would fill only with candidates who held the MLS. It wasn’t cataloging, or reference, or acquisitions he listed. Only childrens services and high level administration required a graduate librarian. A research library director recently told me he no longer hires “librarians,” preferring the subject expertise of those with advance degress in other disciplines, or the expertise of those educated in the technical or administrative skills and talents of other professions.

I will devote much of my work now to these concerns, and to the building of a healthy debate over the direction in which library administrators and governing boards seem to be taking our field. Are these changes simply cost-cutting, budgeting measures, or is there a substantive set of reasons to eliminate the reference desk, the crculation librarian, the credentialled library director? Are these changes eroding the core values of what we once called librarianship, or has a new value system come to us on the wings of a user friendly information and entertainment world where everyone and anyone can be his or her own librarian?"

Source: Blatant Berry Blog, Library Journal

Freedoms...

2007-02-25T15:44:00.000-08:00

"Freedom to read can never be taken for granted. Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, books and magazines are banned at the border. Books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day. Free speech on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read."

Source: Freedom to Read

And let's not forget who the greatest defenders of these freedoms are - LIBRARIANS!

Professional Discourse

2007-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

Some valid observations and points are made by
Rory Litwin:

"When I look at the professional discourse and the types of professional development activities librarians are involved in, I do see a real conflict, which is a conflict having to do with how librarians engage in continuing education. It is not that tech tools aren’t useful; the problem is the degree of pressure to “keep up” with tech tools and the absence of pressure to “keep up” with the intellectual fields we are supposed to be supporting. It seems to me that things are not in anything resembling a balanced situation and that we are swiftly becoming an unintellectual profession. The problem I see with this is that the result is deprofessionalization, since the techie skills aren’t things that we can do better than other people but things that programmers and web designers are already doing better. This is in contrast to the way that we assist users using our bibliographic knowledge; nobody does this better and there is no substitute for it."

Myths and Librarianship

2006-12-31T15:42:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of myths about our profession taken from the University of Western Ontario's MLIS webpage.

Anybody Can Work as an Information Professional

"There is a lack of awareness that librarians are university-educated at the graduate level and that a degree in library and information science qualifies you for many different roles as an information professional. The skills and expertise learned in most North American library science programs are highly transferable, enabling you to work not only in more traditional libraries, but also in diverse areas such as web management, advancement research, information systems, knowledge management, health information, community information networks, information management, and archives/records management, to name a few."

Information Professionals Don’t Need to be Proactive

Librarians need "to develop philosophical frameworks and policies that adhere to ideals of what it means to provide accessible, equitable and ethical library service to a wide variety of library patrons. Librarians, therefore, need to develop a personal philosophy of service and to adhere to certain codes of responsibility put forward by various professional bodies..."

Outsourcing and Privatization in Libraries: Ethical Concerns

2006-11-22T23:30:00.000-08:00

"This paper addresses the ethical concerns libraries face when confronted with the need to streamline processes, meet budgetary constraints and attend to the challenges of an increasingly demanding patron base.
These issues have forced libraries to outsource or privatize many of their services and processes in both public and technical services. Many libraries have outsourced partial or entire technical service processes to outside providers. From material selection via an approval plan to cataloging by OCLC and other vendors to the physical processing of new materials by book dealers, the way libraries perform their work has changed. In addition, numerous others are looking to outside providers to supplement their reference services. Is this shift of responsibility appropriate to the goals of the modern library or is it a necessity to survive in today’s economy? What are the implications of the shift of services and processes from inside the library to the outside? Has quality been compromised? Do patrons notice? What effect has this shift had on library staffing and budgets? Have librarians given up their
expertise to save money?"

Another excerpt:

"Libraries are contracted out for two reasons: to save money for the bosses who decide to outsource, and to make money for the bosses who get the contract. There are some disturbing economics at work here. This practice says that the bottom line is not service but company profits, which flow from the lean margin between the bid for the job and the cost of providing service. High bids don’t win contracts; low bids leave little room for investing in the people and services that make the libraries work”
---- Karen Schneider, 1998

Source and authors:
Todd Spires, Bradley University
J.B. Hill, Southeastern Louisiana University

Librarian 2880

2006-11-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what the minimum number of hours of instruction or class time (only real quantifiable data) is required to make a Librarian? With the assistance of the admissions office of the University of British Columbia and the School of Archival and Information Studies it was estimated that two thousand, eight hundred and eighty hours -- plus or minus a few hours -- is a relatively accurate figure.

Why is this important? Next time you're asked what you do, tell them you're a Librarian 2880. This will undoubtedly lead to some questions about the figure in which case you can explain that it takes a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree to achieve the professional title of LIBRARIAN (total instructional time 2880 hours). We have to educate the public, our students, and even our administrators that the term 'librarian' only means one thing, a Librarian 2880!

Why?

Not everyone who works in an engineering firm is an engineer!
Not everyone who works in a hospital is a physician!

but

Everyone who works in a library is a librarian!

Time to change this perception!

Cheers,
From one of the many Librarian 2880s

October is Canadian Librarians' Month

2006-09-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

October is the month to celebrate the significant role libraries play in our communities. October is also the month to acknowledge the contributions of Canadian Librarians!

What is a Librarian?
"A librarian is a trained information specialist who holds a university undergraduate degree and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree.
As information experts, librarians search for and find information, collect and organize information, and implement systems and vehicles that make information easy to access from long or short-range locations.

Librarians are trained to find and collect all types of information - books, newspapers, magazines, databases, websites, CDs, videos, government publications and any other type of publicly available data. They are also trained to develop systems to organize and manage this information so that it can be easily retrieved. Librarians design and deliver information services for their client groups as well.

Librarians have a variety of roles available to them, depending on the type of library or setting they are working in. In more traditional settings, such as a public library, librarians can specialize in reference, collection development, cataloguing, children's collections, youth services and library computer systems, to name just a few. In a small special library, at any time librarians may be called upon to work with collections, reference, cataloguing, instruction, or computer systems. This 'jack of all trades' approach is an aspect that appeals to many librarians. In alternative job settings, beyond traditional libraries, librarians are increasingly playing roles as website developers, corporate information officers, and information brokers.

