We're here to support the educational process by providing:
- support materials (mainly, but not exclusively, texts)
- a study environment
- assistance in the sound use of both
We're here to support the educational process by providing:
- support materials (the right ones, sourced in dialogue with the academics, and made sufficiently locatable and available)
- a study environment (properly equipped to anticipate student needs)
- assistance in the sound use of both
The role of the academic librarian, then, is to facilitate the sound function of the academic library. This is a "professional" role, by which I mean that this a role for which the incumbent has undergone some form of training and assessment accredited by a trade body. The idea behind such professionalism is to ensure certain standards: standards of capability on the behalf of the professional, which in turn suggest certain standards of remuneration.
(nowadays you need several grand to turn pro)
The precise framework of this professionalism need not be rigid, provided that sufficient rigour is applied in the determination of what constitutes an appropriate level of expertise. The important thing is that that expertise is recognised as being of sufficient value.
There is a British Institute of Facilities Management, and an Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, not to mention the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Librarians are not the only professionals on campus. That is not to say that all cadres are valued equally. Indeed it may well be that your value is determined not by your cartel but by where your job has been pegged by the goddess HERA.
HERA and similar job evaluation schemes are an attempt to grade academic staff according to the demands inherent in their role. Anyone who has looked at the paperwork will notice that these things tend to be skewed to particular flavours of administration and that they are often just a wee bit woolly in places. Still, the consequence is that various library roles are pegged into a local framework: shelvers sit under library assistants who sit under librarians of various shades. The question for all three strata is: to what extent was my position in the grand scheme fudged, and what degree of (in)tolerance exists to threaten it?
I have seen shelvers having to be taken outside the system and treated as a special case to stop them being on the same grade as assistants, such are the limitations of role assessments (other alarming tales are heard beyond the library doors). The whole thing lands us into messy territory: any change to our role should really be met with a new assessment, although what can go up may also go down. I just did a quick back-of-a-datesheet HERA assessment of typical librarian roles and got anything from 100-300 points depending not only on how much responsibility is given to the role but also on where the limits of that responsibility are drawn. 100 points is very lowly indeed, and perhaps best serves as a cautionary exaggeration. The point is that convention and received attitudes can be as important as our actual duties when it comes to playing the role profiling game. Shift out one level of the strata that hold us in place, and the ground crumbles beneath us.
Peg a shelver on grade three, stick a library assistant on grade four, and you can start pegging senior library assistants and junior librarians at the grade five mark. But were you to remove the shelvers from the picture, replacing them with zero-hour students or trainees, the subsidence can begin to bed in. The undermining starts below us: the clue is in the name.
Self-service machines are easier to use than they once were, reducing desk traffic and with it the library assistant's communication score. Book sorters potentially de-skill the role of the shelver. Out-sourcing of processing and other back-room duties may also have a de-skilling effect, or may simply lead to redundancies. The work still exists beyond our walls, made monotonous, production-line and ill-paid, rather than as part of a varied and pleasant library job. The move to a 24-hour service may see us training up our contracted security staff (also outsourced for economy) who will happily do a lot of the work our shelvers and assistants do for none of the money, just for something to do in the small hours.
Outsourcing is a great way of bypassing all those expensive agreements the university has made with the unions over the years, and a brilliant way of pulling people out of the pay spine. It cheerfully disregards things like reward, happiness and work-ethic for the sake of a few quid. Councils have demonstrated that outsourcing is generally a horrible mess but this won't stop certain quarters of academia giving it a go. Mostly these will be the already well-established bad eggs, but just look at how campus security has been treated by even the nicer universities to get an idea as to what is possible. Cleaners and catering are the next obvious targets, and then they might look to the library, where outsourced staff are already keeping the place going during most of the day.
On top of all this is the concept I will now call digital slippage: as more and more of our holdings go online, they become invisible. In the past we could point to the crammed stacks and say "build us a library extension", the creaking tangibility serving as a compelling argument in our favour. Now we walk the rope in a tug-of-war between electronic and physical: our stacks can be painted as anachronisms; our digital collections, whispily drifting across campus, might equally belong to I.T. In a world where collections can be infinitely large, our powers of weeding become irrelevant and the departments might as well take over the whole stock-managing malarkey for themselves. It might even make Open Access more straightforward for everyone!
The physical collection management will remain, though it is likely to become increasingly archival in nature as current content becomes more consistently virtual (catastrophes not withstanding). The study environment could, let's face it, belong to anyone, not least I.T. We might be able to manage it better than anyone else (members of the British Institute of Facilities Management included) but space management requires less heads than stock management (nobody needs to catalogue the comfy chairs).
