CILIP Graduate Day Notes + Slides

Realising your potential: rising above

the stereotypesCILIP Graduate Open Day 2009,

Slides & Notes

Ned Potterwww.thewikiman.org

Realising your potential: rising above the stereotypes

Not a real advert, but it might be how we are perceived outside the profession

WE know it isn’t true - but we’re fighting people’s preconceptions all the time

I’m Ned Potter, digitisation coordinator for Leeds Library

I provide key materials online for the students, via the VLE – a job I could do without ever really setting foot in the library building

Yet I carry the baggage of associations – I am defined by the building I work in however little time I spend there

We’ve escaped the physical confines of the library, without being able to escape the preconceptions which go with it

I’ll be talking about: what the preconceptions are, why they are important, and what we can do to change them

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Didn’t realise how much was written when I started

Entire books have been written on the subject. From back in the 80s - or as recently as last year, such as You don’t look like a librarian! Shattering Stereotypes and Building Positive New Images in the Internet Age by Ruth Kneale,

I couldn’t get hold of it, even on inter-library loan – shame libraries don’t stock it…

We’ve been preoccupied with this for a while, and why not? We have a role in teaching and educating our users these days, and no one wants to learn from someone they don’t respect

While teachers + social workers are often demonised in the media and nurses, computer geeks and others often get a very 1-dimensional portrayal in popular culture, no other professions seem to have quite the range of negative stereotypes, from such a broad range of sources, that we have to endure

We’re all familiar with the most common clichés

Last year in the Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, Maura Seale explored this area in detail. She came up with 5 major categories of librarian in mass media, popular culture, and public perceptions

Personally I might add to that list, ‘The Bibliophile Librarian’ who loves books so much they really don’t want to share them with anyone, let alone members of the public, and a colleague of mine also suggested ‘The Kindly Librarian’ – an elderly man or woman who meets an unhappy child and, perhaps remembering their own experiences growing up, frees them from the bullies by allowing them to enter the world of their own imagination…

Seale does capture the main portrayals well, and it’s worth examining them in a bit more detail. Old Maid is dominant stereotype – what I was referring to in the ad

Frumpy, sexless, sat behind issuing desk, oozing unhappiness

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Seale also points out a ‘Young Maid’ derivative of this – potentially attractive but: “their appearance also indicated repression in some way.”

Idea of repression is important: in Doug Highsmith’s examination of librarians in comic books he notes that Batgirl’s librarian alter-ego dresses in such a way as to heavily disguise any physical attractiveness she may possess

We’re all familiar with the moment in the film where the Young Maid shakes out her bun in slow-motion, removes her librarian’s glasses, and affects a swan-like transformation into the love-interest of the hero

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Library Policeman is the person who takes delight in punishing library users. For lateness, noise-levels, or just anything at all

Building is important in this definition – it is because the library is their domain that policemen can scare people who wouldn’t normally look twice at them in the street

Perhaps we could be encouraged to think these two things are directly connected? It’s because they are marginalised by wider society that they take delight in exercising authority in their own building

Extract revenge with petty grievances – fond of humiliating users (Seale also describes the policeman as a know-it-all figure)

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She also mentions a Stephen King story – The Library Policeman. Look it up – it features a sinister figure who assaults the hero for late return of book. Turns out he molested the hero as a child for the same offence. Also features Old Maid who is a sort of mosquito-esque monster who sucks the life force out of children’s eyes to make sure they are well-behaved. She later kills the policeman who interrogates her, kills herself and comes back as a ghost in order to continue working at the same library!

Suddenly the ‘boring’ stereotype doesn’t seem quite so tough to endure…

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Librarian as Parody takes us into murkier waters. This involves being fully aware of the stereotype, and either playing up to it or becoming an exaggerated opposite

Example of the latter is the film The Librarian in which the macho hero is, to quote Seale “a sexy, adventurous librarian with two love interests.”

An example of the former is the Nancy Pearl Action Figure

Nancy Pearl is a cult librarian figure in America, works for Seattle Library, appears on talk-shows, author of Book-Lust.

Has her own action figure as seen on the slide; comes with own stack of books. Most controversial aspect – push to shush function

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Is this an example of librarians appropriating the stereotypes for themselves, subverting them by embracing them, undermining them with kitsch librarian dolls? Or just pandering to and perpetuating the stereotype?

(Interestingly, the toy-maker responsible for the doll offered two alternative actions – one was the shushing, and the other was having hair in a bun which could ‘pop off’. This bun idea – proving just how entrenched the bun is as part of the librarian’s armoury of stereotypes – was dropped for technical reasons and because having two such clichés was considered over the top…)

Generally the shushing action is funny. But there is an over-arching issue here which is that it perpetuates the stereotype – any librarian as parody figures draw attention to the stereotypes and further engrain them into the culture (even if they treat them ironically or otherwise try to subvert them) so part of me sees the doll as a bad thing

It takes a popular librarian, famed for her mass appeal, who promotes a positive image for the profession…and reduces her to just another Old Maid / Library Policeman hybrid, stamping out the fun one shush at a time

But by thinking this I’m conforming to the joyless librarian stereotype!