Librarians are the oldest information profession. Now, in the information age, their field is growing rapidly. As the field changes and evolves, those who study library and information science will have many opportunities in the information and technology sector, as well as in different types of libraries."

Source: Saskatchewan Libraries

Earth laughs in flowers. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

2006-07-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

What does this image have to do with librarians?
- nothing and everything.

Committee of Concerned Librarians, CCL

Failing Dinosaurs or Thriving Mammals - Escaping the Business Model of the Public Library

2006-04-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

Reprinted with permission from the author.
Pardon the formatting.

Dr. Bill Crowley, Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Dominican University
7900 West Division Street
River Forest, IL 60305

Library Administrators Conference of Northern Illinois (LACONI)

Friday, September 16, 2005
Gail Borden Public Library District
270 N. Grove Avenue, Elgin, IL

Revisiting “The Suicide of the Public Librarian”
In the description of this program I promised that I would address fundamental threats to the survival of the public librarian and public library community. These threats, frequently self-generated, include decisions by directors and boards to

a. position the public library as a for-profit business clone instead of a community educational resource;

b. play numbers games in order to achieve high national rankings at the expense of local responsiveness; and

c. manage the library in ways that force talented personnel out of public service and into administration.

I also promised to offer a number of remedies to counter such suicidal tendencies and thereby avoid future public library irrelevance. Here, I should stress two points: First, I will be particularly concerned with the survival of the professional public librarian and such survival is far from guaranteed. Second, you will not be hearing a regurgitation of my article “Save Professionalism” in the September 1, 2005 Library Journal. Some points will sound familiar but today you will understand the reasons behind my arguments that operating the public library as an information business condemns public librarians to the same extinction suffered by dinosaurs about 65 million years ago,
Community Models of the Public Library
Psychiatrists and psychologists tell us that people operate on the basis of mental models are first formed in childhood and are adjusted through time as a result of further experience. Consider for a moment what residents of our local communities have in mind when thinking of a “public library.” If we are lucky and people actually use the library, their mental models are likely to be mostly positive. Perhaps such models include memories of great pre-school programs, piles of children’s books checked out to read alone or with parents, summer reading programs, library computer workshops, Friday night poetry slams, nights at the library for theater or community forums, self-help videos, and the like. All this is fine as far as it goes.
However, it is highly unlikely that the mental models of most people about the public library include the concept of professionally educated librarians, people possessing master’s degrees from programs accredited by the American Library Association. People are often surprised to learn that the library profession has educational equivalents to the business world’s MBA or the social work’s MSW. People are more likely to believe that a public library is staffed by haphazardly-educated people who are paid to read books or play with computers all day, when they aren’t captivating children’s imaginations through telling really great stories.
Public mental models that fail to recognize professionalism in public libraries can be contrasted with community views of other professionals. For instance, is it even possible for people to discuss a “school” without at some point having the mental image of a teacher licensed to instruct students in one or more subjects? Can people envision an “operating room” without a trained surgeon? Do they go to a “law office” and not expect to talk with a professionally prepared attorney? We even expect our dental hygienists, barbers, and beauticians to hold certain professional qualifications.
What are the consequences for our profession when our local communities are populated by voters whose mental models are not supportive of the value of librarian professionalism in designing and providing public library services?
In an environment where local libraries cannot take community support for the professionalism of public librarians for granted, one should expect that members of the library community would take extra steps to support professional librarians. Unfortunately, it is too often the case that boards of trustees, library directors, and library and information educators diminish, rather than enhance, librarian professionalism. This is the unfortunate reality that led to the publication of "The Suicide of the Public Librarian" in the April 15, 2003 issue of Library Journal.1 It was also part of the reason that I was asked to speak to you today.

The Public Library as a Business Clone
I want to start with a short review of “The Suicide of the Public Librarian" and why I used the article to explore some of the consequences for librarian professionalism of positioning the public library as a for-profit business clone, instead of as a community educational resource.
At its core, this short LJ article analyzed how a nationally recognized public library, euphemistically termed the “Jonestown Public Library,” was helping to maintain its preeminent status by ruthlessly deprofessionalizing its librarians. The source of this library’s national stature was deliberately left out of the article. Many readers assumed that I was referring to a library ranked highly in Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings or (HAPLR).2 I will have a few more words about Hennen shortly.
Since it is a good bet that few in this room keep a copy of "The Suicide of the Public Librarian" under their pillow to reread every morning, let me provide a little more information about the article and its author. Before I left the State Library of Ohio to earn my Ph.D. from Ohio University and teach in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, I had a long library career in New York, Alabama, Indiana, and Ohio involving various positions with two public libraries, a multitype library system, and two state library agencies.
In recent years, my professional network has been telling me about a growing number of cases where librarian positions were being deprofessionalized, losing prized responsibilities and/or being reduced to the status of library associate or assistant, in public, academic, and school environments. After years spent of observing how library directors and boards were sacrificing the long-term prospects of the library profession for the short-term goal of getting through another budget year, I finally had to do something. That something was writing a Library Journal article where I tried to denounce such shortsighted tactics for deprofessionalizing librarian positions as

repeatedly downgrading librarian positions to the levels of library associate or library assistant;

systematically underpaying professional librarians whose life circumstances made them unlikely to move on:

taking all collection development responsibilities away from public service librarians and assigning such responsibilities to part-time librarian selectors; and

thoughtlessly taking storytelling responsibilities away from youth services librarians.

