what do librarians do all day?
I proposed a talk for an upcoming Ignite event in Ann Arbor, and my idea was accepted. I’m going to talk about how what librarians do is actually really exciting and diverse, and why we shouldn’t be worried about the profession becoming obsolete. The talk is called “Ambient Librarianship, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Job.”
I wanted to address the subject because I recently landed my first full-fledged librarian job, and I don’t do anything that librarians “traditionally” do at all. Basically I’m a web dev for a scholarly publishing house that happens to be in a library. And, most librarians I know don’t do “traditional” librarian work either, or it takes up very little of their time. Instead they teach, they build websites, they manage social media, they wrangle data. Sure, they’re all working with information, and promoting information literacy, but they’re not sitting behind desks and organizing tiny cards in tiny drawers in giant chests.
I had a bit of a crisis of faith about halfway through grad school. I had worked in libraries since high school, and I thought I wanted to be an academic reference librarian. Then after two semesters of what I perceived to be really dry, really commonsensical courses in reference, cataloging, database searching, etc., I thought, my god. What am I doing here? I almost dropped out. I then realized that the other courses I’d been taking (information technology, complex systems, information policy), and the other work I knew how to do (web dev and design) could be folded into the label “librarian.” I feel much better about it now, but it took a long time.
I recently asked Twitter for librarians to tell me what their titles are, and what they do, and where they do it. If you’re a librarian, I’d love to hear from you.