Chinese Canadian Library Weblog

I believe most of us have encountered such a sad moment in our career path that when we told others about our professions, people would ask in a surprising manner “Really? Do we still need librarians nowadays?” or looked at us in such a sympathetic manner which you could understand the look meant something like “Are you going to spend the rest of your life stamping out books?” I usually take this kind of response as kind of ignorance and don’t bother to be upset with it. However, if this kind of attitude is held by your boss or your coworker, it is something that you cannot simply shrug off and walk away.

Two days ago, a volunteer brought over 200 student evaluation forms to the library asking me to enter the data to a database. She told me that the Academic Department Coordinator asked her to do so since “the library is so quite there”. Isn’t this typical that in most people’s eyes, the librarian is ONLY responsible for checking out books, so if there are not many students in the library, the librarian must have nothing to do but sit there idling? Personally I don’t mind helping with other departments, but since they sent out the forms to me based on an assumption that the librarian doesn’t have much to do, I consider this an insult to the library work. Moreover, my workload didn’t allow me to help out either. As I mentioned in my previous post, the library where I’m working now is a solo-librarian library. Right now the librarian is away for a 3-week vacation and I have to run the whole library by myself. Due to the limited resources of the library, I have to spend quite a lot of time processing interlibrary loan requests everyday. None of the databases we have access to provides fulltext articles, so normally the students would email me long lists of journal articles/conference proceedings citations asking for help to locate the articles for them, either from the open web or from our ILL supply library.

I decided not to do this data entry job in the end. It was not an easy decision to make at the very beginning, for I was a little concerned that other staff might think me unhelpful or nonflexible. But finally I made the decision not to do, for I regarded this an issue with the image of the library, rather than a personal affair. I emailed the Coordinator stating my willingness to help but due to my already full(if not over-full) workload, I felt sorry that I couldn’t help at this time. At the same time, I felt that I had the obligation to give a little bit ‘lesson’ to people like the coordinator who hold such a stereotypical notion of a librarian that we do have many important tasks to do other than checking out books. I wrote in my email about the amount of ILL requests I had to handle each day, and the backlog of cataloging we still had to catch up with in the library, etc.

Though I know it is an endless journey to fight against the stereotype of a librarian, and I know we cannot simply blame or angry with people for belittling our job, for we have our share of job in ‘educating’ people about the importance of our profession, still, from time to time, I feel frustrated when confronting with a situation like this….