Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

December 2006 Volume 4(6)

Future of the profession

What’s the population of Ghana (got to do with professional librarians)?

There’s no future in being territorial about our role, says Paul Hambelton. We have to find out where we can make a positive contribution. He reports on a thought- provoking ISG seminar on the profession’s future.

The promotional blurb for the ISG (Scotland) event had the flavour of a call to arms, posing three questions: Are you interested in repackaging your skills to show your worth to your organisation and users? Do you have the skills to take your organisation forward but they don’t yet know it? Are you under pressure to de-professionalise posts?

In the opening presentation, Elaine Fulton described how CILIPS and SLIC are contributing to the formulation of occupational standards for libraries, which are currently under development by Lifelong Learning UK.

There is pressure in many sectors to bring in ‘contact centres’ and shared services to replace professional LIS staff with centralised, outsourced or even overseas (as in the case of the MLA’s ‘Enquire’) services. At such a time it is important to codify the special skills which LIS professionals possess in order to demonstrate that they cannot be replaced by generic ‘information workers’ without serious loss of service quality, even if the latter are armed with a battery of high-quality online resources. There was comment from the floor that ‘job measurement’ exercises conducted on LIS jobs are apt seriously to underestimate the competencies required, and it is to be hoped that the above standards will assist in developing evidence to prevent this.

Moving from the general to the specific, Alison Raisin of the Committee of Departmental Librarians described how CILIP’s Body of Professional Knowledge had been used as the foundation of a new Competencies Framework which recognises that librarians apply their professional skills in a wide range of areas across government both within and outside libraries. She expanded upon how she saw librarians coming out of the library/information centre and becoming more involved in the planning and design of information initiatives, rather than passively fielding enquiries to which they respond by searching the library’s material.

In what I found an illuminating contrast, she stated that a typical ‘traditional’ query such as ‘What is the population of Ghana?’ which might be directed to information services staff at the Department of Trade and Industry, would no longer be counted a substantive example of an ‘enquiry’, as nowadays this type of question can so easily be answered by anyone with desktop access to electronic resources. Instead, government librarians should be more oriented towards engaging with the design of information management services and how they serve business needs. In this way, Alison argued, librarians ought to be looking towards recognition as a body of professionals with a special expertise akin to that of lawyers or statisticians.

For the afternoon session, Gordon Dunsire gave a rousing vindication of the cataloguer’s art. Pointing out that billions of pounds of expenditure on ‘fourth generation’ computer technology had failed to produce anything more likely to bring us reliable, accurate machine-generated cataloguing than Sony’s electronic dog AIBO, he defended the value of human expertise in producing records which would remain enduringly effective in aiding retrieval of relevant material and preventing retrieval of irrelevant, and which are neutral and free from any publisher’s sales agenda.

Nonetheless, with the growth of shared cataloguing in the interests of effectiveness, efficiency and consistency, Gordon went on to concede that a reduction in numbers of professional library staff engaged in cataloguing is inevitable, and one which it is futile to resist. The silver lining to this cloud may be that, although co-operation and collaboration will reduce the numbers of professional cataloguers working in their traditional domain of libraries, their particularly disciplined, structured and rigorous approach to metadata and the organisation of knowledge is one which could be highly marketable in other sectors where the threat of information overload is severe, such as e-government and e-commerce.

Closing the day’s proceedings, Jackie Urwin, Leader of the MA/MSc Programme in Information and Library Management at the University of Northumbria, outlined the courses on offer through her department, which bucks the trend in distance learning in offering a formal module on Cataloguing and Classification.

It wasn’t hard to discern a common theme running through the presentations. We clearly need to think hard about what we can supply to a generation of users who can be connected to high quality information resources without leaving their desks. Many of these resources come complete with self-service help screens and online support, with no need for intervention beyond the small ICT staffs who administer them. There’s no future in being territorial about which staff, from which disciplines, can set up information services, or pretending that only a librarian can do this properly. If we are not to end up talking to the walls, we have to go and observe the changing patterns of information use and see where we can make a positive contribution.

Paul Hambelton is Reference Services Assistant, National Library of Scotland (NLS).

The ISG (Scotland) seminar, ‘Information Skills and Competencies: how can we show our worth and stop the pressure to de-professionalise our posts?’ was held at the NLS on 9 November 2006.

Information Scotland Vol. 4(6) December 2006

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.

Last updated: 26-Jan-2007