Which tilts the bagatelle of librarianship to information skills. Information skills are genuinely important in academia, which is why they end up being taught by librarians in brief and ill-attended induction sessions. There is more to it than teaching students how to use EBSCO: even if interfaces did become "easy" they would still inevitably bring up crap (Google is the epitome of "easy") and evaluation is just as important as Boolean logic.
Variety is the spice of life, and academic librarianship is currently a very well spiced profession (not all of it, but some). I would like it to stay that way (it was one of the things that drew me to it in the first place): I want to be able to juggle teaching, stock-management, space-management, archiving, I.T, and all the other stuff we do: it makes for an interesting and pleasant job, and interesting and pleasant jobs make for happy and productive workers. I am worried that this interesting and pleasant job is on the verge of fragmentation: the teaching going one way, the stock management another, etc. Which bits retain the "librarian" moniker and is there any way of holding them together? Because if we don't, we run the risk of dropping down the spine: not only will our work be less varied (and hence more tedious) but it will also, as a consequence, be deskilled and therefore worth less money. As such we need to ensure that all aspects of our work are clearly and incontrovertibly associated with librarianship: all of them. Or else we must cut our losses and hitch our roles to another profession: teaching, archiving, facilities management. Either we hold together, reinforcing the core idea of the library as a centre of study support and the librarian as the agent of that support, or we let it disintegrate and throw our lot in with some other part of HE. I think the former option is still available.
The library building is still there, with both the books and the study spaces. The need for information literacy is both real and compelling. The array of products and licences, the horrors of copyright, the fog of open access, the mysteries of repositories and research data... they constitute a mess of support materials to which we can readily claim some mastery. It's easy to lose sight, from the inside, of the externally apparent mysteries of stock procurement and management (particularly digital stock). Librarians can cast and read those runes in a way that other academic staff cannot. We know what we're doing in that regard. And if we're worried that our magical capabilities might be outsourced, then we should also get our mitts on juicy research data and various repositable gubbins that might be better kept inhouse than out. We need to pull together all teh stuff and make sure everyone knows it's ours. In that regard, it is vitally important to ensure that our work is seen and valued. This is seldom easy for us: running a COUNTER report can only tell so much, and there are no truly effective ways to measure the impact of a LibGuide. So we have to talk about it. We have to show off at every convenient opportunity. We have to stick together and we have to advocate.
Which is where CILIP/ILPUK comes in. Or should come in. Unionisation also has a role (especially in terms of the undermining aspects) but the professional body is key to reinforcing the values of librarianship and of the work we do; of giving the lead and offering a sense of direction. Academia is in a very odd place at the moment, with no real sense of direction, and we could conceivably be in the middle of it, forging something wonderful. But it needs a bit of coordination and the odd gala luncheon to provide the necessary momentum to carry us forward. It needs us all mucking in and looking out for each other, and it needs a little flamboyance from our body. We should be getting out there, flapping our beautiful wings and boasting about how fantastic and essential we are, but instead we are wailing and gnashing our teeth. With a little braggadocio you can convince an emperor to parade naked, so convincing him that librarians are important (which they actually are) ought to be a doddle. If self-belief requires a name change, then (as daft as it is, and it is very very daft) let's do it so we can get stuck in to what matters.
I have seen shelvers having to be taken outside the system and treated as a special case to stop them being on the same grade as assistants, such are the limitations of role assessments (other alarming tales are heard beyond the library doors). The whole thing lands us into messy territory: any change to our role should really be met with a new assessment, although what can go up may also go down. I just did a quick back-of-a-datesheet HERA assessment of typical librarian roles and got anything from 100-300 points depending not only on how much responsibility is given to the role but also on where the limits of that responsibility are drawn. 100 points is very lowly indeed, and perhaps best serves as a cautionary exaggeration. The point is that convention and received attitudes can be as important as our actual duties when it comes to playing the role profiling game. Shift out one level of the strata that hold us in place, and the ground crumbles beneath us.
Peg a shelver on grade three, stick a library assistant on grade four, and you can start pegging senior library assistants and junior librarians at the grade five mark. But were you to remove the shelvers from the picture, replacing them with zero-hour students or trainees, the subsidence can begin to bed in. The undermining starts below us: the clue is in the name.
Self-service machines are easier to use than they once were, reducing desk traffic and with it the library assistant's communication score. Book sorters potentially de-skill the role of the shelver. Out-sourcing of processing and other back-room duties may also have a de-skilling effect, or may simply lead to redundancies. The work still exists beyond our walls, made monotonous, production-line and ill-paid, rather than as part of a varied and pleasant library job. The move to a 24-hour service may see us training up our contracted security staff (also outsourced for economy) who will happily do a lot of the work our shelvers and assistants do for none of the money, just for something to do in the small hours.