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Moving on down the list – the inept librarian is not inept at their job, it must be stressed. They are inept at life. They are socially inept, awkward, or confused about modern life

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The HERO Librarian is more positive portrayal, but can descend into parody

Interestingly, in Seale’s summary of what others have written, she notes that Rupert Giles, the librarian from Buffy is characterised by some as inept and others as heroic. Although Giles is friendly and elegant, and his library and his knowledge have apparently saved the world on countless occasions, he is still seen as sometimes befuddled and out of touch.

Crucially he also inhabits a sort of Victorian ideal of a library, all dusty shelves and wooden cabinets full of old books. He has no familiarity with Information Technology at all, really…

You can buy an official Buffy the Vampire Toy Library:

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Here is a picture of it. Is this good? Kids playing at being librarians should be a positive thing, right? And yet look at it – old fashioned books, a globe on the table, candles in the windows! And not a computer in sight…

Even a relatively positive portrayal of a librarian, such as Giles, is obstructive to our users seeing us as we really are. And little Johnny and little Jane are going to get an awful shock if they grow up wanting to be librarians because of playing with the toy Buffy library set as kids, and then on their first day they have to deliver an Information Literacy session to 20 Google Generation students, using cutting edge screen-capture technology, podcasting, and the Virtual Learning Environment!

Technology is perhaps the one thing which runs through all the modern library jobs – customer services, the systems team, the VLE team, the cataloguers, the e-Resources Team, the Digital Repository – they aren’t defined by any one thing, but all use technology to some degree

And yet people like Buffy’s Giles reflect exactly the opposite! Which brings us neatly to…

Do the stereotypes matter at all? Some, like Nancy Pearl, would argue that perhaps they don’t.

I wanted to know how my colleagues felt about the way in which Information Professionals are perceived, so I devised a brief questionnaire and advertised it in the staff bulletin. Clearly this was important to people, all across the age range, as there were 50 responses within a week

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I first asked if they thought Librarians were portrayed fairly in Popular Culture. 88% said no.

I asked them if they thought there was any truth in the library stereotype

As you can see the majority felt it was no longer relevant to the modern professional

There was also a section for comments, and this is where the strong reactions came in.

One person said:

Later I asked if there was anything we could do to improve our image. Responses included:

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All responses were anonymous, but the survey software allowed me to see that the three comments in the last two slides were from three different people who clearly felt along similar lines

It isn’t that they don’t believe the stereotypes are unimportant, as such – rather that they don’t think people like me should be putting so much emphasis on it in papers like this!

However, it is my belief that the stereotyping issue is significant enough that we do need to confront head on. Because ultimately it interferes with our ability to deliver a service.

I asked Library staff at Leeds if they felt we received sufficient respect outside the profession

Only 8% said ‘Mostly’. The largest group said ‘Not Really’ - exactly half. More than one person commented that lots of people don’t know it is a skilled profession at all, or that you can qualify in it

That lack of respect results in a less successful information provision. How? Because they don’t think we can help them. They don’t expect us to be purveyors of cutting-edge technology. Nor do they expect us to be able to teach them how to use it

One study in 2004 saw only 27% of respondents choose ‘Computer Literate’ to describe Information Professionals. And this was a ‘tick all that apply’ answer, so to put it another way – 73% of respondents didn’t think we were Computer Literate! That’s a disaster considering what we do in modern libraries.

All this is reflected in a study of the Google Generation, conducted by the BL and published last year. It’s available on the British Library’s website. 89% of today’s college students will use an internet search engine as their starting point for academic work, just 2% begin from the library website

To add insult to injury, a higher percentage are satisfied with results from Google than from those pursuing a librarian assisted search

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The Report also established that such is the library’s association with ‘The Book’, students are often unaware of the electronic resources their library owns or subscribes to (often at great expense). Or worse still, they are aware of them but don’t believe the library to be responsible for providing access…

We Information Professionals are the experts in information, and we help facilitate knowledge. It is vital our customers respect us in order for us to help them most effectively – that is the main reason why perceptions matter.

There is another reason too – the greying of the workforce. In 2006 Alan Danskin noted that ONE THIRD of the cataloguing workforce in the US will retire by the end of next year.

