Academic Librarianship: Three Wishes for 2016

On the holiday party circuit, any mention that I am a librarian generally yields the same three comments. “I haven’t been in a library in years” (Said sheepishly). “The field has changed so much!” (Proclaimed confidently). “What is the purpose of a library today?” (Asked sincerely).

These observations generally come from busy academics who have easy access to the online riches of an academic library.

Long ago I developed my stock responses to the first two observations. “It’s ok if you haven’t been inside the library itself, as long as you are finding the information you need.” (Relieved nodding). “Librarianship sure has changed! Boy! And how!” (Triumphant nodding).

Alas, there are no pat answers to the question “What is the purpose of a library today?” Because pat answers are all that can be offered to someone holding a wine glass and hors d’ouevre plate, I generally blow past this question without fully addressing it. But this is actually an outstanding question, pointing to the existential quandaries facing academic librarians today.

Herewith, in the form of three wishes for academic librarians in 2016, is a more considered response to my cocktail party interlocutors:

1. Academic librarians will emphasize the overarching genius of the profession, not the buildings in which they happen to work. People believe that academic libraries are dying because they never need to enter them. Librarians periodically feed these fires, launching desperate campaigns to get people “back into the library.” This only reinforces the idea that a librarian can only work in a library, and is only concerned with helping people who pay a visit. In fact librarianship gave the world the conceptual tools for classifying and organizing information — whether that information comes in cuneiform, print, or bits and bytes. We are currently at risk of losing access to large swaths of born-digital content. Building upon timeless principles, digital librarians are in the vanguard of efforts to save this content. This is librarian work that does not need to occur in a library.
2. Academic librarians will perceive challenging tenure/promotion norms to be a useful service, rather than as veering out of their lane. Librarianship is a service-oriented profession. This often comes in the form of finding an elusive text or offering guidance about how to research a particular topic. This is all to the good, and will continue. But another form of service would be to challenge the incentive structures within academia, which reward intellectual inertia and inflexible publication formats. It’s time to move beyond the PDF. Such issues are very much part of the academic librarian’s purview; one aspect of stewarding the scholarly record is pushing for that record to be as incisive and dynamic as possible.
3. Academic librarians will embrace curation, not collection. Even for the wealthiest institutions, it was always a fool’s errand to attempt to collect all of the world’s recorded knowledge. There were simply too many books. Add today’s born-digital content, and it is clear that no library can “collect” comprehensively. Stop trying. The more fruitful path would be to build tools that preserve and make accessible a university’s own unique intellectual content. The library collection can evolve into a portal for viewing what is occurring on a given campus.

These wishes are interconnected. The librarian’s penchant for classification and organization will be essential to cataloging new forms of scholarship, and to reframing the meaning of a collection.

We are in the midst of an epochal shift in the meaning of academic librarianship. Any such transformation will be far from complete in 2016, but the existential conversations will continue.