As part of preparations for my Ignite talk next month, I wanted to check out some of the diversity of job titles that librarians and information professionals have. (I'm going to point out that 'librarians' are more widespread than you might think based on the number of people who work as 'librarians'.)
I asked Twitter 'Are you an info pro whose job title doesn't include 'librarian'? Could you tell me what you are known as?', and Twitter responded, by golly! There was a lot of 'information', and good showing from 'knowledge', 'learning' and 'research'. My personal favourite is 'Transformation Officer' ('I'm a member of the strategic Libraries Management Team and my job is to improve the service. Lots of projects and funding bids.'). Thank you, tweeting info pros!
If you have or have had a non-librarian job title that you'd like to share, then please leave a comment.
ETA: I've made a couple of Wordle clouds of the job-titles, too.
Showing posts with label information professionals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label information professionals. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Eye spy...
I've just worked my way through my CILIP publications backlog, and the following articles particularly caught my eye:
 |
| 'Toucan bird' by doug88888 on Flickr |
- Like, the London Information and Knowledge Exchange, is organising a masterclass aimed at library and information professionals 'seeking to improve the effective sharing of knowledge and good practice within their organisations'. I thought of the Post That Wouldn't End. (From Gazette 22 July-11 Aug., p. 3.)
- CILIP is having a Member's Day on 14 October. I've no idea what a Member's Day is, but feel I ought to find out as part of trying to cultivate a less cynical attitude towards CILIP. (Gazette 22 July-11 Aug., p. 7)
- Sheila Thomas, who works at TWI and came to the Conversation about CILIP organised by Niamh in June, writes about her week in the regular slot at the end of Gazette. I really enjoyed reading about what she gets up to, which seems to be the real nitty-gritty of abstracting and indexing relevant publications and conference proceedings - having had no idea before I met her what the 'information professional' bit of CILIP might really mean. (Gazette 22 July-11 Aug, p. 15)
- There's a whole page about and a plug on the cover of the latest issue of Gazette for the recently-launched New Professionals Network, of which I'm already a member. It was nice to feel ahead of the news, although I really must get on and make more use of the network! (Gazette 12 Aug.-1 Sep., p. 11)
- Also in networking news, apparently CILIP group on LinkedIn now has 1,000 members. I was quite sniffy about LinkedIn during 23 Things - maybe I ought to reconsider? (Update Aug. 2010, p.7)
- According to Update, Universities are going to 'talk tough' over big journal deals when they next come up for review. Journals pricing deals just make me grumpy when I think about them - I'm quite pleased that I don't currently have to manage them for work. (Update Aug. 2010, p. 4)
- Funding cuts and community engagement were the most heavily revisted themes, being the cover stories for both issues of Gazette. A Big Lottery report has found that 'community engagement takes time', which isn't a great surprise, but may well be good message to hear as libraries are looking towards the communities for increased support. A report from the Libraries Change Lives conference encourages libraries to create a clear message of what they offer and to make the library a valued place. (Update Aug. 2010, pp. 9 and 16)
- School libraries featured heavily in my reading. Given the work I (try to) do with schools, school libraries are of increasing interest. I note with alarm that the Cambridge schools library service has been closed, and read with interest tips from former School Librarian of the Year Anne-Marie Tarter on how to convince children that citation is important, and how to market the library and the librarians within a school. (Update Aug. 2010, pp. 6 and 28-30).
- Practical tips were also found in two articles about services for blind and partially sighted people. This is an area in which I have no experience, but the model of fining out users' needs and then meeting them as best as you can is one that any librarian can learn from. (Update Aug. 2010, p. 49, Sunrise 2010:2, p.5)
- Lastly, there's an article by yours truly in the latest issue of Sunrise, the CILIP East of England regional branch's magazine. Under the title 'The Way to the Stars' I give a brief run-down of the history of astronomy event I ran for the Cambridge Science Festival in March this year and a few tips for those thinking of organising events of their own. It should be available online in due course on the CILIP website.
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Cambridge Conversation (1)
This is the first part of my report about a discussion between health, academic, business and school librarians held in Cambridge on Tuesday 22 June as part of the CILIP Conversation. Part 1 is all about CILIP and part 2 is about the future of libraries.