On the “how to do it right side,” I also provided the example of Anthony W. Miele, a former director of the Alabama Public Library Service, who fought doubters and bean counters alike to make the support of librarian professionalism a keystone of his very successful career as a library leader. Tony, I stressed, clashed with both state government analysts and other department heads over position descriptions and salary ranges to insure that professional librarians received the recognition and compensation earned by their valuable work.3
As several friends of mine pointed out after its publication, the tone of “The Suicide of the Public Librarian” was unusual for an author with my years as a manager and library consultant. The fact that the article included a call for librarians to unionize as a last-ditch effort to stop librarian managers from trashing their own profession, really caught their attention. As one friend pointed out, “You’ve made your point but see if see if you ever get another consulting contract from a public library.” He’s probably right. Since the 2003 article appeared I have had much more time to devote to teaching, research, and writing.
I will be blunt. Calling for librarian unionization represented a revolution in my professional worldview. After all, I was the same Bill Crowley barely escaped having an ULP or unfair labor practice filed against me. That near-miss happened after I tried to be reasonable and resolve long-standing complaints from reference librarians about colleagues who just were not doing their share of the work. The incident taught me that a good faith suggestion for reference librarians to work with their department head to jointly set performance standards for librarians to help insure fairness could be portrayed by the union as a nefarious attempt to impose forbidden quantitative standards on professionals. I’m told that the union used this attempt to collaborate as a club to beat state government negotiators with during the bargaining for the next contract.
I will explore my reasons for embracing librarian unionization as part of an antidote for certain self-defeating management philosophies and practices in a little bit. Right now, I will note that I didn’t expect to have a whole lot of impact with this April 2003 article. I was wrong.
The collective professional response to “The Suicide of the Public Librarian” was extraordinary. When the April 15, 2003 issue of Library Journal appeared, it almost immediately it became a topic of lunchtime conversations among library administrators, librarians, and support staff. There were, of course, the usual contradictory letters to the editor.4 Conversely, the responses that were less public proved to be the most revealing. LJ Editor-in Chief John N. Berry III, who was teaching his regular seminar on professional writing for Dominican University in the summer of 2003, told me that he was using the article as an example in his class because, among other things, it had generated an extraordinary number of negative communications from the administrators of the public libraries that were so highly ranked by Thomas J. Hennen Jr. and his HAPLR ratings. John did not offer—and I did not request—the identities of the libraries and directors involved. I am thus unable to tell you the names of the complaining directors and the full extent of their negative feelings about the article. John did joke about watching my back so I suspect that a lot of managers were less than happy about the article.
Library Journal received most of the outraged communications. However, one director of a highly ranked public library complained to my dean, several times. She was convinced that I was attacking her and her library and really wanted my head. This director must have been disappointed to learn from Dean Pru Dalrymple that (a) I did have tenure and (b) Dominican University supported the intellectual freedom of its faculty.
For the most part, "The Suicide of the Public Librarian" brought me a very different type of communication, one that was illustrative of the cost to library morale of following the corporate business model. I received a number of very reflective, frequently poignant, obviously confidential emails from the human victims of deprofessionalization, the demoralized librarians working in public libraries from California to Virginia. Among other comments, these librarians wrote

“Seems as if you opened a can of worms with your LJ article. Good for you;-)”;

“Wonderful article—absolutely on target. Perhaps JPL [Jonestown Public Library] is elsewhere, but [name of Georgia library] fits the description remarkably”;

“Although you did not mention the library system, it could have been [name of Maryland public library]”;

“Your recent article in LBRARY JOURNAL is all the rage her at [name of California public library]. Perhaps you were really writing about our library system! Every professional insult that you describe is in full bloom here. But we consider it a homicide perpetrated by our administration, rather than a self-inflicted demise.”

“I want to thank you for giving the adult services librarians at [name of Illinois public library] a moment of validation. Two of our librarians discovered the article and quickly made copies for the rest of us, also passing it on to management. The smiles in the Adult Services Workroom have been rare and they were large on that day.”

And, on a more positive note, at a library that I will actually name

“As a librarian with a recent MLS degree, the notion of the demise of the degree is pretty scary. Fortunately, CPL’s [Chicago Public Library’s] administration seems to be committed to MLS positions with good salaries.”5 [Good for you Commissioner Mary Dempsey.]

So, you might ask, why did a long-serving library administrator attack public libraries that were doing nothing more than implementing business ideas sold to us by a generation of consultants and conference presenters? Why attack practices institutionalized by some of the nation’s leading public libraries? The answer is simple. These business approaches are incredibly detrimental to the survival of public librarianship as a profession because they reflect

a critical misreading of fundamentally important American values;

the pervasiveness of a for-profit management philosophy within the public library community that erroneously privileges the corporate concept of information provider over the historic, more realistic, and better supported role as center of lifelong education;

the dominance of corporate “information” and “knowledge” principles within programs accredited by the American Library Association;

the inability of many, including public library boards and directors, to comprehend the essentially educational nature of the public library’s recreational and informational roles; and

inherent bias within the business model towards management of the public library by MBA-educated managers, not library directors with professionally-relevant educations. Standard business practice within the corporate area. The August 26th,

2005 issue of the Chronicle of Hither Education reported, in academic year 2002-2003, that 5, 314 “library science” master’s degrees and 127,545 “business and marketing” master’s degrees were awarded. Assuming a normal distribution of intelligence, that suggests that there are more or less 24 business educated managers for every potential library manager educated every year. Since, in the business model, managers are presumed to be able to manage anything the implications for librarian leadership in the library as business future should be clear.

