Are librarians choosing to disappear from the information & knowledge delivery process? by Carl Grant.
Carl Grant writes:
As librarians, we frequently strive to connect users to information as seamlessly as possible. A group of librarians said to me recently: âAs librarian intermediation becomes less visible to our users/members, it seems less likely it is that our work will be recognized. How do we keep from becoming victims of our own success?â
This is certainly not an uncommon question or concern. As our library collections have become virtual and as we increasingly stop housing the collections we offer, there is a tendency to see us as intermediaries serving as little more than pipelines to our members. We have to think about where weâre adding value to that information so that when delivered to the user/member that value is recognized. Then we need to make that value part of our brand. Otherwise, as stated by this concern, librarians become invisible and that seems to be an almost assured way to make sure our funding does the same. As evidenced by this recently updated chart on the Association of Research Libraries website, this seems to be the track we are on currently:
I ask Carl’s question more directly to make it clear that invisibility is a matter of personal choice for librarians.
Vast institutional and profession wide initiatives are needed but those do not relieve librarians of the personal responsibility for demonstrating the value add of library services in their day to day activities.
It is the users of libraries, those whose projects, research and lives are impacted by librarians who can (and will) come to the support of libraries and librarians, but only if asked and only if librarians stand out as the value-adds in libraries.
Without librarians, libraries may as well be random crates of books. (That might be a good demonstration of the value-add of libraries by the way.) All of the organization, retrieval, and other value adds are present due to librarians. Makes that and other value adds visible. Market librarians as value adds at every opportunity.
At the risk of quoting too much, Grant gives a starting list of value adds for librarians:
… Going forward, we should be focusing on more fine-grained service goals and objectives and then selecting technology that supports those goals/objectives. For instance, in today’s (2012) environment, I think we should be focusing on providing products that support these types of services:
- Access to the library collections and services from any device, at anytime from anywhere. (Mobile products)
- Massive aggregates of information that have been selected for inclusion because of their quality by either: a) librarians, or b) filtered by communities of users through ranking systems and ultimately reviewed and signed-off by librarians for final inclusion in those aggregates. (Cloud computing products are the foundation technology here)
- Discovery workbenches or platforms that allow the library membership to discover existing knowledge and build new knowledge in highly personalized manners. (Discovery products serve as the foundation, but they don’t yet have the necessary extensions)
- Easy access and integration of the full range of library services into other products they use frequently, such as course or learning management systems, social networking, discussion forums, etc. (Products that offer rich API’s, extensive support of Apps and standards to support all types of other extensions)
- Contextual support, i.e. the ability for librarianship to help members understand the environment in which a particular piece of work was generated (for instance, Mark Twain’s writings, or scientific research—is this a peer reviewed publication? Who funded it and what are their biases?) is an essential value-add we provide. Some of this is conveyed by the fact that the item is in collections we provide access to, but other aspects of this will require new products we’ve yet to see.
- Unbiased information. I’ve written about this in another post and I strongly believe we aren’t conveying the distinction we offer our members by providing access to knowledge that is not biased by constructs based on data unknown and inaccessible to them. This is a huge differentiator and we must promote and ensure is understood. If we do decide to use filtering technologies, and there are strong arguments this is necessary to meet the need of providing “appropriate” knowledge, then we should provide members with the ability to see and/or modify the data driving that filtering. I’ve yet to see the necessary technology or products that provides good answers here.
- Pro-active services (Analytics). David Lankes makes the point in many of his presentations (here is one) that library services need to be far more pro-active. He and I couldn’t agree more. We need go get out there in front of our member needs. Someone is up for tenure? Let’s go to their office. Find out what they need and get it to them. (Analytic tools, coupled with massive aggregates of data are going to enable us to do this and a lot more.)
Which of these are you going to reduce down to an actionable item for discussion with your supervisor this week? It is really that simple. The recognition of the value add of librarians is up to you.