Extinction of Librarianship ( Professional Identity Crises)

Extinction of Librarianship (Professional Identity Crises) @

M S Sridhar*

We have been hearing about endangered species, tribes and languages. The list can be extended to add some professions. Librarianship is one such profession speculated as endangered and is often said that the profession is facing identity crises. Periodic reorientation to meet changing needs is essential for every profession. In this sense, no doubt, librarianship is at crossroads due to fast developments and changes taking place in the information horizon during last one decade or so. At this juncture, some opportunists have taken extreme view and made hue and cry about extinction of the profession. Futurology is like a hammer in the hands of people who could not resist hitting wherever a nail is found. The essence of the issue is that whether libraries have become redundant in view of recent developments. Or only certain functions and services of libraries have become redundant with a strong need for repositioning the profession. If so, the need of the hour is exploring other options and diversification as ‘life is not about limitations, but about options’. This requires dynamic leadership to steer the profession out of such crises with ground reality rather than flying with speculations.

Even after assuming, for argument sake, that libraries are on their way to extinction we need to raise at least three questions: 1.Why and how such extinction is approaching? 2. Are the functions and missions so far fulfilled by libraries (or at least significant part of them) are being successfully taken over by new substituting agencies like the Internet? 3. Is there migration of people (users and professionals) away from the profession? The first question leads us to examine whether our libraries are no more required or no more relevant in the changed circumstances. It is difficult to say that libraries are totally not required or relevant. But if any citizen or a real user (for that matter ex-user of libraries) says so, then the individual priorities (on his list of activities) have drastically changed and he is really not able to cope up with pressure of time to use libraries. The requirement and relevance are certainly relative and keep changing with time. After all one man’s information could be another’s noise! The fact is that there always existed a large proportion of nonusers of libraries. In other words, through out history, use of libraries is a minority event and large majority of population, in almost all societies, bypassed libraries. It is an unpalatable bitter truth for librarians. Of course libraries have been there as prestige centers, symbols of welfare measures and as insurance tools to mitigate the feeling of future need for unforeseen information and knowledge. Libraries are no more required entails that the group of non-users is bulging with more and more new nonusers. Hence whether libraries are required/ relevant or not has to be answered by one-time users and not by any of those belonging to large chunk of permanent nonusers.

The second question about the extinction of libraries is that whether the functions and missions so far fulfilled by libraries (or at least significant part of them) have been successfully taken over by substituting agencies like the Internet. It is amply clear that ICT has been an extraordinarily aggressive technology. It is not sparing any sphere and it does not demarcate any boundaries or categories as far as information management is concerned. Every moment, ICT invents, reinvents and explores new possible ways and means of improving information services. As against this ever dynamic explosive tool, librarianship with its long held traditions, inbuilt inertia and self-created bonds is rather no match in adapting to changed circumstances. For ages, codes, canons, rules, comas and even full stops have been the ‘sacred tools’ of librarianship. It is true that library professionals are experts in classification and they are the first to create metadata. But unfortunately, they did not aggressively create plenty of metadata and did not allow mixing of metadata with primary data like what IT did. For over a century, library catalogues including recent automated ones never allowed users to create their own personslised subsets like bookmarks/ favourites and play lists of IT. One main reason for the current state of affairs of the

M S Sridhar 1

Extinction of Librarianship ( Professional Identity Crises)

profession is that libraries have been dedicatedly, rigidly and probably lopsidedly emphasized select tools, schemes, means and techniques as the essence of the profession for ever. This mind set and mass hysteria with stubborn resistance to change and wantonly made complicated tools unfortunately relegated the core task of ‘managing services’ to a secondary position. Change became forbidden and negative in the profession. Alas, it forgot that change also means progress and growth! It is interesting to note that in a relatively new engineering college in Bangalore with its 25000 books (1000 titles multiplied by 25 copies) a committed librarian tried to satisfy all the canons of classification and assigned unique call number to each copy of each title and made call number clearly visible on the spine of books. But he misses the fact that each shelf had 25 copies of the same title. Probably restricting classification to shelf level and stacking books one over the other like in a book shop would have served the purpose better with more ease.

The last question on the probable extinction of the profession is about migration of people – users, professionals or both. In a way this issue is closely related to and appears as extension of earlier two issues. No doubt, there is lot of scope for diversification of professional work. Other related works and services can be more effectively and comfortably handled by library professionals than others. We hear discussions on some new rehabilitation options like ‘proactive librarian’, ‘embedded librarian’, ‘invisible intermediary’ and so on. Hence any migration of people, in whatever direction and magnitude, is good for the profession.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------@“(Guest Editorial)”, SRELS Journal of Information Management, 48 (1) February 2011, 1-2.

* Former Head, Library and Documentation, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore 560017. E-mail: mirlesridhar@gmail.com

M S Sridhar 2