If everyone is not too tired of this subject, may I add my two cents?
Several years ago, I was hired to perform abstracting and indexing
duties for an international consulting firm. The firm was creating an
in-house knowledge base, and I worked for their insurance industry
practice. As this database was being implemented firm-wide, I was
invited to participate in a meeting at their world headquarters. During
the course of this meeting, representatives from the various practices
spoke about the work being performed by their "librarians," work which
varied widely from practice to practice. As they spoke, I got the
impression that many of these "librarians" were in fact support staff
people only, such as summer interns or secretaries, an impression which
was confirmed when I asked the room at large to explain to me what they
meant when they referred to "librarians." At that point, I said, "I
would appreciate it if you would reserve the title of 'librarian' for
those who are professionally qualified to hold it. A librarian holds a
graduate-level degree."
I'm not sure if this made me the most popular person in the room, but
one immediate result was that I was named to the database design team.
Most of my work on that team consisted in educating the rest of the team
members in the necessity for controlled vocabularies, paying attention
to copyright issues when indexing third-party materials as opposed to
their own in-house work, the importance of maintaining database
integrity, and the issues involved in maintaining and distributing print
copies of the mateirals. At the time, it seemed that I was beating my
head against a stone wall, and the initial attitude prevailing in the
company was that non-librarians could enter information and maintain
this database. However, about a year after my part in the project ended,
I ran into one of the young firm associates with whom I had worked. He
informed me that the company had discovered, through hard experience,
that their associates and support staff indeed could not maintain this
database properly, and the firm was literally scouring the country for
librarians, with the MLS, to do the work.
Yes, folks, it does make a difference if you have an MLS, but only if
you yourself respect the hard work (and expense) you put into getting
it. It is true that some have earned the title "librarian" through the
very real contributions they have made to the profession, with or
without an MLS; however, that was not the case in the experience I cite
here. This was a case of corporate managers who were totally clueless
about our profession bestowing this title on people who in no way were
qualified to hold it, either through education or experience. My
insistence on the MLS being a requirement for the title of "librarian"
was based on the knowledge that many in that room had no idea that
librarianship is (a) a science, or (b) a graduate-level discipline. I
believe this underscores the importance of the concept of a process of
certification to be set up, perhaps jointly by the ABA and AALL, which
will define what a law librarian is and what the criteria should be for
that title. But it should not be a process to exclude; rather, it should
provide mechanisms for professional recognition and development for all
who work in law libraries, degreed and non-degreed alike.
Off the soapbox ...
Ann Davidson
dls@hslc.org
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