Abstract
It is time for us to collectively embrace the diversity of the library profession and encourage students and graduates to understand that great employment opportunities present themselves outside the traditional library space. Our traditional library skills will always be required, but to maintain our relevance we must provide a greater emphasis on non-traditional roles when teaching library-related qualifications. The scope and value of what our traditional skills can bring to other industries has been underestimated. A librarian’s job prospects are increasingly diverse, so our pre-service training and ongoing professional development should reflect this. Such practice would go a long way to safeguarding our profession for the future.
Traditional and non-traditional library roles
The world outside traditional library walls is a wonderful mess, pleading to be cleaned up and organised by professionals from within our industry. This mess is hidden away in archive boxes imprisoned in warehouses, or is held on hard drives in office desk drawers. In the ‘Content is King’ age, organisations have amassed vast amounts of digital information and data and often do not know what to do with it, or how to get it to those who want to access it. Whilst we as librarians worry about the robots stealing our jobs, mass digital information has come to take over the world. Suddenly, new jobs are advertised such as ‘Content Architect’ or ‘Digital Archivist for Beyoncé’. A traditional librarian may look at jobs like these with hesitation. Where is the ‘must have or be eligible for Australian Library and Information Association membership’ requirement? What is the Higher Education Workers pay scale for this role? Do they need me to know about MARC?
As a librarian who has had her own identity crisis and who now exists and thrives outside the conventional library sphere, I am certain our profession is alive and well. You might just not recognise it. Our industry is great at promoting new, world-class libraries and our expanding library services. We must also promote the value of our individual skills to our new graduates, and to the non-library world: there are great employment opportunities to be had in this space for those willing to pursue them. I can confidently say that all the classical library skills I was taught during my information management education are still as relevant today as when I was studying. Organising and providing access to information will always be at the crux of what I do, and this is what I love to do. The scope and value of what a library and information science graduate can offer the world is, however, only becoming apparent to me nearly six years after graduating. The scope and value of what other skills and knowledge a librarian can develop in other industries has also been a revelation. A librarian’s job prospects are increasingly diverse, so our pre-service training and ongoing professional development should recognise and support this diversity. In this way, our profession will live on.
You do not need to be, and should not allow yourself to be, defined by a traditional job title or job description. I have learnt that my skills and experience are highly sought after, and relevant to roles that do not have ‘librarian’ in their title. As the Photos Co-ordinator at the Australian Football League (AFL), I manage a photo website and digital photographic archive of football players whilst handling reference enquiries for content from media outlets, football clubs and corporate partners. These are tasks that any conventional librarian would be called upon to do, but amongst these everyday responsibilities I also get to hold reflectors at photo shoots, and stand on the hallowed turf of the Melbourne Cricket Ground on AFL Grand Final day to facilitate the sharing of premiership images with media outlets as they happen. Additionally, I have been employed in a role that had librarian in the title but had an impact greater than some traditional librarian roles. As the Digital Assets Librarian for the not-for-profit organisation World Vision Australia (WVA) I constantly felt the small impact I was making to the world’s most vulnerable people by sharing their images in our marketing material, and in the Australian media. Opportunities such as these, existing outside the one-dimensional library job title, are examples of why unorthodox roles can be so enriching for the career development of an information professional.
Whilst I’m proud to be connected to and a part of such a noble profession as that of the librarian, I believe that taking on a role without stereotypical baggage is a distinct advantage. I have stopped answering, ‘I am a librarian’ as the first response when asked what I do for a living. The word ‘librarian’ can pigeon-hole you into something that you are not. Instead, when someone asks me what I do, I generally tell them where I am working or the projects on which I am currently working, such as the Typhoon Hayian fundraising campaign, or AFL Team Captains photo shoot and then dropping in the line ‘Oh, I’m a librarian by the way’ to gauge a reaction. Today I am comfortable being a non-librarian librarian; however, it took me a while to get to this point. In my role as the Digital Assets Librarian I overheard a colleague refer to me as ‘just’ the librarian. Is that how my role was perceived within the organisation? As ‘just’ the librarian? How and why had the profession and my role been belittled so much?