Reaping What You Sow or the Public Library in the “Information Age”
According to the October 1, 2002 issue of the Tacoma Washington News Tribune, local City Councilman Kevin Phelps, to help reduce an $18 million city budget deficit, proposed a radical change in public library service as a way of avoiding a looming financial disaster. It was a plan praised by other members of the council as “forward-thinking and progressive, ” particularly since public libraries were “’somewhat of a dinosaur.’”
As summarized by the News Tribune’s Peter Callaghan
To [Councilman] Phelps, the growth of the Internet and the home computer means libraries needn’t be places but systems. Fewer libraries could manage data and deliver books via the mail. Poor people who want to visit could be given bus passes. He envisions just one library—a fancy new model downtown that might even attract tourists.6
In countering the these arguments, Callaghan wrote that Councilman Phelps’s plans for drastically restructuring the city’s public library were based on two fundamentally flawed assumptions, the first one being the idea that the concept of library as physical space is obsolete and the second one limiting the library to being simply a storehouse of information. To counter these misunderstandings, Callaghan wrote about Tacoma’s “10 libraries” as the “living rooms of 10 neighborhoods,” offering safe places for latchkey kids after school, rooms for community meetings, the ability for seniors “to read papers and stay current,” Internet service for those without home access, and sites where “parents can give their children the gift of reading.” Callaghan thought it particularly important to note in his column that “museum and library visits are a predictor of later school performance.”7 By definition, “school performance” is a component of education.
Values in Conflict
From a business perspective, information is less a profession and more a commodity. As long ago as the year 2000—close to an eternity in “Information Age” years—Mary Corcoran, Lynn Dagar, and Anthea Stratigos published the results of a in-depth study of information provision for the corporate sector in a small article entitled “The Changing Roles of Information Professionals: Excerpts from an Outsell, Inc. Study.”8 Here, the authors explored the developing competition to corporate information professionals represented by the Internet and even by the vendors who compile and lease the very databases that can be used from desktops by corporate employees without the immediate assistance of “information professionals.”
In particular, the authors asserted
Information professionals are working within an industry that is moving toward the commodity stage. Standard procedure for commodity businesses is to lower their operational costs as the price point is driven down.9
Note the phrases “commodity stage” and “as the price point is driven down.” Today, public libraries purchase or lease a range of commodities, including cell or landline telephone service, Internet access, printer cartridges, pencils, and pens, “products” all seen by the market as being more or less standardized. In the new world of information as commodity, suppliers of information, including public libraries, must increasingly distribute their product on the basis of price and convenience Think about it. Is your public library’s information service cheaper or more convenient for people, particularly voters, than Google?
In a world where information is a commodity and Google and its current and future competitors provides good enough information very conveniently and almost free of charge to anyone with a home Internet account or access to a library terminal, once unthinkable things are now being thought. A few years ago, a public library trustee cornered me at a business conference held at Dominican University, asked a very reasonable question, and provided his own answer. I did not have a tape recorder on me at the time but his comments were roughly along these lines.
If all that public library directors talk about is electronic information, why do we need master’s degree librarians in public libraries? We have some pretty good community colleges around Chicago. Community college graduates with associate’s degrees in information technology probably know more about electronic information than master’s degree librarians. Since there is a glut of IT graduates, they can be hired at half a librarian’s salary and might even do an even better job. (Personal communication with speaker)
Think about it. For years our professional rhetoric has been telling our local communities that the public library’s value lies in being a community information center in the corporate mode. People are beginning to take us at our word. They are starting to advocate changes in public library service from Tacoma to Chicago based on the same corporate information model that we often hear about at our annual conferences. Realistically, how can we justify employing professionally educated librarians in an information-as-commodity world demanding lower price and greater convenience? The short answer is, we can’t. The market won’t let us.
Modeling Businesses and Numbers Games or How Did We Get Into This Mess?
In the late 20th century, the business model took hold in much of the American library community. In a fundamentally important development, American Library Association-accredited programs changed from educating librarians to educating “information professionals.” In part, this was an understandable move. Business generally ignores librarians but embraces information specialists, knowledge managers, and competitive data analysts. Also, the market for electronic information products has been booming for years. In this environment, universities could make a lot of money teaching and researching the creation, collection, analysis, and dissemination of electronic information, even before the rise of the World Wide Web offered new opportunities for attracting students, grants, and new faculty positions.10 If you are young enough, it was probably your ALA-accredited program education that first set you on the yellow brick information road while you were working on your master’s degree. Many professors still believe it is the way to go. The slightly older members of the audience, who may have been in the field as long as me, probably heard business model presentations at ALA, PLA, and OLC conferences delivered by corporate consultants, business leaders, and library and information educators. Out of the best of intentions, and probably for less than their usual billing rates, or even free of charge, such presenters offered you their finest advice on “branding” the public library as a preeminent information provider based on the corporate mode. Usually, such branding involved cost-saving and deprofessionalizing steps such as those implemented by the so-called “Jonestown Public Library” described in my article. More recently these same or other presenters, again out of the best of intentions, are telling that you must really, really, really cut costs so that your public library can compete as an information provider in a globalized environment. Your competitors, often well-educated residents of the Indian subcontinent, can provide quality professional services, including information services, to Americans at a mere fraction, perhaps as low as one-eight, of our domestic costs.11
From their perspectives, many educators, consultants, and corporate leaders speaking at this and other podiums were really trying their best to help you reshape the public library along market lines. They liked the public library and wanted to help insure its survival. This is so even if adopting the business model means hiring professional librarians only as managers, centralizing all your collection development, firing your fulltime reference librarians while hiring library assistants to provide a human presence at the information desk, and, in the very near future, offshoring the real professional reference work, including maintenance of your web site, to Bangalore, India.
Hennen and the HAPLR Rankings
Whether or not he chooses to admit it, the Thomas J. Hennen Jr. and his “Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings” (HAPLR) fit precisely into the business mode that so threatens librarian professionalism.12 It is much too late to stop him, the Hennen genie will not go back into the electronic data bottle. Hennen’s misleading library ratings will probably undermine the future of public libraries for at least a generation or more.
