Barbara Fister's 10 Reasons To Love Librarianship

Here's Barbara Fister discussing ten reasons she finds librarianship rewarding in the Library Journal.

1. It’s never boring. There is always something new coming along, something to learn, something to try out, some new idea to consider. It’s hard to get in a rut when no two days are alike. Anyone who claims our profession is doomed to extinction hasn’t used a library in a very long time.

2. It’s a social profession. We help each other out. It’s terrific to live in an era when we can have so many ongoing conversations to tap into whenever we need to recharge our batteries, ask a question, or try out an idea. Locally, we bounce ideas off one another, and I can hop on a venerable email list or FriendFeed or Twitter and get instantly educated, entertained, and inspired, often all at the same time. I have a lot of friends who are librarians, and they are some of the smartest, most generous people on Earth.

3. The work we do is important, but we don’t get hammered by our user community the minute something goes wrong the way IT departments do. Our users trust us to figure it out and generally give us the time to troubleshoot without complaint. Considering how deeply frustrating it is to me when a book I’ve run into the stacks to retrieve isn’t where it’s supposed to be or a link doesn’t resolve the way it should, I’m grateful our patrons are as patient with our failings as they are.

4. We get to help students find their way in the world of ideas. There’s something magical about that moment when you can see it click, when a student realizes knowledge is something she participates in creating, that she has a voice that matters. It’s a renewable pleasure. New students arrive every year!

5. Our profession is built on values that matter—and not just for libraries and librarians. We play a role in preserving culture for future generations. We defend people’s right to explore and express unpopular opinions. We protect privacy in the service of intellectual freedom. We have even been called “radical militant librarians” by the FBI. These aren’t issues that belong only to us exclusively, but it’s great to be involved in them.

6. People usually are grateful for our help. Sure, we wonder how to get our foot in the door with that professor who always makes impossible assignments, and we cringe when we overhear a senior bragging that he’s never checked out a book. But when you walk a stressed-out student through an assignment or help a junior put together the missing pieces in a research paper or locate some hard-to-find source for a faculty member, they act like you gave them a gift. How many professions are there where people think, when you’re simply doing your job, that it’s a special favor just for them?

7. Our libraries serve as the common ground for our campuses. There’s something really neat about working for a cultural institution that so many people feel belongs to them, personally, and working in that common ground means we can see the big picture on campus in ways others often can’t. We can’t hold irrational prejudices against the STEM departments or the humanities or the preprofessional programs, because we know and serve them all. We do, however, need to work on thinking more globally, or overcoming Information Calvinism, as the Library Loon has put it. If we turn off access to information on graduation, we are defeating our own efforts at information literacy as a foundation for lifelong learning. If interlibrary loan didn’t exist, we would think it was an amazing idea. We need to build that kind of everyday mutual aid into a more open and equitable information infrastructure. (See what I mean? Never boring.)

8. We have a budget. It’s not much of a budget, and it may be under pressure and shrinking, but it’s bigger than most campus budgets and is a framework within which we make our priorities and beliefs concrete. There’s a lot of power in our hands, and we tend to forget how many riches we actually have compared to libraries in other parts of the world—or how much we could change the world if we used those budgets strategically.

9. I get to buy books with other people’s money and—just as delightful—I get to weed the collection. Since I have tenure I can say out loud that I love books. (A word of advice to new professionals: never say that in a job interview for an academic library position. You will mark yourself as a clueless throwback.) I love books enough to want to make the good ones findable and to retire the ones that have passed the point of finding readers. I try to spend one hour a week in the stacks, and it’s strangely affirming and peaceful, my weekly moment of zen.

10. I love that I don’t need to be a specialist with a narrow research agenda. Being a librarian means I have the freedom to be interested in anything and everything. You have to embrace randomness when you aren’t sure whether the next reference question will be about primary sources on feminist political organizations in Latin America or for data on the public financing of sports facilities. If I were another kind of scholar, I’d have spent years training to be an expert, going through a hazing so intense and time-consuming that I might be too cautious to step outside my zone of expertise in future. We librarians are kicked out of the nest half-fledged and know that we have to keep on learning, that a lot of our further education will be DIY, and that the world is full of interesting things to explore. The MLS comes with a license to be widely curious and unafraid of things we don’t already know.

These are all great ideals of the library profession. I especially like #5: "We play a role in preserving culture for future generations. We defend people’s right to explore and express unpopular opinions. We protect privacy in the service of intellectual freedom."

And #7 makes a great point: "If we turn off access to information on graduation, we are defeating our own efforts at information literacy as a foundation for lifelong learning." I had a library professor in my master's program who seemed to have never thought of this concept. I mentioned the notion of alumni not having access to the very databases and resources that we teach and the disservice of it all. Wouldn't it be better if we focus on resources that the public has access to? It seems like an obvious problem because many of the databases are price prohibitive for an individual. It's for this reason that I have made it a point to teach free and low-cost legal research on the web.

Thank you, Barbara, for showing some love to the library profession!

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