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owlectomyEasily Distracted has a post on the privatization and deskilling of National Park services that is, I think, interesting in the context of librarianship. When people keep insisting that less government is better, it's harder and harder to convince taxpayers that it's worth it to pay people with Master's degrees to check books out and do storytimes (however bad librarians' salaries are, paraprofessionals' salaries are worse -- and I think they're more underpaid relative to the work they do).
And that's exactly the public conception of what librarians do. Most of my peers in terms of class/generation/education don't go to public librarians, at least, for research; they can look up the book they want online, search the public access catalog for it, place it on hold. You can go from being curious about a book to checking it out with no human contact whatsoever, if the library has self-serve holds and self-check, as some of the BPL libraries already do. The work that gets done in searching databases, tracking down that book that the patron isn't quite sure about, doing good reference interviews, etc -- it becomes invisible. It becomes visible only to people on the other side of the digital divide, who don't have the experience searching for information, and those aren't the people who have the power. People expect the librarian to know where a particular book is, or where the cookbooks are, and -- it's no more than they'd expect from a clerk at Barnes & Noble, so why is the city paying the big bucks for a Master's degree?
Hm. Maybe that would make a PR campaign for librarians.
"You wanted that green book. SHE FOUND IT."
"You wanted a picture of the kind of washing machine your mother had when you were born in the 1940s. SHE FOUND IT."
"You wanted the latest novel by Erin Brockovich. She found it... and it was by Janet Evanovich."
(Better than "Looking for a late night chat?", as a certain library has advertised their chat reference service...)
And that's exactly the public conception of what librarians do. Most of my peers in terms of class/generation/education don't go to public librarians, at least, for research; they can look up the book they want online, search the public access catalog for it, place it on hold. You can go from being curious about a book to checking it out with no human contact whatsoever, if the library has self-serve holds and self-check, as some of the BPL libraries already do. The work that gets done in searching databases, tracking down that book that the patron isn't quite sure about, doing good reference interviews, etc -- it becomes invisible. It becomes visible only to people on the other side of the digital divide, who don't have the experience searching for information, and those aren't the people who have the power. People expect the librarian to know where a particular book is, or where the cookbooks are, and -- it's no more than they'd expect from a clerk at Barnes & Noble, so why is the city paying the big bucks for a Master's degree?
Hm. Maybe that would make a PR campaign for librarians.
"You wanted that green book. SHE FOUND IT."
"You wanted a picture of the kind of washing machine your mother had when you were born in the 1940s. SHE FOUND IT."
"You wanted the latest novel by Erin Brockovich. She found it... and it was by Janet Evanovich."
(Better than "Looking for a late night chat?", as a certain library has advertised their chat reference service...)
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25/6/11 23:46 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/11 00:11 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/11 01:56 (UTC)My work occasionally intersects with stuff called "knowledge management," and I am increasingly of the opinion that KM has two purposes:
1. Extract information from baby boomers before they all retire and take with them a lot of the knowledge they haven't, for a variety of reasons, shared
2. Extract information from expensive, experienced, competent people and replace them with inexpensive people who do not yet have experience or competence (and may not ever)
This stuff is everywhere, and I hate it. Just because the only thing you see someone do is easily replaced by a computer database, does not mean that is the only thing they do.
(I have the problem that my main function is writing, and everyone can do that....)