Following on from my earlier post about image and perception, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we perceive ourselves in the profession, and how others perceive us from outside it.

But first, an anecdote. Last week I went to the dentist and it set me to thinking. I have a good dentist, professional and skilled, and snarky, in the way that the best dentists seemed to be. And he was oh so very cranky at me for not looking after my teeth as well as he thought I should - amazed and annoyed that I wouldn’t spend the time to floss three times a day. And it occurred to me that, being so embedded in his profession, so caught up in what he does everyday, that he had forgotten what it was like to be on the other side. It wouldn’t occur to him that his patients might value their time differently, and not want to dedicate a half hour a day to their teeth, or that they might not know the best and most effective ways of brushing and flossing. As a professional in his field, dealing with these issues every day, they are of the utmost importance to him, and he couldn’t imagine anyone else feeling otherwise.

I can’t help but think that in the library profession, particularly within law firms, that we tend to be blinkered in the same way. Dealing with our work everyday, we can’t help but value it very highly. And we should value it - we’re providing a professional service to the users in our firms. But I just don’t think our users value it as much as we do. And not just in the general, ‘oh those silly lawyers, they don’t know half the work we do for them’ kind of way, but in a more tangible way, I don’t think that our work is as immediately important as we would like to think it is. So much of what we provide, particularly in the way of raw data, needs to be filtered and refined in some way - usually by an overworked PSL or trainee - into something more relevant for the fee-earners. Whilst we have the skills to find the information, and provide somewhat of a refined product, we generally don’t have the skills to interpret it, nor the place within fee-earning departments to have the knowledge of exactly what is needed and when. What we provide is important, yes, but it’s often a raw product, and not the end in itself.

I think that much of our frustrations within firms stems from this - it’s not that the lawyers don’t value what we do for them, but that they often don’t know what we do for them. Our research and work feeds into many aspects of the firms information flows, but the source of this information is rarely acknowledged. Our information arrives in their inboxes or on their desks seamlessly or silently, and they, understandably, don’t really know the work that went into getting it there. And most lawyers, unless they have had a lot of experience with a good librarian, won’t know what we can offer and what skills we have. They will hold faint memories of librarians from their university days, or maybe from their days as a trainee, not knowing that we can give them much more. They don’t know, and they wouldn’t even think to ask - it’s just not within their sphere of interest. They feel that they need to know the details of what we do as much as they need to know exactly what their finance or IT or HR departments do.

Buried in our work, and knowing it’s value so completely ourselves, we complain that people don’t value us, but don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why that might be. We need to step into the minds of our users and think about how they gain their perception of the library. What do we do for them that they can see? That they can’t see? Where does the information that we provide flow throughout the organisation? What can we do to make our presence more visible and more valued? What can we do to educate people in the services that we provide? When do we need to step back and realise that what we’re providing isn’t as important or valued as we think? And what are we going to do about it?

How do you all feel about this? Do you think that we are placing an unrealistic expectation on our users to value us? Or do you think that your firm or organisation values your service as much as you would like?

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I swear I’ll get around to writing a post about the BIALL conference (no, really, I promise!), but other things have cropped up, and have led me in other directions. And one of the issues that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, particularly on the back of the conference, has been that of the public perception of librarians.

Now I know that everyone likes to talk about this a lot, with the ‘oh, but no one understands us and everyone thinks we’re just glasses-wearing, shushing, school-marms in tweed’. Which, arguably, is still the public perception to an extent. (Oh the joys of telling people that you’re enrolling to do your masters in librarianship! The rolled eyes! the confused glances! the requests for private shushing sessions in the stacks! Laugh a minute, I can tell you) But there’s another issue in this whole image malarky that really irks me. And that’s that only public librarians exist. In the public eye there is only one way to be a librarian, and that is in a public library. Well, maybe university librarians at a pinch, but only the one’s that sit on the reference desk, not any of the ones that work behind the scenes. And public librarians, well, I don’t think they represent the profession as a whole. They do a good and valuable and important job, and one that I wouldn’t do for love nor money, but they only represent one facet of a profession that has so many different aspects.

I’m curious to watch Hollywood Librarian when it gets a more general release, but I am kinda disappointed that (as far as I can tell) the only side of the industry that’s being represented are public librarians. Which is not to say that public librarians aren’t important, nor that it’s not a good place to start changing public perceptions (where better to start than with what people already know). But just that it’s a bit frustrating to realise that it’ll be a long time coming before there’s any sort of public recognition of the work that the many kinds of special librarians do. Corporate librarians and medical librarians and one person librarians and legal librarians and all of those myriad information professional jobs that don’t come with the word ‘librarian’ tacked onto the end. I can’t help but think that it’s terribly important to not just modernise our image, but to broaden it (I didn’t even know that special librarians of any kind existed until I started my masters). How are we meant to meet changing needs, and tackle emerging problems, in all disciplines and areas, when all people see us capable of is running an (admittedly very modern and progressive) public library service?

I think that changing the perception of librarians and information professionals in any way can only be a good thing (hey, it might even help get us higher wages one day!), but I think changing the perceptions of the whole of the profession can only be a good thing as well. And I think that it has to come from within. I hate that when we introduce ourselves to people (and I know we mostly do this - I frequently do, and then kick myself later) we sort of cringe and say, terribly apologetically, ‘Oh, i’m a law librarian’. You can almost hear the tacit ’sorry’ tacked onto the end. As if that’s not a good enough response! (hey, we could be introducing ourselves as a lawyer! far more cringe-worthy I’m sure). We have all this rhetoric about being proud of what we do, and standing up for the profession, and we talk the talk amongst ourselves, but put us in front of an outsider and we apologise for ourselves every time we discuss it. And this has a knock-on effect in everything we do (you think a managing partner is going to pay attention to your department if you can’t even believe in yourself? I don’t think so). There is such a broad scope of information professional roles out there, and I’d like to see librarians (information professionals!) not just embracing them, but advertising them. Promoting ourselves and our skills. Letting people know that we exist, that we do a highly skilled and kick-arse job, and that they should know about us!

Now, I’m not proposing any answers here, as I don’t have any to give. I don’t know what to do about it. What do you all think? How do you represent the profession? Do you cringe and apologise? What do you think we should be doing to try and broaden the perceived definition of librarian?

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