Lots of the other participants have also reported: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What do we think about the Conversation?
CILIP asked us to say what we think will happen in 10 years time, but we really can’t do that; it’s a job for futurists. What we can do is to evaluate what has changed in the last few years, and how this might develop in the next 1, 3, or 5 years, and we could have been asked about this in more detail in the survey.
We really didn’t like the CILIP survey much ; it felt irrelevant and lacking in detail. Some of the questions just didn’t even make any sense at all, such as ‘do you think that expectations of your role are increasing’. We also wanted more detailed questions about what we want from CILIP.
What do we think about CILIP?
CILIP feels distant, remote and irrelevant to many - particularly those working in business, school and health libraries – it seems like Update and Gazette have little that reflects our working lives.
The principal of chartership is worthwhile, but there was opposition to having to remain a member of CILIP for life to retain it. Personally, I understand this objection, but I suspect that this is the case for most professional bodies and that it isn’t just a CILIP issue.
CILIP CPD courses are expensive. Many people were very impressed with the courses organised by special interest groups, at very reasonable prices, although it was noted that speakers for these courses are often only paid travel expenses. CILIP courses are much more expensive than those from other similar professional bodies such as the Museums Association, and they’re not reliably good enough for people to want to risk spending £400 to attend them.
CILIP’s building in London is very unpopular; issues regarding its costs and value have been addressed elsewhere.
We read Update and Gazette for the job advertisements, and some people (those training and chartering) try to read it all, but we don’t find much that is relevant or interesting to us. The job advertisements are sometimes for such poorly paid jobs that we wonder whether CILIP should be advertising them at all. It was also noted that it’s so expensive to advertise in Update and Gazette that many jobs are missing.
It was thought that there could just be one CILIP magazine, possibly delivered online only. (I have a lot of thoughts about the online magazines, and the CILIP website in general, but I’m saving them up for another post.) It was even suggested that the magazine format could be dispensed with in favour of personalised news bulletins. There is an e-bulletin feature already, but there’s not a lot of refinement to it.
So why do people continue to pay for membership? Some jobs do need chartered status, and for professionals without an LIS degree, chartered status is important evidence of competence. People couldn’t praise the special interest groups enough – they seem to make membership worthwhile.
We do want a professional body
We want it to advocate for us, and to have good PR abilities and a strong public and media profile. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors was mentioned; we’d all heard spokesmen from it on the TV and radio. We really want CILIP to have someone whose job it is to appear on Newsnight, instead of making excuses about how hard it is to face up to Jeremy Paxman.
We approved of Phil Bradley’s idea that it would good to see a proactive CILIP that gets things wrong sometimes, instead of seeming to sit back and let us get on with it.
The example of Micahel Rose advocating for children reading was made. Andrew Motion (chairman of the MLA) wrote in 2008 about libraries in a way that suggested he hadn’t been in many recently, but he has been speaking up for them in the last few weeks. His opinions may not be nuanced enough to capture all the issues that concern librarians and information professionals, but CILIP could benefit from having someone similar to make a public impact.
Lots of the other participants have also reported: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What do we think about the Conversation?
CILIP asked us to say what we think will happen in 10 years time, but we really can’t do that; it’s a job for futurists. What we can do is to evaluate what has changed in the last few years, and how this might develop in the next 1, 3, or 5 years, and we could have been asked about this in more detail in the survey.
We really didn’t like the CILIP survey much ; it felt irrelevant and lacking in detail. Some of the questions just didn’t even make any sense at all, such as ‘do you think that expectations of your role are increasing’. We also wanted more detailed questions about what we want from CILIP.
What do we think about CILIP?
CILIP feels distant, remote and irrelevant to many - particularly those working in business, school and health libraries – it seems like Update and Gazette have little that reflects our working lives.
The principal of chartership is worthwhile, but there was opposition to having to remain a member of CILIP for life to retain it. Personally, I understand this objection, but I suspect that this is the case for most professional bodies and that it isn’t just a CILIP issue.
CILIP CPD courses are expensive. Many people were very impressed with the courses organised by special interest groups, at very reasonable prices, although it was noted that speakers for these courses are often only paid travel expenses. CILIP courses are much more expensive than those from other similar professional bodies such as the Museums Association, and they’re not reliably good enough for people to want to risk spending £400 to attend them.
