Who Comes Next?
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for October 2004
Back when I was in library school (go ahead, roll your eyes; I would too if I were you), I was looking forward to a promising career as a reference librarian. Obviously, something went terribly amiss along the way and I wound up as a library school educator; like I always say, though, it beats having to work for a living.
Anyway, in those halcyon days of youth, I was looking at positions with titles like humanities bibliographer or user services specialist, or even—gasp—reference librarian. Somewhere things have clearly changed, since libraries in American Libraries’ Career Leads advertising section are now seeking electronic resources librarians and digital services coordinators.
Well, no shock there; but this month’s issue theme of recruitment caused me to consider these new job titles and the new people who will hold them. First off, is our work really that defined by the stuff with which we work? Yep, and it’s been that way for a while. We’ve always had people who specialized by formats: maps, music, government publications, newspapers, microforms, serials, media, and, of course, monographs. So, with good reason, we’ve been on that path for quite some time.
The second and far more compelling question is this: What should we be looking for in people who will be, to coin a phrase, “Internet librarians”? Certainly, they’d have to have facility with and interest in the Internet per se, people who know the guts of it, the protocols, the software, what makes it tick, and how to make it work. There’s more to it than just technology, however. In a way, There may be a generation of people whom we might almost think of as “native” to the Internet: those who are now growing up with it and thinking of it as something that
is just there, rather than as a technology or something new.
We’d also want people who would view the Internet as a place where they eagerly want to spend their professional time and effort, much as a potential pilot sees the sky or a budding marine biologist views the sea; people who have a passion and a drive to be there and to do good work there.
Such people will, inevitably, see the Internet differently than those of us who watched it emerge. They will see it not just as a communication medium or a way of automating ILL; it will instead for them be a place for original, even daring thought.
(Let me insert here my standard comment on recruiting. We library educators have always known that you—our professional colleagues—are the best recruiting devices we have. Send us your best people, the ones you know or work with of all ages who are bright and clever and talented and creative. All of us in the information and library school are truly grateful for your help and the profession will be stronger for it.)
Recruiting this sort of person will not—at least not for the next decade or two—involve only reaching people currently thinking about graduate school; it will mean work in high schools and perhaps even elementary schools, and seeking those who are fascinated and compelled by the possibilities that Internetworking might provide
for the work we think of today as librarianship.
This only reinforces my notion that those among our profession who work with the young, in schools and public libraries and elsewhere, are in some sense the most important librarians—not only because they help to educate and inform, but because they set the pattern for the way those children will think about libraries for their entire lives. Customer-service people know that early experiences are highly influential. Bad first librarian = bad notion of libraries for a lifetime.
Are libraries necessary?
And this brings us to perhaps the most important and certainly the most emotional question: Do these next Internet librarians also have to have a background and interest in libraries? I’ve puzzled over this one and am not entirely sure that they do. They might even be better off without—free to think more boldly and differently.
If people who see and feel the Net this way can be welcomed—in schools like ours and institutions like yours—they will likely take librarianship in directions we can’t even imagine, not beholden to the past so much as informed by it. And it might just be best if we got out of their way and let them do it . . . but that’s another story.
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