IS "LIBRARIAN" A DIRTY WORD?

James Sweetland, Library Link Regional Convenor, USA

Item:	An increasing number of graduate and professional schools in the United States are eliminating the word "library" or "librarianship" from their names;
Item:	The school at the University of California-Berkeley has recently announced that they will not bother to seek accreditation from the American Library Association, on the basis that they have no interest in providing education for librarians;
Item:	A growing number of businesses are using terms like "knowledge management", or "information management", to apply to the functions of information seeking, classification, and dissemination in their firm. These firms tend not to hire people with library or library and information science degrees.
Item:	A number of students from other nations, especially the developing countries, avoid programs with the "library" word, preferring to obtain master's and doctoral degrees in things called "Information Science" or "Information Studies."

So, are we to accept the idea the stereotype of the librarian as out of date, fusty and musty, anti-technology, and the like? If we do, should we give up trying to change this stereotype, and adopt a new word? This discussion, of course, has surfaced before (or possibly, it has never died since it first surfaced). The difference, as indicated above, is that some of the leaders of the profession (assuming academics are leaders) seem to have accepted the anti-librarian stance this time.

The basic arguments in favor of dropping the name are, in essence-no one really understands what "librarians" do; the term refers to those who work in a specific institution (medical doctors, for example, are not called "hospitallers"); the term has a long history of negative connotations. The basic arguments in favor of using the term are, in essence-it has a long, generally positive tradition; most people know what the term means (and may possibly perceive a change in term to, say, "knowledge manager" in the same light as replacing "garbageman" with "sanitary engineer"); there is a set of connotations, many of them positive, in the term.

Interestingly enough, research in the U.S. has tended to find that the public has a generally positive image of the "librarian" as helpful, courteous, cultured, knowledgeable, and caring, although admittedly the image generally does not see the "librarian" as particularly technically competent in information technology.

So, why the problem?

Well, at the risk of sounding like a complete cynic, may I suggest that we are in the "Dickensian" stage of the information revolution. The minions of the computer are nearly everywhere, and we are in a cycle that accepts only "business" and then only if it's a purely profit-driven version of "business," as a legitimate goal. Librarians, on the other hand, have a tendency to be friendly, to go out of their way to help (consider the number of times any given librarian has worked "overtime" to answer a question or solve a problem), and to have a strong commitment to information delivery. Thus, they can be seen as a hindrance to the pure profit motive.

For example, the essence of a library-any library, but especially a public library-is to provide a collection of information sources to an identified group (students, union members, members of a club, taxpayers in a given community, etc.) at no specific cost. It does this by collecting a relatively small amount of money from all the members, and then buying (or borrowing, renting, etc.) material likely to be wanted by a significant number of those members.

Or, in essence, a concept of a public library is to reduce purchase of information packages by collective pooling of money. Or, in essence, a library is in direct competition to the sale of said information packages directly to the end user. This issue has come up in many countries under the guise of the "public lending right"-in effect, seeing the library's circulation of books as reducing the author's compensation.

I am not arguing here either for or against the public lending right, or even trying to discuss the legitimacy of profit as such (in fact, I would argue with Adam Smith that profit is legitimate). However, I suggest that the "librarian ethic" can be seen as contrary to a number of impulses which have grown up along with the information industry. A similar phenomenon may be seen in the United States with the current privatizing of many kinds of government services, and the corresponding denigration of the so-called "helping professions" unless they are involved in a for-profit business.

So, in summary: the problem with having an academic institution claiming to educate "librarians" is that the zeitgeist of the more developed part of the world sees this as a waste of time at best, and subversive at worst. So, we see the move to more neutral words, like "information studies" or to business-oriented terms like "knowledge manager".

The above opinion, of course does not necessarily reflect the opinion of either my employer or of Library Link.

But, does it reflect your opinion?

• What do you think?
• Is this overstated?
• Is this point of view even sound?

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