CILIP’s building in London is very unpopular; issues regarding its costs and value have been addressed elsewhere.
We read Update and Gazette for the job advertisements, and some people (those training and chartering) try to read it all, but we don’t find much that is relevant or interesting to us. The job advertisements are sometimes for such poorly paid jobs that we wonder whether CILIP should be advertising them at all. It was also noted that it’s so expensive to advertise in Update and Gazette that many jobs are missing.
It was thought that there could just be one CILIP magazine, possibly delivered online only. (I have a lot of thoughts about the online magazines, and the CILIP website in general, but I’m saving them up for another post.) It was even suggested that the magazine format could be dispensed with in favour of personalised news bulletins. There is an e-bulletin feature already, but there’s not a lot of refinement to it.
So why do people continue to pay for membership? Some jobs do need chartered status, and for professionals without an LIS degree, chartered status is important evidence of competence. People couldn’t praise the special interest groups enough – they seem to make membership worthwhile.
We do want a professional body
We want it to advocate for us, and to have good PR abilities and a strong public and media profile. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors was mentioned; we’d all heard spokesmen from it on the TV and radio. We really want CILIP to have someone whose job it is to appear on Newsnight, instead of making excuses about how hard it is to face up to Jeremy Paxman.
We approved of Phil Bradley’s idea that it would good to see a proactive CILIP that gets things wrong sometimes, instead of seeming to sit back and let us get on with it.
The example of Micahel Rose advocating for children reading was made. Andrew Motion (chairman of the MLA) wrote in 2008 about libraries in a way that suggested he hadn’t been in many recently, but he has been speaking up for them in the last few weeks. His opinions may not be nuanced enough to capture all the issues that concern librarians and information professionals, but CILIP could benefit from having someone similar to make a public impact.
Cambridge Conversation (2)
This is the second part of my report about a discussion between health, academic, business and school librarians held in Cambridge on Tuesday 22 June as part of the CILIP Conversation. Part 1 was all about CILIP and part 2 is about the future of libraries.
Other peoples' reports are also available: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What is ‘librarianship’?
There was some debate about whether libraries and librarians need to rebrand as ‘Learning Resource Providers’ or something similar, but this term seemed far too narrow. Maybe there’s something else we could call ourselves, or maybe we just need to be clearer about what librarians do.
One good summary of librarianship (or information professionalism, if you like) that we thrashed out was:
The emphasis was very much on personal interaction and support. The organisation of data can happen from anywhere, but user support and training is best done face-to-face, and one-to-one. This 1947 promotional film emphasises personal interaction in the role of the librarian. Why are we having to work to re-emphasise this now, when it’s surely never stopped being true?
This level of personal interaction and help needs professional staff. There’s definite concern about the de-professionalization of public libraries, and in a similar way about also the closure of government libraries: what impact will this have in the long term?
We discussed some of the ACRL predictions for future of academic libraries, in particular the idea that in 2025 there will be ‘no need to search’ (link to pdf page 16, item number 17 ). This ‘no search’ environment (we wondered if it would be something like foursquare, about which I know nothing) will surely require a lot of unseen work in the background, and it will need common languages and standards across all sources and platforms, and not continual re-invention of standards as we see today (apparently the Europeana project isn’t using Dublin Core standards for metadata but inventing some different standards [I've been corrected in the comments - Europeana are tweaking Dublin Core instead of using it straight, which is clearly better but still not ideal]). Librarians will have to keep interpreting what people say and want until the semantic web is very, very good indeed, and that won’t be soon! Users expect intuitive interfaces, and need to be shown that there are benefits to learning more complex search techniques.
In 5 years time...
We ended the discussion by trying to imagine the future of libraries and information services on a more manageable timescale than the 10 years asked about by CILIP. If you have thoughts about what your library or service will look like in 5 years (both best and worst case scenarios!), then please continue the discussion in the comments.
School Libraries
School librarians can be very isolated. They rely on local networks, feel distant from CILIP, and unrecognised by teachers. School budget cuts means that there may be no money at all for CPD.
