Defining What We Do—All Over Again
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for September 2002
It is with great pleasure—and more than a little humility—that I write my first column under the “Internet Librarian” heading. Karen Schneider has done a masterful job over the last eight years to help us all know about, understand, evaluate, and use the Internet and all its myriad wonders. If my tenure here is half as successful, or as long, I’ll consider myself very lucky indeed. I’ll do Karen her due homage in a future column. For now, I thought I’d share some thoughts on what I’d like to do with this opportunity.
Who the heck am I?
A valid question. I was born to be a librarian. I cataloged the books in my room as a child and set up a little library. (Traffic was low, but the level of service was very high—and I haven’t done any cataloging since.) I got my MLS and Ph.D. from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where I learned, among other things, that the work of librarians and the concepts of librarianship went well beyond the boundaries of the physical library and could benefit any organization or community.
I’ve mainly taught, at Syracuse, Albany, Michigan, and now, very happily, at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle; but I’ve also put in a little time in the trenches, first at the Oneida Library in my hometown in upstate New York and more recently at the reference desks of the UW and the King County Library System’s Bellevue Regional Library. I spent a few very happy years working with some of the best people I’ve known, as the director of the Internet Public Library, which started as a class project in a graduate seminar I taught at Michigan. Learning experiences all.
And, yes, my mother was a librarian. She never got a degree, but she was one of the best librarians I have ever known and worked with, and to this day my favorite reference resource is the World Almanac—in no small part because she bought me one for Christmas every year and I spent the next week reading it from cover to cover.
Down to business
Enough about me. So what is an Internet Librarian anyway? Well, let’s start with what a librarian is. I had a heck of a time searching (on the Internet, of course) for a good definition, so I’ll have to make up my own. I say a librarian is someone who works to understand and satisfy the information needs of his or her community. That work necessarily happens in lots of contexts: social, economic, legal, political, and, of course, technological.
Librarians have been very good over the generations in taking advantage of technologies available to them in a responsible and professional way: the typewriter, the telephone, microforms, the computer and its allied technologies, and so on. Not always without a struggle, mind you; the library hand persisted for quite a while as the preferred method of creating catalog cards after typewriters came around, and the telephone didn’t get fully integrated into reference work until the 1950s, but we generally do pretty well.
Okay, so what’s an Internet librarian? Since I didn’t coin the phrase, I’d guess that it’s a librarian who does what he or she does using or on the Internet. Most of us are already doing that. In fact, by this stage it’s nearly impossible not to be an Internet librarian. Besides digital reference and cataloging of Web sites using metadata and arm-wrestling with vendors over licensing agreements, rare book folks are using the Internet for price information, librarians who work with children have to be concerned with information literacy and filtering, and there’s even work in the preservation and archiving of Web sites (try out www.archive.org some day).
There is much to be done in evolving our practice to truly incorporate the power of what the Internet is and can be. In fact, the more librarianship we can get into and onto the Web, the better it will be as well, so it’s a two-way street.
What I want to try to do here
In this column, Karen has talked about specific technologies, the use of those technologies in a library context, and important policy and legal issues, and offered more than a few keen ideas on what might be done and how to do it. I’d like to continue writing in those areas and extend into a few others. I want to help us all to understand how we as a profession can embrace the technological world of the moment, and the one to come (whatever that is) without ceding our values and professionalism and important things we’ve learned over the last century or so.
I want to find and share examples of great ideas and uses of the Internet—and perhaps a few notable failures. I might even slip in the occasional harangue with some ideas to prick our collective consciences. I need your help, too; let me know what’s going on, things you want to share, ideas for columns, and so on, at intlib@ischool.washington.edu.
Most of all, I want to help us all to do librarianship as effectively as possible in this emerging technological environment. The better we can achieve that, the better service we’ll be able to provide to our communities, and the better librarians we’ll be—until the next technology comes and shakes everything up again. But that’s another story . . . .
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