And in this country, many customer-facing library staff who have made library work their career are retiring, to be replaced by people for whom the job is more transitory – graduates from other disciplines only looking for temporary work in a library, for example

These retiring staff need replacing. And at the moment, insufficient numbers are being attracted in to a profession wrongly seen as boring. This alone is a convicting argument for why our image really does matter

So: we’ve established that librarians are unfairly portrayed by mass media, and that largely the stereotyping is negative. I’ve explained why I think we can’t just adopt an attitude of ‘we don’t care what you think of us’, as negative perceptions effect our service delivery and recruitment to the profession

So what can we do about it? It is quite hard to imagine any kind of coordinated strategy at all. Certainly not one which is crass and self-defeating

A librarian promoting road-show? TV Advertising? A Reality TV show set in a library? All seem to have the potential to do more harm than good, so a ‘stunt-based’ approach doesn’t seem to be the answer

Cynthia Shamel does suggest a coordinated and highly developed marketing strategy in her paper Building A Brand: Got Librarian? It is too comprehensive to go into detail here, but we can take a quick look at it. Some of the things she suggests might be quite far beyond what most of us are capable of doing, for example:

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Pretty serious stuff. I presented an early version of this paper before, at the New Professionals Conference in July. I said that I didn’t think I was going to be writing for business week, or chatting with the guy who invented the internet, any time soon – and that perhaps this kind of thing was beyond what most of us are capable of

But I was chastised by CILIP’s head of Training and Devlepment, Penny Simonds, for my lack of ambition. She said the kind of things Shamel mentioned are exactly the kinds of things we should indeed by doing. Since then, I’ve come round to her way of thinking a bit more. In my defence, what I meant was that we have to start with more attainable goals, so as not to scare people into thinking the problem is completely beyond us. We can then move onto the grander schemes later on

But we should be trying to ally and associate our work with the other leading and innovative players in other customer-focused industries, and we should be getting positive stories into the Media. An example of this is the University of Leeds Library SShhh…! Bag.

Leeds as a University is big on eco issues, and has won all sorts of Green Awards. The library was worried about the amount of plastic bags they were giving out to help people carry books, so they came up with an alternative, green solution

The Eco-Friendly Sshhh bags are made of jute, which biodegrades well, and are produced for Leeds by a carbon-neutral company

They come in about 20 different colours, released in limited runs, and they’ve proved a staggering success – more than 15,000 have been sold and they’ve become a must-have fashion accessory

The Guardian ran a story about them, including interviewing the librarian whose brain child they were. It mentions the Facebook Group set up called "I have a Sshhh bag and am therefore amazing!!!" And it mentions the website set up to track Ssshhh bag ‘sightings’ all over the world

Here is a picture of the map

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(each of those is a sighting, and when you click on it you see the picture of the bag in situ. That’s why the bag in the previous slide is on a bridge in Venice…)

Another important part of the ‘media’ side of things is to embrace all forms of media and communication to let people know what Information professionals actually do

Examples of this include the Library Day In the Life Project in which bloggers from all over the world wrote posts about what they do on a particular day. It’s an annual thing, and each year one week is set aside for the project – anyone and everyone can blog about one or more of the days in that week. It allows a wider acceptance of the fact that what we do now in modern libraries is really nothing like what we used to do and what the stereotypes would have you believe…

An initiative just launched basically today is the Library Routes Project. This was created by me and a couple of other bloggers to document how and why people got into the profession. Particularly pertinent to you so do go and check it out – the Wiki contains links to articles and blog-posts on people’s library roots (how they got into the sector) and their routes (the jobs they’ve had and how they got their current position)

It will make interesting reading for you, but it would also be great for you to contribute – if you’re thinking about entering the profession, write about why.

Projects like these can help deepen the understanding of what we do, and help attract people to the profession by letting them know that whether you ‘love books’ has really got nothing to do with anything in the modern Information Professional’s world!

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Cynthia Shamel has some other great ideas from her article – she suggests having marketing as a core module in library school programmes; not just marketing your service but marketing ourselves as information professionals

She also emphasises the importance of position librarians as “the primary conduit for the transmission of information from wherever it exists to wherever it is needed”This sounds a bit like what we already try and do, but Shamel is talking about wider public perception:

In the same way everyone knows they need an accountant for financial advice or a lawyer for legal guidance, they must thinking first of a librarian when they want authoritative information

Shamel ends her paper with the following:

I agree with what she says, except possibly the part about exploiting the stereotypes, about which I’m undecided…

Ultimately it is down to us – and particularly to you, as the next intake of professionals – to ensure others recognise the importance of what we do, that we don’t conform to the more negative stereotypes and that others see that the nature of Information provision and information

work is changing

Those outside the profession are struggling to catch up with who we really are and what we really do in the 21st century, so we must update them whenever we can – as Shamel says, using every opportunity and means available

There is an old sporting cliché – you are only as good as your last game

This applies to us – we’re only as good as our last customer interaction. Every single thing we do must be customer focussed, positive, and reflect the role of the modern information professional

We have to be nice when we’re not feeling nice, and remember that the point of the library is to serve a community of some kind. In the academic library, I actually believe it is better to let one or two students get away with things and basically take the piss out of you, than to clamp down hard on all rule-breaking and condemn the whole student body to a joyless library experience

That is NOT the opinion of my employers!

But customer interaction is basically the main weapon we have in our armoury to shake off the old associations that cling to the library

All this is summed up two quotes, one from Esteve-Coll and one from a colleague of mine, Dan Pullinger:

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Documents

CILIP Graduate Day Notes + Slides