WHAT ARE LIBRARIANS REALLY LIKE?

James H. Sweetland, North American Convenor

There is a very popular film in the United States, called "It�s a Wonderful Life." The basic plot is that a small town banker, on the verge of ruin, having said "it would have been better if I had never been born," is taken through his past life by an angel, showing how much worse things would have been if he hadn�t been born. As the angel shows people dying, the town becoming corrupt and the like, the main character still holds to his statement the change occurs when he asks about the woman who would have been his wife. Once he finds that she is still single, and in fact has become the town librarian, he changes his mind, and decides not to commit suicide.

This image, of the librarian as spinster, unattractive, hopelessly dull, and generally out of it, is a common one. In fact, until quite recently, there is evidence that some psychological counselors consciously directed people who were timid, couldn�t deal with stress, and generally lacked ambition, to librarianship. Ironically, there is solid evidence that the stereotype, if ever correct, is certainly wrong now.

Possibly the most important data comes from studies conducted by Mary Jane Scherdin, originating in her 1988 doctoral dissertation. The study used the ACT (American College Testing) Interest Inventory, commonly used in counseling to establish for what sorts of occupations a person would be most suited. Basically, all interests are coded on a grid in which one dimension ranges from ideas to data, and the other from people to things. Scherdin�s initial intent was to compare librarians (defined as members of the American Library Association) with information scientists (members of the American Society for Information Science).

Her findings were quite interesting. First, she found there was almost no difference in the text results for the personalities and job interests of the librarians and information scientists (persons who were members of both organizations were excluded from the study). Second, she found that the general category in which the information professionals fell was considerably different from that used by the test.

ACT�s existing manual, used to suggest career paths to those who take the test, put librarianship in the general "Arts" category, specifically in the Applied Arts (Written and Spoken) family, along with such jobs as book reviewer, poet, and the like. The actual results of Scherdin�s study found that both librarians and information scientists were in the "Science" category, but very close to the Visual Arts group (perhaps including such groups as architects and civil engineers). The difference was great enough to cause a suggestion that the test needed to be recalibrated.

Further work on this subject by Scherdin and others has established a consistent pattern librarians are, contrary to the stereotype, more "investigative" than expected, and in many ways show the same characteristics as managers.

Why then, does the stereotype persist? Some other results may explain the problem: Librarians as a group tend to be introverts, more interested in ideas than in interacting with people; they are also generally likely to prefer working alone, and not to be self promoting thus generally likely to be underestimated after casual contacts. When one adds to this a tendency to be "judging" rather than "perceiving", librarians can also come across as a bit scary and thus again somewhat aloof.

This is hardly an argument for using personality tests as a job criterion, nor is it a call for librarians to change personalities. However, the evidence suggests that, as a group, we are bright, energetic people who enjoy solving problems and finding solutions. The one danger, however, as we spend ever more time on the computer, is that the isolation this can bring will merely exacerbate the tendency to be aloof loners, which would mean the world will take even longer to recognize librarians for what we are, not for what we may have been in some distant past.

For further discussion on this topic, see
Discovering Librarians: Profiles of a Profession. Edited by Mary Jane Scherdin. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries/ American Library Association, 1994.

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