Because the obsolete scribes are dancing in front of me, waving their pens and parchment, I thought I’d write a bit about what librarianship means to me.
For hundreds of years, librarians have been keepers of books (incidentally, I hate the idea of "professionals as gatekeepers", but it's definitely there and yes, I am one, though I like to think it's a wide-open gate). The root “libr-“ means book. Libraries are traditionally either a building for holding books or a collection of books. Now, of course, a library can be a collection of almost anything that is related to information, which is to say, almost everything. I’m uploading podcasts into my iTunes library while I write this, how convenient. If I’m looking for a picture of my mother-in-law for our family reunion, I go to my photo library. If I had actually taken the time to tag my photos, I could even find one of her quickly.
The tagging and the finding is a lot of what librarians do these days. Most of us have very specific functions. Technically, I’m an archivist, not a librarian. I happen to have an MLIS but I work with individually or institutionally generated materials (personal papers, university departmental records), not commercially generated materials (books, CDs, journals). Much of this is unpublished so my job is to make this material accessible to the public. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes and the digital world has been very hard for a lot of archivists. It’s also hard for the people who want to use the archives. In the instant access world of blogging and scanning and 3G and wikis, it’s hard for people to understand that some things really do exist only on *gasp* paper. It’s harder still to explain that many of these things are fragile and that they can’t photocopy or scan them and that we don’t have a digital version because, quite frankly, we don’t have the time, money or staff to digitize everything.
I wish I didn’t have to explain this, which is why I do what I do. To me, librarianship is about access and preservation. I want to save things in whatever format, but I don’t see the point of saving them if no one can find them. For example, Clemson’s Special Collections has a copy of this incredibly cool image of Nikola Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory:
It’s a famous photograph (also a double exposure, in case you were wondering). Ours is inscribed to Bernard Behrend by Tesla. Behrend was a Swiss-born engineer, a contemporary of Tesla, and is also the donor of some of Clemson’s most valuable books. I happen to think that the value of this image, of our thousands of historical Clemson photos, of our Cooperative Extension records, lies in our ability to get the information out to people who need it but might not know that we have it. We don’t have the endless money, staff or time that it would take to get all of this information into a digital format, but we do have access to other tools. I want to learn about those tools and I hope someday to incorporate the appropriate tools into this area of librarianship.
It may be that I am falling into that trap where “it is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence” (Shirky 59), but I don’t think librarians are going away any time soon. This doesn’t mean that I think certain librarian roles aren’t going to go away. In fact, I’m surprised some roles haven’t already disappeared. I just happen to think that more filtering and sorting and presenting is going to be necessary when “the ability to connect everybody to everybody” is no longer what sells the network (Howard 221).
Jen,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated your post because it gave me much better insight into your career. I took several career tests when I was in college and had no idea what I wanted to do, and they all said I should be a librarian. We're kindred spirits!! (okay I'll stop with the cheesiness now). Anyway, I think you have a great point when you write that the value of the image lies in the ability of the university to get it out to people. I had never really thought about it that way, but you definitely have a point. So what if you have this great book if no one knows about it? So much of an object's value lies in society's judgment of it, which is a little bizarre, if you think about it. Everyone in society could love something, but it be inherently invaluable. So then, what's valuable and what's not?
I have to agree with Lindsay about the idea of valuable vs. invaluable. In this digital world, what is most valuable now is who has the newest version of Kindle and who has the newest version of the iPad. Because society deems it so much more valuable to have possibly hundreds if not thousands of books at your fingertips at all times through a digital medium as opposed to an actual book in which you can turn the pages, make annotations in the margins, highlight, whatever. Unfortunately, this society is getting away from actual books (which hurts me in a deeply personal way as I have more books than space for at this point in time) and I fear that libraries, although they will never really go away (how would people get on facebook when they don't have a computer at home?), will lose the archival quality of today's library. Somehow I think there will be enough of a demand that anything and everything of "value" (read: anything in digital format) will be easily accessible in a library full of computers with no actual books except those collecting dust in the basement that no one bothers to look at anymore because they aren't instant digital documents.
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