Well, I'm coming up on one year and four months employed as a professional librarian. I find that people still have some pretty wacky ideas about who librarians are and what we do as a profession. Here are some facts that most people don't know about librarians:
- Being employed as a librarian typically involves completion of an undergraduate degree, an ALA-accredited masters degree in library or information science, and in many cases a second masters degree in a subject specialty. That's a lot of schoolin' (and student loans).
- At my institution, librarians are classified as assistant, associate, or full professors. Yes, we are academic faculty with the same responsibilities as the rest of the teaching faculty. We are expected to excel in the three areas of teaching, service to the library/campus/community, and to publish to meet the requirements for tenure. And we have to do this working 12 months a year, 40 hours a week. (Sadly, even tenured faculty librarians do not get summers off!)
- Librarians are your voice on the front lines of information policy. We have a code of ethics as a profession to defend your open and free access to information in any format without judgment. We defend intellectual freedom, fight censorship, and protect privacy. Heavy stuff.
- The next generation librarian is hip, focused on transforming libraries into the future, and very tech-savvy. We also tend to be blogging our experiences. Several librarians in my graduating class are at the cutting edge of technology and libraries and maintain fascinating blogs (Pegasus Librarian, Goblin in the Library) covering everything from copyright to Ruby on Rails, marketing to paper preservation.
- A recent survey of the "biblioblogosphere" reports on the demographics of blogging librarians. Apparently, the majority of us are: female, 31-40, Midwestern, MLIS degreed, work in academic libraries, and are blogging for the first time.
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