In truth Hennen is a classic American entrepreneur. Americans love rankings and “We’re number one!” is a claim advanced about almost anything. A national treasure of public library data was just sitting there, incredibly underused and available in computer accessible form through the Federal-State Cooperative Service. No one at the federal or state level was using the data to rank public libraries. In part, this was an ethical response to the reality that numbers do not indicate quantity. But it was a decision that also reflected political reality. If easily challenged ratings of public libraries were promulgated by government agencies, the lowest ranked libraries would undoubtedly complain to their elected representatives. In addition, what library board would vote to pay annual dues to an association that used flawed numbers and formulas to rank its library low in state or national rankings. There were no competitors. The government provided Hennen with an incredibly valuable information resource that he was free to manipulate anyway he wanted—and start his own business while doing so. But inherent in Hennen’s product is a bias towards reducing costs. Such as bias does not support paying the levels of salaries necessary to retain talented librarians necessary to carry out the public library’s educational roles. Already, stories about public librarians becoming school library media specialists, in part for higher salaries, are far too common.13
Disagreement with using a business model for public librarianship should not be construed as being opposed to proper accounting principles unlike, for example, an Arthur Anderson or Enron. Many opponents of the so-called business model, myself included, really believe in the admirable goal of keeping your financial records so well that state or local auditors never, ever, can document an audit exception. The ideal of honest bookkeeping can also be a part of the educational and recreational models of public librarianship.
The Marketplace versus the Public Library
Whenever we adopt the language of information educators, business consultants, corporate information specialists, and knowledge managers, we overlook a critical reality of contemporary life—the logic of the marketplace provides a very limited role for the public library. It leads, whether we will it or not, to the so-called “forward-thinking and progressive” ideas of Tacoma Councilman Kevin Phelps. As we just discussed, Phelps grabbed our own “library as information center” professional rhetoric and took it quite a bit further, to the point where he was advocating one centralized source of library provided information in a city that hitherto supported ten neighborhood branches. He did offer to build a new central library as tourist destination and have the city provide bus passes to it for those too poor to get own a computer or pay for a ride to the new central library after all the branches had been closed down. To him it probably was a substantial concession.
If following the corporate, for–profit model represents a road that seems likely to lead to the demise or severe diminution of the American public library, is there an alternative that offers more hope?
Fortunately, there is such an alternative. And best of all, it is a realistic option based on a philosophy that is supported by some of the strongest values of American culture.
The “Old” Public Library 101
If you are old enough, the first course that you took in the information schools that used to be library schools described the public library as having educational, informational, and recreational roles for its service community. Following 1945 and the end of World War II, the American public library profession began privileging its informational function and diminishing its philosophical commitment to its educational and recreational responsibilities. A major symbol of this conceptual transformation was the post-war Public Library Inquiry, a massive study of America’s public libraries funded by a then-substantial $200,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation and carried out by the Social Science Research Council under the direction of political scientist Robert D. Leigh.14 In the report’s summary volume, entitled The Public Library in the United States, Leigh and the other project staff emphasized that a mainstream professional ideology existed within the public library community supporting the commitment “to serve the community as general center of reliable information and to provide opportunity and encouragement for people of all ages to educate themselves continuously.”15 This thrust clearly favored information provision and relegated educational activities to a secondary place. The Inquiry also dismissed the importance the public library’s recreational role or “’Giving people what they want’” as a distinct negative. It further asserted that librarians who viewed the public library as a “free, miscellaneous book service supported by the public for that purpose” were cleaving to a course of action that would diminish or even doom the institution in the new communications age.16
In the public profession of the last half of the last century, information was king, lifelong education was tolerated, and the ever-popular recreational role of the library was a source of embarrassment.
The “New” Public Library 101
As is so often the case these days, the Internet has changed everything in the provision of information. In the first-half of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that the public library’s informational role, a role increasingly identified with the delivery of what is now a commodity, has to be rethought. Library web pages are potentially quite useful to local taxpayers—think about all those licensed and other sources of information provided 365/24/7 that have been identified and validated by librarians. Then think about the competition composed of Google and other non-public library Internet sources of information. Can the public library—and professional public librarian—really compete with the other providers of the information commodity in this Googlized world? If not, what can the public library and librarian do to meet critical public needs and thereby safeguard their future?
Embracing the Educational Model of the American Public Library
It might be a little embarrassing for all of us to confess that the Ohio Library Council really didn’t need to bring me here today. You already have the direction that you need to take. I urge you to go to the OLC web site and open the web page dealing with “Library Funding History.” After the obligatory quote from Andrew Carnegie, the first sentence of the first section—the one sub-entitled “The Funding History of Public Libraries”—briefly says it all
The history of public library funding in Ohio trances the growing commitment of its citizens to the importance of life-long learning.17
That sentence doesn’t say that the citizens of Ohio are willing to pay a lot of money to make public libraries a more expensive alternative to Google or the next Microsoft browser update. It says that Buckeyes are committed to lifelong learning and have seen—and may well continue to see—the public library as a vehicle for helping to insure that ongoing learning opportunities and resources are made available when needed. Legally, the State of Ohio seems to agree; the law on public libraries is placed in Title XXXIII Education in the Ohio Revised Code.18
Ohio is not alone is this regard, the State of Idaho creates public libraries “as a part of the provisions for public education.”19 Indiana proclaims, “the state shall encourage the establishment, maintenance, and development of public libraries throughout Indiana as part of its provision for public education.”20 Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” the ultimate autodidact, may describe the purpose of public libraries most poetically. In Illinois, public libraries may be established “to provide local public institutions of general education for citizens.”21 I like that phrasing—it flows.
A 21st Century Local Public Institution of General Education
Critical to the survival of professional librarianship in the 21st century is the acceptance of the reality that long-ago legislators, trustees, and librarians were correct in deeming the public library to be fundamentally an educational agency. In the words of Boston’s famed 1852 City Document No. 37, the public library should be seen as a publicly supported continuation of the “great work” of “the school and even the college and university.”22
This educational obligation is grounded in professional librarianship. It is why we should avoid implementing a model of the public library that is grounded in contemporary corporate practices and forces talented personnel out of public service and into administration as a condition of their employment as professional librarians.
An Agenda for the Survival of the Public Librarian
Before offering details of an agenda for the survival of the professional public librarian it is important to stress that we are not talking about a pale imitation of a classroom instruction that even as long as seventy years ago was seen as providing “too much teaching and too little encouragement of learning.”23 Rather, we are talking about creating a learning environment for voluntary activities—not mandated K through 12 instruction. In this conception of the public library professional librarians are educated and employed for the primary purpose of facilitating the ongoing self-education, defined in the broadest possible terms, of a spectrum of community residents ranging from pre-school children to senior citizens.
Tentative Components of the 21st Century Public Library Educational Agenda

