My wife, who is a law librarian with 30 years under her belt, believes it’s dying. Certainly it is where she works: she now spends 80-90% of her time doing web development. The office is gradually phasing out the library (i.e., every time money gets tight, the library gets hammered). The management expects the lawyers to do their own searches online. Only when it’s something difficult are her skills put to use.
I think medical librarianship is growing, like everything else having to do with health care. But as far as I’ve heard, that would be about it.
That’s pretty short-sighted, depending on what you mean. Using physical tomes to distribute written information will be as obsolete at the end of this century as using horses for transportation was at the end of the last. That’s not to say that there will be no books, but they will be for collectors and hobbyists. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if written language (written by or for humans to read) became obsolete in another few hundred years.
In the short term, I don’t see librarians becoming obsolete. But as more material becomes electronically distributed and algorithms become better at finding relevant information than people are, we will cease to need librarians.
Well, I have a different conception of my job than you do walrus. I see myself as an educator first and foremost (and my faculty status says my university does too). I teach people, on a one-to-one basis or a one to many basis, how to think about the information process from beginning to end. This involves everything from getting the student to realize what their information need actually is (this is much more difficult than you might think), then search strategy, then evaluation of materials, then synthesis and integration. In short, I teach critical thinking about information. No matter how good the algorithms get at cutting through the data smog, it can’t replace information literacy. Actually better algorithms would make my job easier because I could spend less time teaching the mechanics of the tools and spend more time on teaching concepts.
The very last and least part of my job involves the distribution of information. I’m not saying any of this as an indictment of you walrus, but I just think my profession is vastly misunderstood.
“Written language” obsolete? Then what will all that online information, and the algorithms to find it, be expressed with? Interpretive dance? Seriously, I’d like to know. Written language has been doing pretty well since the days of Sumer; I’d really like to hear an argument for its disappearing any time soon.
(If you’re thinking we’ll all just talk to our 'puters, like in the movies, may I point out that most people can read faster than they can talk intelligibly, so if we use that method we’ll be getting a lot less done.)
I also wouldn’t assume that “collectors and hobbyists” amount to a trivial market for books. Horses, as you mentioned, are no longer used for transportation, but there’s no lack of horses used for sport and entertainment; there’s a channel of nothing but horse racing on my TV, and betting on horse races is a big business. So even if people stop using books solely to distribute information, there could still be a lot of books being published.
Indeed, while books are moving online, web sites are also moving into books; I personally own several books spun off from web sites, and I read only today about the inaguration of a new book prize, the Blooker, for best book based on a blog or website.
I do agree that books purely for information, that is, reference books and some textbooks, are going to go electronic and stay there, as the OED and Encyclopedia Brittanica already have. But people don’t read, or go to the library, just to learn facts.
As someone suggested upthread, it may be that the future of librarians is in teaching people not just to find information, but how to find GOOD information, and how to recognize it when they find it.
Our HS librarian attends all teacher meetings, and I assume he’s on the teacher pay scale, which means he’s topping out at maybe 60K+ at his age, with a little extra school. Not too bad for a job with strict hours, two weeks off at Christmas, and soft summer hours.
BIG DISCLAIMER: I HAVE KNOWN AND CURRENTLY KNOW VERY INTELLIGENT EDUCATION MAJORS.
That said, a disproportionate number of the stupidest students at any college are Education majors. There’s one in particular who comes to mind who has literally made me stop saying “there’s no such thing as a stupid question”. (The fifth time in the same week that you have to show somebody how to insert a CD into a drive, it’s a stupid question— so help me Og he somehow BLEW UP a CD one time.)
They are probably the most high maintenance students in a college library. For every really bright one there must be four who are of either the “Delta Delta Delta can I hep ya hep ya hep ya?” or “Yeah… can you tell me where I might could find me a book or something? I’m writin’ on some dead English author, think his name was Tennessee Faulkner” ilk.
A major problem also is faculty members who are either
1- flat out Luddites (don’t know how to use the Internet, aren’t going to learn, and forbid their students to use DATABASES because they don’t understand and don’t care that a- databases are not the Internet and b- we don’t even GET the print subscription to this journal and that index anymore because we get it electronically
or
2- considerably overestimate their abilities at finding information sources online and misinstruct their students and then when they themselves are doing full fledged research can’t understand why an unformatted search for Ho Chi Minh is bringing up articles on Don Ho, Santa Claus and Monica Lewinsky.
So continually educating yourself and the user base is a major part of the job. My favorite part of the job is when a student needs to find this one piece of obscure information and they can’t and through hook and crook you find it for them, especially if the way you find it is through one of the “side streets and back door methods” (example: a student once needed scholarly research on “the disease where kids age really quick and die of old age when they’re like 10 and stuff” but she had no idea of the name of the disease, and though I knew exactly what she was talking about it I didn’t either, but I remembered that Jack Elam was in a horrible low budget movie about an old codger who adopts a space alien and that the kid in the movie died of that disorder in real life, so I typed Jack Elam on imdb and within three clicks I’d found the movie and the kid’s biography and the name of the disease [Progeria] and was able to go from there, and I have similar stories about finding info on African tribal patterns by remembering an episode of Carter Country or on 19th century sewage systems by remembering something I once read about a professional regurgitator, etc.- the whole James Burkes- Connections thing can actually come into play as a reference librarian [though 95% of your questions are the standard “where can I find criticism on Langston Hughes” and “I’m writing this paper on whether pot should be legal” stuff you can answer in your sleep).
