The Future of Librarianship

Well, I went to the group discussion with CILIP’s Chief Executive Bob this morning. We were discussing our future: what are the big issues in librarianship, where do we see our profession in 10 years time, and how should CILIP change? It was very informal, lazing around on big comfy chairs and discussions in groups and so on.

My notes are rather fragmentary, and I was getting carried away so forgot to write and so on. Still, some of the issues / changes in librarianship the group I was in came up with were:

There are stereotypes of what librarians are all about, which need to be tackled

• We need to show people that being a librarian isn’t just telling people to be quiet and shelving books, it’s not something that you can just get volunteers to do like Oxfam shops
• The back office stuff is huge, but people don’t realise it’s happening
• We need to update the librarian brand
• Also, what being a librarian means is changing dramatically
• A new skill-set is required now

Information access is such a huge part of modern life

• Librarians have a key role to play, as we always have
• We need to become navigators not gate-keepers
• People think Google can find everything, but it can’t! Research into information seeking behaviour shows most users aren’t actually good at searching
• Librarians need to be indispensible

The Death Of Books

• Or maybe not
• Certainly big changes are happening, and some print media are moving online
• This could be a complete paradigm shift, as big as the invention of printing or even of writing

Money woes

• Financial constraints, Credit Crunch, etc
• Economy shrinking by 30%,
• We need to find things to cut as well as things to promote
• Public libraries are doing better because of the credit crunch- free books!

Then we discussed CILIP. It has bad points!

• Too expensive!
• It advertises some jobs, but it isn’t comprehensive
• The training courses are too pricey, need to be cheaper- or videoed and put online for free
• There was some Newsnight debacle recently- they wanted a librarian, but everyone high-up in CILIP was away from London and they couldn’t find anyone to go on. Hence they need to be more media-savvy, need to get up-to-date and have Library Spin Doctors
• Conversely, they’re too London-centric, everything revolves around their lovely offices in Central London
• University courses vary a lot in quality, if they’re going to say courses are CILIP approved they should do it more rigorously. Should they just do course accreditation and not chartership, focus their efforts? But then how to do centralised CPD- should library schools become CPD hubs?

But also good points

• It’s useful to have a representative for our profession to go on Newsnight / to talk to ministers
• People like having a central information source, although we argued over print or e-newsletters
• The page with all the 1-year graduate trainee schemes on is good (the job adverts could learn a bit from it)
• It has good potential, but needs to do a lot of become actually exciting and interesting and useful!

If you want to read lots of snappy 1-sentence versions of the meeting, see http://twitter.com/laurajwilkinson as she was tweeting the meeting.

If you want to join the CILIP conversation about our future, see http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/conversationsurvey/cilip.htm