Understanding that the heavy tax support accorded American public schools indicates a general willingness of the culture to support programs that are seen as educationally beneficial to voters and their families.

Recognition that privileging the master’s degree from a program accredited by the American Library Association, by hiring whenever possible staff possessing the traditional educational “gold standard” of the library profession, may be the only viable method of avoiding ongoing librarian deprofessionalization as dictated through use of the corporate business model in public libraries.

Awareness that a unionized professional librarian workforce represents a potentially valuable ally in resisting the imposition of the business model within public libraries by trustees and other government officials willing to accept a lower level of professionalism in return for reduced cost. Through working to maintain the numbers of professionally educated librarians, such unions provide a contemporary countervailing force to the imperatives of deprofessionalization and help insure that the future ranks of library administrators are filled with professionally educated librarians.

Leadership by national and state public library associations in identifying the knowledge, understanding, and skill needed by professional librarians in the educational model and in insuring that present or alternative American Library Association-accredited programs offer courses and degrees that embody and convey such requirements.

Comprehension that “recreational” activities of the public library, when analyzed, often support priority educational objectives. Examples of this phenomenon include the advancement of learning through entertaining preschool programs, the facilitation of youth writing abilities through challenging teen poetry slams, and maintenance of adult reading abilities through appealing book discussion groups.

Understanding that the learning centered model of the American public libraries requires a particularly strong librarian presence in children, young adult, and reader’s advisory services.

Realization that the educational model of the public library requires facilities designed or renovated to emphasize such learning spaces as small and large learning rooms, computer labs, art galleries, and performance spaces/meeting rooms with portable stages.

Knowledge that in an Internet-facilitated world the public library’s role in making possible effective information use is primarily educational and lies in the (a) provision of instruction, frequently via workshops, in employing effective information tools and techniques for validating the information acquired through various means and (b) acquiring or identifying of useful information resources and the facilitation of their use in Internet-facilitated environments.

Discernment by state and national associations of the need to study the effects of the HAPLR rating system and to explore developing alternative procedures that better measure public library quality.

Notes

Bill Crowley, “The Suicide of the Public Librarian,” Library Journal, April 15, 2003, 48-49. See also, Bill Crowley, “Save Professionalism,” Library Journal, September 1, 2005, 46-48.

Thomas J. Hennen Jr. “Great American Public Libraries: The 2003 HAPLR Rankings,” American Libraries, October 2003, 44-48.

Crowley, “Suicide.”

“Letters,” Library Journal, July 15, 2003 and October 1, 2003..

Email messages to author of July 30, 2003, April 14, 2003, April 14, 2003, May 12, 2003, May 17, 2003.April 16, 2003.

Peter Callaghan, “Councilman’s Plan to Cut City Libraries Is Far from Courageous,” Tacoma (Washington) News Tribune, October 1, 2002. http://www.tribnet.com/news/local/story/1872253p-1986445c.html (accessed October 2, 2002).

Ibid.

Mary Corcoran, Lynn Dagar, and Anthea Stratigos, “The Changing Roles of Information Professionals: Excerpts from an Outsell, Inc. Study,” Online, March/April 2000, 29-30, 32-34.

Ibid., 29.

Bill Crowley, “The Control and Direction of Professional Education,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (1999): 1127-1135.

See Susan S. DiMattia, “Offshoring Hits Home, Library Journal, April 1, 2004 http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA405418 and Charles Murdock, “A Leading Export? Your Jobs,” Chicago Tribune, August 22, 2004, sec. 2.

Hennen, “Great American Public Libraries.”

Jennifer Bromann, “Trading Places,” School Library Journal

Robert D. Leigh, The Public Library in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 3.

Ibid., 223.

Ibid., 223-225.

Ohio Library Council, “Library Funding History,” n.d. http://www.olc.org/ accessed August 8, 2004.

Anderson’s Ohio Online Docs, “Title XXXIII Education—Libraries.” http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/ accessed August 17, 2004.

Idaho Statutes, Title 33 Education, Chapter 26 Public Libraries, sec. 33-2601. http://www3.state.id.us/cgi-bin/newidst?sctid=330260001.K accessed March 27, 2003.

Indiana Code, Title 20 Education, Article 14 Public Libraries, Chapter 1, sec. 3. http://www.in.gov/legislative/ic/code/title20/ar14/ch1.html accessed March 27, 2003.

Illinois Library Association, Illinois Library Laws & Regulation in Effect January 2004 (Chicago, IL: Illinois Library Association, 2004), 24. (75 ILCS 16/1-10).

Boston Public Library, Report of the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1852 (City Document No. 37) (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1852), page 4 of 11. http://www.scls.lib.wi.us/mem/history/report_of_trustees.html accessed June 7, 2004.

Sir Henry A. Miers, “Adult Education in Relation to Libraries,” Library Journal 58, no. 8 (15 April 1933): 335.

The Suicide of the Public Librarian by Bill Crowley

"Do more with less!"

2006-03-24T22:02:00.000-08:00

The Workload Problem

There are three (interrelated) general causes for the burgeoning workload of academic librarians: diminished resources for universities at large, including reductions of library staff ; an increasingly managerial or corporatised style of governance at the highest levels; and an explosion in the complexity and sheer quantity of the work to be done, largely due to the expansion of the role of information technology. The result for librarians is a syndrome of increasing pressure to "do more with less," a familiar mantra of policy-makers. In practical terms this means, for instance, serving proportionately more time on the reference desk, covering collections responsibilities for a greater number of
subjects, or cataloguing more books per day.

