Jenny Emanuel, Electronic Services Librarian at University of Central Missouri, posted an invitation to complete a survey on how library professionals think of themselves to several mailing lists. As part of the ALA Emerging Leaders 2007 program, she is part of a team look for options on rebranding the librarian profession in the digital world. This looks like it will have interesting results; if you consider yourself a “library professional” take the survey yourself: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=371423757475.
Out of all of the questions, number 10 struck me as the heart of the matter:
10. How strongly do you agree with the following statements?
- Librarians excel in customer service.
- Librarians are on the cutting edge of the publishing industry.
- Librarians are experts at designing databases and special computer resources.
- Librarians assist people in learning new technologies.
- Librarians wear cardigans and glasses.
- Librarians are experts at exploiting the Internet.
- Librarians are on the cutting edge of technology tools (i.e. blogs, wikis, podcasts).
- Librarians are highly educated professionals.
- Librarians need to do a better job of marketing themselves.
- Librarians need a new image for the digital age.
I did have philosophical differences with question #13:
13. Please fill in the blanks in the sentence:
Only a librarian can deliver _____ to _____.
I couldn’t get past the mental image of librarian-as-gatekeeper. I could answer the question “only a library can deliver…” — but that is an entirely different question.
Believe it or not, I also had a problem answering question #2:
Would you describe yourself as a librarian?
I think I used to be a librarian — primarily at a time before I had a library degree. Now I think I’m a ‘library technologist’ — working on the application of technology in the library arena. Since working in a consortial office puts me at some distance from actual users, I’m not sure I can claim the title ‘librarian’ any more.
Interesting questions, no? Then go take the survey yourself. The results will be presented in a poster session at ALA Annual on Friday, June 23.
2 Comments
Is it a problem in _marketing_ what we’re doing, or is it a problem in
_what we’re doing_? Are we doing what we should be in the first place? I couldn’t really answer that survey, because I’m not sure we are.
A marketing problem is when people don’t realize what we’re doing. Not if they correctly realize what we’re doing/not doing, but we wish we were doing something different. That’s not a marketing problem.
I think it is a little bit of both, and the survey will ferret that out. It asks not only about others perceptions of librarians, but librarians’ perceptions about themselves. Public librarians, for instance, continue to shatter my stereotyping of them as “not with it” — I can’t remember if the survey provided a way to break down along those demographic lines, but the results could be interesting.
Then there are those that don’t seem to be doing the right things anymore. A colleague had a phrase for that — “Change, one funeral at a time.”
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