Happiness is a Warm Librarian

Everyone is going to get sick of my graduate school stories. Promise. When I was in library school, I was told two interesting things about librarians:

• When they have to leave a collection, librarians experience stress similiar to the stress people feel when they lose a spouse to death or divorce.
• Librarianship is riddled with sexual devients.

Whatever person told me this always looked at me, eyes wide, and said, sincerely, "No, really." To me, that means it's practically gospel. ;)

B. W. Cull (2005) published results from interviews with Canadian librarians and uncovered some things that I can see in myself and my fellow librarians. They aren't nearly as licensious, but I'm also willing to share them with my mother.

• (5) “With only one exception, the librarians expressed significant enthusiasm for information literacy instruction. Not only did they consider teaching to be a core activity of their libraries, and in many cases their first personal priority, but they expressed a whole-hearted belief in the necessity and importance of what they did. Simply put, for many of them, information literacy teaching was a passion.”
• (6) “…information literacy instruction is a core library function.”
• (9) Many librarians try to integrate various instructional methods in their teaching, often changing their approach based on the reaction of a class or an individual.
• (10) “When they elaborated on their instructional objectives, many librarians in this study pointed out that they focused mainly on teaching transferrable skills, as opposed to teaching only the specifics of using a particular database, print collection, or other individual information resource.”
• (13) The lack of library assessment in traditional information literacy settings means that librarians have less confidence that what they are doing is actually reaching the students.
• (16) While there is faculty support for information literacy training for students, there is often very little time in a traditional course to devote an entire class period to something that is not the main subject area.
• (16) “Several librarians said that they did not promote instruction to any great extent because they already had full teaching workloads.”
• (17) While web-based library instruction can free up some time, the time it takes to develop worth-while online components to information literacy instruction is a significant investment.

As we move into a time of economic uncertainty, I think there will be pressure on librarians to transfer some aspects of information literacy training to computer-only situations. How will this change our identities? Even in an strictly virtual educational environment, education is -- and has remained -- a service occupation because the best way to teach people is with people, even if those people are only designing the courses.