I had a point when I started in but they confiscated it at Customs.
Well, this is disheartening. As I said, I work in legal publishing (as an editor), and our library was pretty much decimated as well. My company is part of Lexis and I have free access, and there are plenty of things I can’t find, because–surprise–not everything is online. Sigh. Would she suggest I stick with publishing and give up the law librarian dream?
I’m in my first semester of an MLS program, hoping to become a law librarian as well – I already have my JD. I could also see myself in a public library setting (just not as a children’s librarian). I’m reading this thread, getting disheartened, getting excited, getting even more disheartened… I’m so new to this field, and so unsure of exactly what lies ahead and what options are out there. I hope I haven’t made another huge mistake.
Seriously, though, it’s a field that offers many personal rewards, like really loving what you do, helping people find the information they need, or helping them find a new work of fiction that really entertains them.
On the other hand, you’ll be chronically short of time, money & supplies, will likely not have the respect of the people whose respect you most need (those handing out the money) and you will probably, at some point in your career, have to clean up something you’d rather not come into cintact with.
Oh, I feel your pain. Every library I’ve worked in has had that problem - we can try to educate the students, but it’s damned hard when you can’t educate their teachers! “I have to have it in print. The actual journal. I need a photocopy. My professor doesn’t take anything else.” “Tell your professor he’s a grade-A moron.”
And I assure you, that sort of thing is far, far worse when you get into public libraries. I know plenty of intelligent, aware, with-it teachers who work awfully hard to educate their students. I just never seem to be helping their students sort out the mess of an assignment that some real idiot gave them.
When I met my girlfriend last year, we were grad students under the rubric of “Information and Media Studies.” She was getting her MLIS, and I was getting an M.A. in Journalism.
One of us will be graduating in May with a full-time government position paying over $40,000. The other can’t find a job, and is constantly pitching magazine articles in the hopes of scraping together another month’s worth of rent. Guess who’s who.
I work in a library. A very large library, the largest in my state. Of course, living in Australia, this isn’t very large, and it only holds 1/5 as many volumes as the NY public Library. There is a lot less shelving staff than I expected, and the head librarians are more like managers. Most of the use comes from textbooks, and I don’t believe online text could ever replace a textbook.
But, the library has switched to being very online. Most of the journals are online. if it’s not online, you fill in a form online, someone scans it and sends it to you via email. So in that way it is becoming obsolete. But, the library is patronised a lot by students wanting somewhere quiet to study, and I don’t believe that will ever die.
I can echo a lot of the statements here about libraries changing. Yes, much more information is online, nowadays. However, it costs money to get the good stuff, and libraries are managing the connections between communities of readers and that information. Also, the way we serve needs is changing. In our library, we’re doing more answering of questions online, either by e-mail or by chat. We belong to s service that has chat for simple questions, operating 24/7, available for all. The libraries pool together to see that most of the hours are covered, and contract out the rest).
This hasn’t cut back on visitors to the library, though. Students come for a place to study. Many people come to use the PCs we have to gather information and to write papers (and to update MyPage entries, play games when we’re not looking, read e-mail, and other like occupations). And they come to the library because they know we will give them information. If they need to know when registration for classes ends, or if they can get tutoring for a class, or how to get their grades on-line, they know they can come to the library and not be put off. To the best of our ability, we give them, dare say it, “the straight dope”. As long as people need information, something like librarians will be needed.
Yes, she would (I asked). She says that there’s no future in either government libraries (with the exception of the Library of Congress) or private law firm libraries. Law schools are the last haven; she says they’ll take forever to give up the books.
Next week she has to cut $75K from a $150K library budget. Used to be around half a million, IIRC. She’s going to a conference of law librarians next week, where everybody will wring their hands, except her. She’s found true happiness as a webmistress.
I worked as a librarian for 13 years. I loved the work, but as a career it didn’t quite cut it for me. Over time I realized that there are chronically not enough openings for the career path I would have liked. Three years ago I switched careers because there are lots more openings in translation. The last two years of my library career I was a de facto translator already, because all the foreign language materials in the library that no one else could understand went to me. I translated enough information to catalog them. Once I’d become renowned as a translator, it was only a matter of time before better opportunities opened up in that direction. Suddenly I started doing way better than ever before in my life. I took it as a sign that maybe librarianship wasn’t my qismat.
P.S. On the subject of law libraries, my advice is to run screaming in the opposite direction as fast as you can. Based on my 2-year tour of Hell in the form of a law firm. Devil’s advocates, literally. I should start a Pit thread just for the unquiet memories of that evil firm. I would rather eat grass than work for lawyers again.
Please tell me you work at my U (I know you don’t). I’ve been trying to get my students to get your point 2 forever, I’ve given up on point one. And if I get another student who references Wikipedia in a “research” paper again I think I might go into a rage and end up on national TV. :smack:
Mom’s a university reference librarian. She spends most of her time helping students with the various electronic databases. Most of the scholarly electronic resources are by subscription, and those subscriptions are very expensive. They’re accessible to students online, and the library provides online help, but the students keep pouring in to the reference desk because it’s much easier to help in person. At the very least, librarians will be needed to maintain the electronic collection and provide search help.
Plus, there are old paper and microfiche resources that I rather doubt will ever be available electronically.