In my experience, you can change perceptions and have much more freedom in making your role what you want it to be outside the established library sphere. The more you learn about your colleagues, the more you can develop ways to service their needs. Learning to promote my knowledge and skills to the non-librarians I’ve worked with has enhanced my information management career dramatically. It has also instilled in me confidence that I am a librarian, albeit one in Celia-sized sheep’s clothing. Librarians are commonly equipped with research skills like no other, so learning about how your colleagues work and what their information needs are should be easy. I inherited a film archive during my time at WVA, and through learning about others’ roles I knew this material would be relevant to the advertising campaign for the 40th anniversary of the 40 Hour Famine campaign. With this in mind, I invited relevant stakeholders to help me with the initial sorting of the collection. Not only was their knowledge invaluable to assessing the significance of the collection, but I was also promoting my services to the staff. I was no longer just the librarian.
As a result of promoting ‘Brand Celia’, opportunities have been accelerated, and rewards that I was previously unaware of whilst studying have been realised. Promote what you can do, before someone assumes what it is that you do. If they do not know that you are there, how will they be able to take advantage of your services? It is important to demonstrate the value of your role to your colleagues around you, and to include them in relevant projects at the earliest opportunity. Developing relationships with others in your workplace is key. Traditional librarians excel at promoting their library and library services, and this should be no different for information professionals working in the unconventional sphere. It was only once I began my current role that I discovered a casual employee had been tasked with scanning historic physical photographs. After nearly a year of scanning close to 5000 photographs, there was no overall significance assessment or prioritisation of what had been scanned to date, or steps taken to include this collection in the existing photographic archive that I was overseeing. My librarian skills clicked into gear, and I am now providing guidance on the best way to move forward with the next year of this project. There are many projects like this existing in workplaces around the world, projects just waiting for a library and information science professional to take charge. I cannot wait for my next discovery.
The evolving nature of the profession
As an industry, we need to provide a greater emphasis on non-traditional roles when teaching library-related qualifications. Such practice would go a long way to safeguarding our profession for the future, and students must be exposed to alternative workplaces via industry placement requirements. Other than public, university or special libraries, an effective demonstration of how broad-reaching a base set of skills can be will help the next generation of librarians secure future opportunities. Guest lecturers such as Beyoncé’s digital archivist would encourage students to investigate all possibilities available to them once they graduate. As my own personal library career evolved to embrace roles outside the boundaries of the familiar library, I initially felt like a failure and not a ‘librarian’ anymore. As each professional journey is different, I believe that showcasing the range of roles available to someone with a library-related qualification should be paramount to instilling the belief within students that what they are doing can add value to business and to the community.
I cannot emphasise enough how many career opportunities opened up to me once I acknowledged that I could still be a librarian in a non-librarian role. As the world evolves, so should the profession. I believe information professionals know that working with change and not against it is much more beneficial to our development than continuing to work as we always have. A few years ago, I attended my first ALIA New Librarians’ Symposium. This particular ALIA event is good at encouraging attendees to think beyond the single librarian experience, exposing students to the array of workplaces open to graduates of the profession. We all get inspired post conference, and I encourage all to act on this inspiration. In the weeks following this symposium, I developed a fear of being pigeon-holed and decided to act. For the majority of us who will be in a number of jobs throughout our information management career, the possibilities are many. We just need to take that first step out of the comfort zone and take a risk. It pays (literally) to develop our skills within a range of areas, not just in cataloguing or handling a reference query.
The changing and evolving nature of not only the profession, but also of access to information globally, is at odds with the key traditional learning of a librarian. Librarians provide a sense of order to the world. In this digital age, where there is now chaos in information, we as individuals must accept uncertainty in the workforce. When I initially leapt into the non-traditional abyss, I had separation anxiety from being a librarian. In my education, and with my ingrained stereotype of the profession, a librarian does not sit at a desk and Skype chat to Nepal communications staff for the most up-to-date images of an earthquake. A librarian does not find archival film from times of famine in Ethiopia and have it digitised for a segment on The Project television show. ‘What if I lost this job and had to search for another one?’ I thought. ‘I am so far away from what a librarian is now that I do not think I could get a real library job!’ I still have the librarian’s perception that many have – I need to know Dewey off by heart. I am only a cataloguer. I do not handle reference enquires. Libraries are about books – but the main factor that will determine how successful you will be in the unconventional library sphere is how willing you are, as an individual, to embrace change. To accept that, in part, you are the change.