(your services are no longer required)
Outsourcing is a great way of bypassing all those expensive agreements the university has made with the unions over the years, and a brilliant way of pulling people out of the pay spine. It cheerfully disregards things like reward, happiness and work-ethic for the sake of a few quid. Councils have demonstrated that outsourcing is generally a horrible mess but this won't stop certain quarters of academia giving it a go. Mostly these will be the already well-established bad eggs, but just look at how campus security has been treated by even the nicer universities to get an idea as to what is possible. Cleaners and catering are the next obvious targets, and then they might look to the library, where outsourced staff are already keeping the place going during most of the day.
On top of all this is the concept I will now call digital slippage: as more and more of our holdings go online, they become invisible. In the past we could point to the crammed stacks and say "build us a library extension", the creaking tangibility serving as a compelling argument in our favour. Now we walk the rope in a tug-of-war between electronic and physical: our stacks can be painted as anachronisms; our digital collections, whispily drifting across campus, might equally belong to I.T. In a world where collections can be infinitely large, our powers of weeding become irrelevant and the departments might as well take over the whole stock-managing malarkey for themselves. It might even make Open Access more straightforward for everyone!
The physical collection management will remain, though it is likely to become increasingly archival in nature as current content becomes more consistently virtual (catastrophes not withstanding). The study environment could, let's face it, belong to anyone, not least I.T. We might be able to manage it better than anyone else (members of the British Institute of Facilities Management included) but space management requires less heads than stock management (nobody needs to catalogue the comfy chairs).
Which tilts the bagatelle of librarianship to information skills. Information skills are genuinely important in academia, which is why they end up being taught by librarians in brief and ill-attended induction sessions. There is more to it than teaching students how to use EBSCO: even if interfaces did become "easy" they would still inevitably bring up crap (Google is the epitome of "easy") and evaluation is just as important as Boolean logic.
(if you think The Sun's bad, you should see Page 3 of Google)
Variety is the spice of life, and academic librarianship is currently a very well spiced profession (not all of it, but some). I would like it to stay that way (it was one of the things that drew me to it in the first place): I want to be able to juggle teaching, stock-management, space-management, archiving, I.T, and all the other stuff we do: it makes for an interesting and pleasant job, and interesting and pleasant jobs make for happy and productive workers. I am worried that this interesting and pleasant job is on the verge of fragmentation: the teaching going one way, the stock management another, etc. Which bits retain the "librarian" moniker and is there any way of holding them together? Because if we don't, we run the risk of dropping down the spine: not only will our work be less varied (and hence more tedious) but it will also, as a consequence, be deskilled and therefore worth less money. As such we need to ensure that all aspects of our work are clearly and incontrovertibly associated with librarianship: all of them. Or else we must cut our losses and hitch our roles to another profession: teaching, archiving, facilities management. Either we hold together, reinforcing the core idea of the library as a centre of study support and the librarian as the agent of that support, or we let it disintegrate and throw our lot in with some other part of HE. I think the former option is still available.
The library building is still there, with both the books and the study spaces. The need for information literacy is both real and compelling. The array of products and licences, the horrors of copyright, the fog of open access, the mysteries of repositories and research data... they constitute a mess of support materials to which we can readily claim some mastery. It's easy to lose sight, from the inside, of the externally apparent mysteries of stock procurement and management (particularly digital stock). Librarians can cast and read those runes in a way that other academic staff cannot. We know what we're doing in that regard. And if we're worried that our magical capabilities might be outsourced, then we should also get our mitts on juicy research data and various repositable gubbins that might be better kept inhouse than out. We need to pull together all teh stuff and make sure everyone knows it's ours. In that regard, it is vitally important to ensure that our work is seen and valued. This is seldom easy for us: running a COUNTER report can only tell so much, and there are no truly effective ways to measure the impact of a LibGuide. So we have to talk about it. We have to show off at every convenient opportunity. We have to stick together and we have to advocate.
Which is where CILIP/ILPUK comes in. Or should come in. Unionisation also has a role (especially in terms of the undermining aspects) but the professional body is key to reinforcing the values of librarianship and of the work we do; of giving the lead and offering a sense of direction. Academia is in a very odd place at the moment, with no real sense of direction, and we could conceivably be in the middle of it, forging something wonderful. But it needs a bit of coordination and the odd gala luncheon to provide the necessary momentum to carry us forward. It needs us all mucking in and looking out for each other, and it needs a little flamboyance from our body. We should be getting out there, flapping our beautiful wings and boasting about how fantastic and essential we are, but instead we are wailing and gnashing our teeth. With a little braggadocio you can convince an emperor to parade naked, so convincing him that librarians are important (which they actually are) ought to be a doddle. If self-belief requires a name change, then (as daft as it is, and it is very very daft) let's do it so we can get stuck in to what matters.
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