This week there was a visiting librarian consultant on campus. It brought back a flood of memories to me, with my 16 yrs. in the PU Humanities library system. It had been a while since I’d heard “library-speak”.
First of all, librarians are fierce defenders of human rights. Sound strange? They are, historically in the forefront of the freedom to information, freedom to research whatever you want to. They refused to cooperate with the Patriot Act when the govt. wanted to know what all we were reading. They are linked to groups like the ACLU. They fiercely defend freedom to information and non-governmental interference.
I wrote one paper in grad school about power relationships within libraries. Where I worked, there was the clerical staff, who had 1st and most contact w/ patrons and little power; and then there were the “librarians” who roamed the shelves, wandered in and out to work when they felt like it; had their own offices and were in charge of meeting with faculty.
Clerical staff had 2 20-min. breaks and a 1-hour lunch. Librarians wandered. To assert their own independence and power in their own way, clerical staff started skipping their 20 min. breaks and leaving an hour early. And no one stopped them, because the librarians knew what they were doing was a lot more lenient.
The two groups never took breaks together or lunch together. It was an unspoken rule. I am not good at unspoken rules and my problem came when I, as a clerical staff member, became so good at research that professors were coming into the library and asking for me instead of professional library staff. I was in fact told to QUIT meeting with professors, as it was “embarrassing the professional staff”. Yet, I knew those same professional library staff were not interested in some of the research projects of some faculty and belittled them behind their backs. These would be the African American faculty, and their projects were not considered “true science” (direct quote from a librarian). Somewhere along there I decided to become not a librarian, but a professor, and do my OWN research.
More and more I realize my background was a research university and how much I am geared toward that path. Research is what I do. It comes naturally to me. I always want to get to the bottom of what has been published out there on a subject I am interested in. Papers I wrote as an undergrad had 20-25 sources. I wanted to know all there was to know on a certain subject. But I was more mature in age and experience than most undergrads. My dad was a professor too, and although he died when I was only 16, the fire was already lit. His gradf students came to our house for dinner and I saw the way he worked, papers spread out all over the dining room table at night. He worked at home surrounded by the noise of his 4 kids, not away at his office.
So the visiting librarian was very interesting and forward-thinking, and my recollections are from my own background. What I am recalling are the amazing separations by class and occupation levels, where no one may pass, under threat of losing one’s job. Everyone follows the rules, just because that’s the way things are. There was nowhere else for me to advance to in PU Libraries. I had to either go get my MLS or my PhD. I chose my PhD. I wanted to actually DO my own research — not be in charge of finding information for someone else’s interests.
In any case, the “library-speak” was also about what a library IS, in the future. What is a library? It is not a hoarder of books. It is certainly not a gatherer of journals in paper form. Journals are not even bound anymore. (That was my former job: binding periodicals clerk). So what is a library?
Libraries of the future are places where people may gather to share information, to study together, to collaborate. They will still hold books. But books will be borrowed and shared amongst libraries. Librarians will put together search engines by subject, according to the interests of the people doing research. Their jobs are to continually review what is “out there” and condense it down by subject areas. Databases and also just things they put together, places where they gather various sources. Not all journals are yet online, especially the older historical issues, so that is ongoing.
Libraries may eventually become virtual, but retain books like a museum. But for now, the vision is for them to be artistically designed, welcoming environments where people come to enjoy and share knowledge, and to collaborate on research and learning.
And now I have my own published book, and my own journal article. I have a chapter in a 3-vol. series coming out, and I have an entry in a criminal justice encyclopedia. 🙂
Doctor Grandma 
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