Learning new skills
To confront change head on, evolving and growing as information professionals, and to provide more career certainty we also need to continuously learn new skills. The ALIA Professional Development scheme is a wonderful tool that all information professionals should embrace to keep their library skills current. We must never stop learning. However, keeping on top of our professional development in a non-traditional library role can be difficult and I discovered that I needed to take much greater responsibility for my own development. In my first role, I was able to take full advantage of the Melbourne Cricket Club Library’s institutional membership to further my development. A challenge I have found in my non-traditional roles at WVA and at the AFL is that I am only one small voice, pontificating to management for paid professional library training. I need to be adept at the art of persuasion when writing proposals for funding from training budgets, and when influencing to secure attendance at ALIA and at other library-related training and events. More importantly, outside the accustomed library sphere, we have to learn and take on much more than just library-related skills and knowledge. This can be challenging, but ultimately it will make you a much more valuable information professional. The challenge with this is that an organisation does not necessarily realise that an information management professional is what they need, nor even that an information management professional is what they already have.
Outside the library world we are not a protected species, as would be the case in a university or public library where structured pay scales and clearly defined job descriptions are the norm. Sometimes the role is ambiguous, an ambiguity that can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that we can move into a fresh new role that has no traditional librarian stereotype baggage and make it our own. Working within a non-library organisation with its own strategic goals and objectives, you have the opportunity to acquire skills you would not otherwise think about in a conventional library setting. I have been exposed to the talents of some of the best in the business – award-winning sports photographers, news journalists, humanitarians who travel the world to selflessly help people in need – and I have definitely taken advantage of their talents. Whether by putting my hand up to hold lights at photography shoots, or seeking feedback on my writing from journalists at WVA, mentors from other professions have guided me to become a better information professional. I now have many more strings to my library bow: Photoshop, media pitches, sales negotiations, international development and senior AFL footballer face recognition. This up-skilling makes the information profession more relevant, as you can actively curate what you want your career to look like. By making the most of these professional opportunities, we can begin to mould our specific jobs and advance along our career paths as we see fit, abandoning the shackles of the traditional designations and perceptions associated with our roles, and growing in confidence that what we are doing is of benefit to a world overloaded with information.
Conversely, we may feel isolated in a role where there are no other librarians to bounce ideas off. We may find ourselves in a position where we attend meetings that have little to do with our roles, or find it harder to be remunerated in recognition of our specific library skills. I have also been challenged by the physical vs. the digital space. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought that I would spend as much time as I have over the past six years seated in front of a screen. On the plus side, by working remotely I can be wherever my user may be. Everyone else is in the digital space; it makes sense that the librarians, old-world or otherwise, are there too. Analysis and debate on how digital information is managed is paramount for a student within the information profession. Educators need to expose students to the emerging digital technologies and trends through their inclusion in the curriculum, and encourage them to experience these for themselves through work placements within industry.
The volume of digital content being produced, the way information is accessed and the needs of our users are constantly evolving. I was not prepared for the amount of technical knowledge and expertise I have had to call upon within this area. I did not go into this profession to be proficient in areas such as troubleshooting database issues, or providing advice on digital storage solutions. The evolution from my first role, where my only requests for assistance were to the maintenance staff to fix a shelf, is in stark contrast to my current role where I am best friends with the IT department, as we look together for solutions to enable the sharing of large volumes of data within and outside the office space.
It should be emphasised that traditional library skills will always be required beyond the library walls. I have a taxonomy for assigning metadata to imagery. I perform reference enquiries for photographic content. I also deal with issues that many other types of librarians are facing, such as my current battle with my own thinking around free access to information. Whilst the professional librarian working within a not-for-profit organisation might aim to saturate users with digital content as soon as possible, an organisation requiring a high level of control over its digital information – its intellectual property – must use its content differently. Such situations have presented a challenge to my views around access to information. Finally, due to the many projects and tasks that I am undertaking, I do not have time to read books – just like every other librarian!
The librarian profession is very diverse. We are not just university, public or even special librarians. We can work anywhere. Even with Beyoncé. We need to embrace the diversity of the profession, and encourage students and graduates that this is where our future is headed. The world needs us and we need to be ready to stand up and clean up its mess. By embracing our diversity, we can do it together.
Notes on contributor
Celia Drummond is an RMIT Information Management graduate. Her diverse professional experience includes working during the introduction of public library self-check machines, cataloguing arguably the best sporting collection in the world at the Melbourne Cricket Club Library and eye-opening assignments at both World Vision Australia and the Australian Football League. She is a non-traditional librarian, but a traditionally nice person.