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Recently, author Michael Crummey spoke at APLA. He started off by saying that he consulted with a librarian friend who advised him to never, ever start a talk to librarians by talking about a childhood public librarian who inspired his love of books and libraries. We laughed at that truth, but here's the thing…
Maybe we do need to hear more of this. Why? Because that's the only way we can win. Libraries – all libraries – are in an increasingly dire struggle for survival. Vendors can select our content. Cataloguing can be outsourced. Circulation can be automated. Help can be a call centre away. This isn't some far off apocalyptic vision, it's now. Would it be an academic library that encouraged intellectual growth and long tail discovery? Absolutely not! Would many stakeholders and decision makers see it as an acceptable alternative? Absolutely.
Academic libraries are expensive. We can never win the ROI game, nor can we prevail in monies or metrics. We cannot shout our value loudly and hope others will hear and accept it. And, we can no longer depend on the ivory tower to protect us; universities are facing the same challenges libraries are. We need to get in the trenches and ensure every single potential user of our libraries has a story that starts something like Michael Crummey's could have. We need to patrol study group areas (physical and virtual) and jump in with answers. We need to never be too busy to help that faculty member staring at where her print journal used to be. We need to understand it's part of our job to answer pleas for help to the Twitter universe at eleven at night. We need to pick up the phone and advise that wayward prof on how not to break the law when linking…before he's asked us. We need to accept that there is no such thing as going out of one's way for an academic librarian; rather wherever we go for our users is where we need to be. Librarians in an academic library need to accept the role of personal research hand-holder, of round-the-clock broken link fixer, of internet trawler looking for opportunities to help. Whether we're in public services or not, whether we're junior contract librarians or deans, we need to be not just service providers, but experience providers.
Am I saying that every librarian needs to be a superhuman 24 hour service machine? No (at least, not completely). We need infrastructure and support from administration to allow us to do this. But it's all about attitude. We spend a lot of time defining our profession, and more potently, pleading for outsiders to accept our definitions. If it is more than a job, if working at an academic library is more valuable to us than working in a call centre or cataloguing warehouse, then it also needs to be something more than a 9-5 set of assigned duties. A wise administrator once said to me that he never won his battles with facts and figures, but because someone at that table had an incredibly positive personal experience with the "library". We need to ensure that everyone has that same story to point to – it's the only way we have a chance of ensuring our survival. If you're not up for it, pretty please look for another job, because I definitely am not cool with that call centre thing.
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