Surfing one of my favourite websites for library sayings, i came upon the following rant to be pasted onto a t-shirt or mug:
Ok, sure. We’ve all got our little preconceived notions about who librarians are and what they do. Many people think of Librarians as diminutive civil servants, scuttling about “sssh-ing” people and stamping things.
Well, think again buster. Librarians have degrees. They go to graduate school for Information Science and become masters of data systems and Human-Computer Interaction. Librarians can catalogue anything from an onion to a dog’s ear.
They could catalogue you. Librarians wield unfathomable power. With a flip of the wrist they can hide your dissertation behind piles of old Field & Stream magazines. They can find data for your term paper that you never knew existed. They may even point you toward new and appropriate subject headings.
People become Librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing.
They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. They preserve every aspect of human knowledge. Librarians rule.
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So here i am reading this, nodding my head in complete acknowledgment of these acclamations.
Until the last 2 paragraphs. What was it that struck me about those? How about their sheer ego-centric-patronizingly-upper-class sounding tone?
There’s just something about the off handed way it remarks that librarians “…preserve every aspect of human knowledge.”
We do what now? Dude, that’s a big responsibility. And we’re not the only ones doing it. I very much believe it is more of a shared societal duty rather than a single profession’s job to preserve every aspect.
And how about that “all-seeing, all-knowing” bit? A bit presumptuous?
So this is where humour moves quickly into those broad generalizations that librarians have been fighting since the beginning. Where does the humour and quick wit stop and the sweeping generalizations and ‘i’m better than you’ attitude begin?
Though i am ALL for promoting librarians and the information we provide, i am a bit hesitant in creating an elitist sounding profession that unwittingly puts itself on a pedestal and proclaims loud and clearly “we are awesome, here us roar”.
I am much more of a stealth-ish type myself: one where we go about our business with maybe a cute little hint here or there and let people decide for themselves rather than shoving it in their face.
As i step down from my soap box, anyone else care to share how they feel? What is the difference between bold proclamation and obnoxious banter?
“Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing”
There was totally more to my previous comment and it was this:
“Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing” — Totally not true. I can’t even find my socks in the morning.
I really don’t get the fetishizing of this profession. Well, I don’t get the fetishizing of any profession, including the medical and law professions. But I really, really, really don’t understand why everything has to be hot librarian, librarian chic, librarian dolls and movies and cute sayings on t-shirts. (Ok, I’m being a hypocrite, as I have a t-shirt from last year’s ALA conference that says Librarians Do It By The Book, and I belong to the Facebook Hot Librarians group. Clearly, I should not be throwing stones.) But, I mean, I just see so many problems with this profession: the lack of entry-level jobs, the recruitment push, and its subsequent abundance of entry-level librarians; outsourcing cataloguing; the ivory tower profs versus practiced instructors in library school; budget cuts and job cuts; the dearth of hot, straight men in the workplace. Can’t we work on things like securing in-house cataloguing before we have an orgasm over Second Life in the library?
(Ok, and can I also mention that the initial ‘l’ in ‘librarian’ is NOT CAPITALIZED? It’s not a proper noun!!)
So, those are my two cents. I definitely appreciated this post, akd, as it gave me a chance to run my mouth about something I actually care about!