Excerpt from: Canadian Association of University Teachers Association

You Have Rights! Librarians and Unions

2006-03-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

Don't miss this audio conference on Tuesday April 25, 3pm ET, noon PT
Site License: $68.00 cdn. + gst

The majority of Canadian librarians are represented by unions but they are often unfamiliar with the collective bargaining process and what, exactly, their rights are as union members. Other librarians may be interested in becoming negotiators at the table but need to learn the practices and pitfalls of negotiating as well as the benefits to be gained by negotiating for their own group. Find out more about what is needed to improve your working conditions and benefits in the negotiating process.

The Benefits

Role of unions/collective bargaining and their benefits to librarians in defining working conditions

1. How to define the key items for collective bargaining for librarians such as ranks, pay scales, promotion/ tenure, leaves and other benefits
2. Librarians at the negotiating table: find out where do you fit? What do you do to get what you want?
3. Who Should Participate?
Academic, public and special librarians are most likely to need the expertise this session is providing.

Key Topics You Will Explore
-Key items for collective bargaining for librarians
-What do you do to become a negotiator, where can you train?
-Collective agreements; positives and pitfalls in being part of one: what are the disadvantages of being a librarian in the bargaining process
-Bargaining strategies for librarians in the new millenia; looking ahead to the future

Linda Winkler has been a librarian at the University of Regina since 1975 and has been involved in negotiations at the University for three collective agreements. From 1991 to 1994 she was a member, and later Chair, of the Librarians' Committee at the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the parent organization for the University's union located in Ottawa. During this time Linda took training in collective bargaining with CAUT. In 2005, she was the librarians' representative to the advisory committee for the university's negotiating team in the current round of negotiations at the University of Regina.

source: reproduced from the Education Institute

Threat to the professional librarian.

2006-03-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

It has been CCL's experience that lectures proposals such as the one described below somehow do not make their way into library conference schedule lineups. Why? Is it because there are too many more fascinating subjects out there? -- or is it that library associations, although ironically headed by librarians, do not provide a forum for discussion on topics of a purely professional nature? In our attempts for inclusion of our non-librarian colleagues in all things 'library', have we not inflicted a great disservice on ourselves and the profession?

RENEWING PROFESSIONAL LIBRARIANSHIP: AN ACTION AGENDA
Dr. Bill Crowley, former State of Ohio (USA) deputy state librarian for library services and present professor with Dominican University's Graduate School of Library and Information Science, addresses the fundamental threat to the survival of the professional librarian...

Bill Crowley, Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University, has over twenty-three years of "real world" experience in the United States.

April 25, 2006 Equal Pay Day

2006-03-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

Each year, the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) organizes the national observance of Equal Pay Day to raise awareness about unfair pay for women. It is observed in April to indicate how far into each year a woman must work to earn as much as a man earned in the previous year.

Librarians, a predominantly female occupation, earn less than other professionals with similar qualifications, experience and responsibility who work in fields that are predominantly male. This is certainly the case for all library workers.

source: Equal Pay Day

Pay equity case from down under.

2006-02-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

Although not an example from this continent, the following case study is encouraging. It should provide some motivation for BC Librarians to encourage employers, and government to close the pay gap which has plagued our profession for years!

Pay equity case study
This Office prepared a case study on pay equity which was submitted to the 1998 Pay Equity Inquiry conducted by the NSW Industrial Relations Commission. The case study compared the work value and renumeration of two gender-dominated professions, librarians and geologists, employed by two major NSW Public Service organisations, the State Library of NSW and the Department of Mineral Resources.

Results
The study demonstrated a significant pay gap. The rates of pay for librarians were less than for geologists of equivalent work value as measured by job evaluation points scores. While the pay gap was small for base grade positions, it increased to approximately $8,900 for the comparator jobs, and was even larger for higher level jobs. The difference amounted to almost 20% of the Senior Librarians' pay as compared to pay for the Senior Geologists with similar levels of qualifications, experience and responsibility.

source: Employment Equity & Diversity, Public Employment Office, Premier's Department of New South Wales

Is this the job for you?

2006-02-02T22:38:00.000-08:00

What follows are a few excerpts from a job posting. Would you recognize this as a Librarian posting or a vacancy for a job at your local department store?

"service staff with a commitment to customer-centred service"

"This proactive approach entails taking customers directly to the items they are looking for, consistently approaching customers to offer assistance, providing informed suggestions,..., and continuously merchandising the collection through display and positioning to make it easy for customers..."

customer
A person, company, or other entity which buys goods and services produced by another person, company, or other entity.

merchandising
The promotion of merchandise sales, as by coordinating production and marketing and developing advertising, display, and sales strategies.

Who needs Librarians?

2006-01-18T22:25:00.000-08:00

"Ronald Harbert, president of the OCL [Orange County Library, Florida] board of trustees, has asked patrons to alert him to “shortages of service” occasioned by the library’s staffing plan. How do library patrons know when they’re receiving inadequate service, beyond egregious examples? People who are not expert library users can easily mistake earnest but uninformed and inadequate service as passing muster, just as someone who knows little or nothing about medical procedures can assume that a careless doctor’s diagnosis and treatment are on the ball.

It’s the same all over: As expenses rise and municipal budgets erode, managers struggle to fill the holes while papering over the resulting shoddy public service with happy talk. The selfless heroes in the Michigan legislature not long ago saw to it that they received pay raises of almost 40 percent. These same ascetic public servants, annoyed over tuition hikes, are busy telling the state’s public colleges and universities—which they have been underfunding for years—to “tighten their belts, like everyone else.”

source: Uncle Frank's Diary

Librarians 'suffer most stress'

2006-01-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

"Working in libraries has been commonly thought a stress-free job
Fighting fires may sound taxing, chasing criminals demanding, but a new study says that working in library is the most stressful job of all.
Librarians are the most unhappy with their workplace, often finding their job repetitive and unchallenging, according to psychologist Saqib Saddiq.

