It’s grad school application time, and I’ve gotten a few requests for thoughts about library school, what it means, if it would be right for people. I got some targeted questions, but I’ll try to answer them in a winding essay about what a librarian is. If any of that sounds interesting to you, then maybe you should consider a library degree.

Librarians are a wide-reaching class of professionals whose work spans from highly technical environments (writing search engines, optimizing inquiry languages, and the like) to people who do puppet shows on felt boards for toddlers. They data mine and story tell. Some work in school libraries, some work in law offices. Some answer urgent reference questions from doctors in surgery, others handle panicked freshmen writing their first term papers. Some teach. Some program. Some run libraries for rural communities of a few dozen people, while others work for national institutions.

Some of them come to library school as second or third careers, perhaps having worked in a library for decades. Some (like me) have had no library experience. Many come from social sciences, although others are engineers. Some are law-school dropouts.

Librarianship is one of the those awesome professions where you can come into it from anywhere, use your experiences and culture to grow and enrich your learning, and apply that knowledge to whatever profession/skill set you enjoy or excel at. Illinois’ GSLIS program is largely unstructured so you can try different areas of librarianship. You’re not committed (at the start or the finish of the program) to one specific track/profession. There’s no thesis requirement, because at the end of this trade school they don’t expect you to “know much”. Instead, go out in the profession, learn, publish and contribute back that way. (Many academic librarians are publishing faculty, maybe with tenure.)

Okay, so librarians come from anywhere and can go anywhere. But what are they?

Librarians are matchmakers. They recognize people’s information needs and provide avenues to meet those needs. They are problem solvers. They are treasure hunters. They know that every question has an answer, or path towards an answer. Librarians do not know everything (although many are very smart), but they know a satisfactory answer is somewhere out there. Librarians are like white-water rapids guides — in an overwhelming sea of information, they take wide-eyed tourists on a smooth ride, knowing what turns to take and which forks to avoid. Librarians are wicked smart on Jeopardy!

Librarians are preservationists. They are archivists, conservationists, curators, and docents all in one. They know what to add to their collections to serve their communities, and what to prune away. They understand the value of collecting and preserving history, even when they don’t have an immediate use for it. Librarians understand the duality between access and preservation – if something exists, but no one knows about it or can use it, why preserve it? (Think the warehouse in the end of Indiana Jones; it’s not enough to know the Ark is in there somewhere.) Similarly, if something has a lot of access it is preserved. (How many copies of the Declaration of Independence exist outside of the one in glass in the national Archives?)

Librarians hate complicated information systems, but they realize they are a necessary evil. They know the difference between a good source and a poor source, and although they use Google and Amazon and Wikipedia like the rest of us, they know about encyclopedias and indexes and other “reviewed” sources of knowledge. They, too, wish search engines were better and easier to use. Think of a librarian as someone providing an information finding service so that you, as the customer/researcher/patron can simply have your information need met without having to learn a card catalog, search language, web database, etc. Consider this: you can ask plain-language questions to a librarian and they’ll smile and help you. You can smile at the computer all you want, but it takes a different level of knowledge to make it give you what it wants.

Librarians are computer people. Even though they think they aren’t. Even though they hate computers, just like the rest of us. Way too often librarians sell themselves short as computer professionals, when in reality I bet they know their way around a PC or a website or a database leaps and bounds above the average Joe. Librarians are just humble enough to know there’s so much more they don’t know that they feel odd gloating about their repressed mad computer skillz.

Librarians are one of the few, last champions of civil liberties. They wield the sword of knowledge and the shield of indifference. They fight, on the local level, on the government level, and internationally for freedoms of speech, assembly, and take up the charge against injustices in these areas. This type of social justice is part of the profession. When you promote the freedom of learning, you sometimes make enemies of those who deny some knowledge, or challenge someone else’s right to discuss it. Librarians are, not surprisingly, pretty liberal although you can find blogs of conservative librarians. At some level, it’s about recognizing your community and finding the best role of information in it, even if that’s challenging.

Librarians know “information is a public good” and should be available to all, for all, forever. They are all too familiar with riding the line between providing services freely (free book rental, free Internet in the library, etc.) and having to exist in an environment where those trades are still commercial (libraries still buy the books, they still buy the Internet access). It sucks. Librarians, like school teachers and others in the public sector often feel like they take a vow of poverty and are constantly fighting for resources and professional development — but, like teachers, continue to do it because the reward from the job is greater than the paycheck.

Libraries (in whatever form you view them) are incredibly dynamic, changing environments. There’s a stigma that librarians are resistant to change, when instead their careers are defined by change. Everything changes. The topics, the materials, the technologies, the way you access the technologies. When I think of my library experience, I see card catalogs, bar codes, CD-ROM jukeboxes, dot matrix printers, laser printers, color laser printers, computers, the Internet, WiFi, websites, searchable catalogs, records, audio cassettes, CDs, DVDs, HD movies, books on tape, books on CD, ebooks, MP3 players, GPS devices, mainframes, personal computers, laptops, PDAs, smartphones …. Think about it. Every few years, the technology in a library changes – either to help librarians do their jobs better, or match the media de jour its clientele demand. Can you even check out an 8-track today? Probably, somewhere, along with a player if a librarian was doing their job right. Key point: if you don’t like change, stay out of the library.

Librarians are social. (I mean in addition to the karaoke and the drinking.) It’s a socially defined, refined profession. If you have a library, and I have a library, and we want to share (information, resources, lending, etc.) we need to reach a mutual understanding on what we call things, how we handle them, etc. So librarians get together and discuss it. Then something changes, or someone new gets introduced to the party, and they do it again. There’s no one right answer in librarianship, just good ideas that are shared, gain momentum, and carry the rest of the profession. I’ll even go out on a limb and propose that (since the days of the medieval libraries where it was one stop shopping for information) all advances in librarianship as a profession are social, information sharing between each other… standardized cataloging allowing for others to share or purchase catalog information, open access to catalogs, inter-library loans, consortia, the INTERNET.

(This point really rung home to me when I realized professional catalogers, when they have a questions about a material or an environment, don’t consult the cataloging tombs (oh and there are tombs, pedantic, sytantically wonderful tombs) but instead they ask what other people are doing. Consensus, surprisingly, wins.)

At this point, it shouldn’t surprise you that librarians are teachers. They love information, they love helping people use and find it. They love talking about what they do (natch), and helping others use what they’ve contributed. Librarians ask questions.

….

Except for illustration, I’ve neglected to define a library. There’s a preconceived notion of a small public library, or a Harry Potter-esque gothic academic library, or whatever but those are shallow representations of libraries in society today. Public libraries are hopping places, with DVD sections to rival those commercial shops, neon lights and playgrounds that could be out of FAO Schwartz, and coffee shops next to recital halls. College libraries are like the Apple store with more couches (and disturbingly less books, but those are preserved in off-site warehouses that are like meat lockers). But even those are obvious. The telling question is “What ISN’T a library?” Is the supermarket? The IT Helpdesk? Netflix, or TV for that matter? Even bars are libraries, that catalog their drinks into their classes, value them based on their cost and what the market will bear. There are experts to help you make decisions, suggest things you might not be aware of, and provide assistance. The environment is friendly, hopefully, and supported by food or comfortable chairs to make the visit inviting.

If you’re trained as a librarian, every situation becomes a library. The points I made above hit home almost everywhere. If they hit home with you, you might be the next great librarian!