School libraries will have to adapt to match evolving teaching methods and to provide tools to help students find what they need outside the physical library, as well as providing project collections of books for use in the classroom.
There are currently not enough computer resources, but this might change as increasing numbers have their own laptops. Even with their own computers they will need help to locate resources online, and in the physical library.
Academic/Faculty/Subject Libraries
Subject librarians will have to know their subject more so as to be able to provide tailored search and indexing services. They might not need to be the academic, or doctor, but will need to speak enough of their language not to sound stupid, but to sound reliable and useful instead.
Business Libraries
Publications need more detailed metadata, for example about the precise materials used in engineering. This has to be added somewhere in the process, but it will be a lot of work, and it’s unlikely that author or user tagging is the answer.
A Cambridge College Library
What can we do to improve the situation?
Other peoples' reports are also available: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What is ‘librarianship’?
There was some debate about whether libraries and librarians need to rebrand as ‘Learning Resource Providers’ or something similar, but this term seemed far too narrow. Maybe there’s something else we could call ourselves, or maybe we just need to be clearer about what librarians do.
One good summary of librarianship (or information professionalism, if you like) that we thrashed out was:
Librarianship is helping people to work what question they’re really asking.
The emphasis was very much on personal interaction and support. The organisation of data can happen from anywhere, but user support and training is best done face-to-face, and one-to-one. This 1947 promotional film emphasises personal interaction in the role of the librarian. Why are we having to work to re-emphasise this now, when it’s surely never stopped being true?
This level of personal interaction and help needs professional staff. There’s definite concern about the de-professionalization of public libraries, and in a similar way about also the closure of government libraries: what impact will this have in the long term?
We discussed some of the ACRL predictions for future of academic libraries, in particular the idea that in 2025 there will be ‘no need to search’ (link to pdf page 16, item number 17 ). This ‘no search’ environment (we wondered if it would be something like foursquare, about which I know nothing) will surely require a lot of unseen work in the background, and it will need common languages and standards across all sources and platforms, and not continual re-invention of standards as we see today (apparently the Europeana project isn’t using Dublin Core standards for metadata but inventing some different standards [I've been corrected in the comments - Europeana are tweaking Dublin Core instead of using it straight, which is clearly better but still not ideal]). Librarians will have to keep interpreting what people say and want until the semantic web is very, very good indeed, and that won’t be soon! Users expect intuitive interfaces, and need to be shown that there are benefits to learning more complex search techniques.
In 5 years time...
We ended the discussion by trying to imagine the future of libraries and information services on a more manageable timescale than the 10 years asked about by CILIP. If you have thoughts about what your library or service will look like in 5 years (both best and worst case scenarios!), then please continue the discussion in the comments.
School Libraries
School librarians can be very isolated. They rely on local networks, feel distant from CILIP, and unrecognised by teachers. School budget cuts means that there may be no money at all for CPD.
School libraries will have to adapt to match evolving teaching methods and to provide tools to help students find what they need outside the physical library, as well as providing project collections of books for use in the classroom.
There are currently not enough computer resources, but this might change as increasing numbers have their own laptops. Even with their own computers they will need help to locate resources online, and in the physical library.
Academic/Faculty/Subject Libraries
Subject librarians will have to know their subject more so as to be able to provide tailored search and indexing services. They might not need to be the academic, or doctor, but will need to speak enough of their language not to sound stupid, but to sound reliable and useful instead.
Business Libraries
Publications need more detailed metadata, for example about the precise materials used in engineering. This has to be added somewhere in the process, but it will be a lot of work, and it’s unlikely that author or user tagging is the answer.
A Cambridge College Library
In five year’s time the physical library with books in it will still be here. Students are currently very clear that they want to have the physical space to work in, and not even all new academic books will be available as e-books by then, never mind the older texts that are still needed.
Special collections are being digitised, but this can’t replace the importance of the books and manuscripts themselves, and will often lead to increased reader numbers through improved publicity. Digitisation also isn’t futureproof.What can we do to improve the situation?
- Collect evidence of what we do in order to prove our worth.
- Ask our readers and researchers what they want from libraries: this might include help with copyright, and with getting published, more detailed enquiry answering about specific items (see Greening the material text).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)