Librarians complained ... that their skills were not used and how little control they felt they had over the career."

source: BBC

Administrative Imperatives

2005-12-20T21:03:00.000-08:00

"The erosion of librarian control over work skills is not "caused" by the rising aspirations of LAs nor by the prevalence of information technology. Rather, the changing work roles in research libraries, including the shift of responsibilities to LAs, reflect human decisions made in the context of "business models" that place a premium on efficiency and cost effectiveness. This trend is part of an established professional culture broader than librarianship. It is encouraged by managers and administrators whose values do not necessarily emphasize traditional assumptions regarding professionalism and the prerogatives of professional staff.

Librarians have been encouraged to link their status to the supervision and management of others, and in doing so, have complicitly abandoned the skill base that has traditionally defined the profession and have assumed increasingly abstract management roles. The danger is that management is a profession unto itself and librarians could ultimately lose control of both the front-line work of libraries as well as their administration."

source: Library Issues

Our links to the past, our bonds with the present, our path to a civilized tomorrow are all maintained by libraries.

2005-12-08T09:09:00.000-08:00

Libraries stand for freedom. Keeping libraries open, making books accessible, allows people to connect with another mind through the printed word. Libraries make possible these intense, vivid, private relationships. The essence of how human beings communicate with each other – at the most sophisticated and intelligent level – is found in the meeting of the minds of writers and readers. Writers want to be read. They don't expect everyone to agree with or love them, necessarily, but they long to make connections with others. This is a fundamental desire for all of us, and libraries are important custodians of this yearning. They are among the most important meeting places that a culture can have.

All who work for the good of public libraries know that we will need some careful navigation to get them to a safer harbour. But this we must do. Our links to the past, our bonds with the present, our path to a civilized tomorrow are all maintained by libraries. They are agencies of the public good. They allow all of us to be, as the Hebrew saying goes, pilgrims at the gate of a new city. They are sources of knowledge and imagination, and they never allow us to forget that we are always at a threshold, constantly at the verge of creating anew our civil society. Whether or not we are able to see it realized in our own lifetimes, all of us, as individuals and in our communities, are striving for that city – that eternal city of the good and the beautiful and the true. And the public library, for me, has always been a lovely part of that vision.

source:
Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson
Speech on the Occasion of a Luncheon Hosted by the Regina Public Library
Regina, Monday, May 16, 2005

The McLibrary, coming sooner than you think!

2005-11-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

Librarians are "weeding" out tomes that are not widely circulated -- an appalling thought for traditionalists, who count on the library to carry the obscure volume, too.
Librarians themselves will morph:
• A clerical worker with a college degree will answer reference questions -- basically taking over the role for which a librarian went to college to get a master's degree.
• Librarians with expertise in a particular field no longer will order books for their area.
• Users will do more self-service.
Some call it McLibrary. Everything is about volume and quick turnover. And money.

source:
'New and improved' library...

Deprofessionalization, the figures!

2005-11-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

Between 2002 and 2012, the number of librarians is expected to increase by 10.1%, while library technicians increase by 16.8% and library assistants by 21.5%. Total employment in the U.S is expected to increase by 14.8% over this period.[3]

These projections for library workers are consistent with those for 2000–2010, when the number of librarians was expected to increase by 7%, while the number of technicians increased by 19.5% and the number of library assistants by 19.7%.[4]

This trend points to a deprofessionalization: work once performed only by librarians is now performed by support staff. In a recent American Library Association Support Staff Interests Round Table (ALA SSIRT) Survey of 212 library support staff, 73% stated that they are now performing tasks previously performed by Masters of Library Science (MLS) librarians at their library, or have the same or similar duties as MLS librarians at other institutions.

Note: Similar Canadian figures were not located.

Source:Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, 2004

Q. Why do we need librarians anyway?

2005-11-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

A.
In a world that’s information rich, librarians are
information smart. They save time and money by helping
to find the exact information needed. They teach
children the joy of reading, and seniors how to surf the
Internet. Helping and teaching others to find and
evaluate information is a unique skill that librarians bring.

source: Campaign for America's Librarians Advocating for Better Salaries and Pay Equity Toolkit

Note: If anyone can provide a Canadian equivalent, please email:
cclbc@shaw.ca

De-selection or destruction?

2005-10-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

This image, entitled The Three Friends was digitally photographed from a book rescued from a library dumpster. It's title: "Beautiful Gems of Thoughtful Sentiment: a vast treasury of choice productions in poetry, prose, and song from the literature and music of all ages." It's publication information is as follows: "Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890, by Henry Davenport Northrop, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washinton, D. C."

This gem, a book 116 years old, may have no longer fit the collection criteria of this particular library. It is disturbing that the dumpster was to be its next home!

NOTE: Oct. 31/05 listed on www.abebooks.com as $154.99 US

A Giant Step from the Front

2005-10-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

Fueled by financial constraint and opportunities for the application of new technologies, a radical restructuring of library work is underway. A recent study by Leckie and Brett (1997) reveals that, of all the work roles performed by librarians, the opportunity to be in direct contact with patrons remains the most highly regarded, yet the work of librarians is rapidly being reorganized in such a way that this opportunity for contact may become increasingly rare. As the data from the present study reveal, when para- and sub-professional staff are "empowered" to assume more front-line tasks formerly carried out by professionals, librarians are leaving behind what, for many, are the most significant roles in their work repertoire, thereby taking a "giant step back from the front."

-Roma Harris
-Victoria Marshall

Source: Library Trends; Winter98, Vol. 46 Issue 3, p564, 17p, 1 chart

"There's no such thing as a good education without ... professional librarians."

2005-10-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

"Librarians are being replaced by library clerks without degrees in library science."

"The community and local politicians last week rallied around the Holmesburg branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia in opposition of the city's proposed cuts in hours and librarians."

Source: http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14165821&BRD=2340&PAG=461&dept_id=488595&rfi=6>

Is there a future for librarians on the reference desk?

2005-10-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

The increasing trend to replace librarians on the reference desk with other library staff has given rise to this question. We invite comments and anecdotes from libraries that have experienced this trend to deskill librarians.

An article of interest and something to ponder:

Save Professionalism
By Bill Crowley — September 1, 2005
The public library must be respositioned as an educational institution!
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6251454.html