{"id":266,"date":"2009-11-09T22:24:21","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T03:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/?p=266"},"modified":"2010-01-25T16:34:44","modified_gmt":"2010-01-25T21:34:44","slug":"praises-for-librarians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/archives\/266","title":{"rendered":"Praise for Librarians?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading this book review by ricklibrarian <\/a>today morning.\u00c2\u00a0 The review was about Marilyn Johnson’s new book, This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 In the book review, it was stated “most librarians knock themselves out serving their clients regardless of pay, institutional support, or appreciation from society at large.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

And is this supposed to be praises for librarians?\u00c2\u00a0 No librarian would argue against the fact that librarians tend to be more than 100 percent service-oriented.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, librarians are eager to help, librarians are willing to do almost any kind of work that may contribute to library users’ better understanding and use of library resources, librarians are friendly, librarians are polite, and librarians protect the public’s freedom and privacy.<\/p>\n

But I don’t think librarians are to be praised for knocking themselves out serving their clients regardless of pay, institutional support, or appreciation from society at large<\/strong><\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 That is just crazy, isn’t it?\u00c2\u00a0 Not because there is something wrong with librarians being devoted to their work but because librarians’ services rendered in such a way may well make them almost meaningless.<\/p>\n

There are obvious and clear limitations to ‘individual’ librarians’ devoted services that is unsupported by proper pay, institutional support, and appreciation from society at large.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter how excellent their services are, without the proper recognition and support from society and institutions that govern and fund libraries, the value of libraries and librarians’ services will go unnoticed or taken for granted.<\/p>\n

I wonder how many people are even aware of the fact that librarians are required to finish a graduate school to be a librarian and also have to invest additional years as a library assistant for experience enduring a surprisingly low salary for their education and previous experience.\u00c2\u00a0 Probably not that many.\u00c2\u00a0 I wonder how many academic faculty members at a college\/university know that at their institution, librarians may also be faculty just like them (although it may not be tenure-track)?<\/p>\n

Some may question why what makes someone qualify as a librarian should be common knowledge.\u00c2\u00a0 Why not?\u00c2\u00a0 After all, everyone knows that what doctors, lawyers, journalists should do to become qualified in their professions.\u00c2\u00a0 The point is not bragging that it is not easy to become a librarian nor claiming that librarians are intelligent, knowledgeable, and talented people (although both of them may be quite accurate a description for librarians in general).<\/p>\n

Rather, my questions is this.\u00c2\u00a0 If the basic qualifications of a librarian is unknown to library users -either faculty and students or the general public, why would they respect, listen to, and work with librarians?\u00c2\u00a0 Without such knowledge, there is going to be little appreciation and understanding about what librarians provide and offer to library users.\u00c2\u00a0 It seems to me that there is some serious work to be done in libraries’ outreach activities and that it may concern more librarians than library services or resources.<\/p>\n

So, librarians, let’s please not knock ourselves out regardless of pay, institutional support, or appreciation from society at large<\/strong><\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, libraries and librarians have to help people understand what kind of places libraries are these days – certainly not just a warehouse of books – and what kind of work librarians perform -certainly not just shelving books.<\/p>\n

As the cataloguing librarian<\/a> describes so vividly in the recent blog post, the general public’s perception and understanding of a librarian is sadly obsolete and dismal.\u00c2\u00a0 How did it happen that a used car salesman is so convinced that he knows so much about what a librarian does and laughs at librarianship as a profession?\u00c2\u00a0 Although deplorable, I don’t believe that this car salesman is any unique exception.\u00c2\u00a0 But in my opinion, it is mostly those outside a library who declare the death of librarianship.\u00c2\u00a0 If you are working at a library, you will be so busy that you won’t even have time to worry about the death of a library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was reading this book review by ricklibrarian today morning.\u00c2\u00a0 The review was about Marilyn Johnson’s new book, This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.\u00c2\u00a0 In the book review, it was stated “most librarians knock … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[39,358,40,38],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-library","tag-librarian","tag-library","tag-profession","tag-public-perception"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2AlrP-4i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bohyunkim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}