3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Joe Hodnicki, over at the Law Librarian Blog, pointed out post from Ryan Deschamps blog (The Other Librarian) where Ryan challenges librarians to personally rebut the 10 reasons he lists why librarians cannot claim professional status. Ryan's list of ten reasons is thought provoking, and meant to be a little over-the-top, but does note some of the challenges that librarians face when defending their profession. He's received nearly 100 comments on his post (some of which go through a point-by-point rebuttal), so he's definitely hit a nerve with librarians. As many of you may remember, I recently modified a Will Rogers' quote and said that "I'm not part of any organized profession... I'm a law librarian."

Perhaps the biggest challenge that librarians face is that we are such a diverse profession that it makes it very difficult to throw a rope around what we do and how we are defined. The term "librarian" has been watered down so much that it could mean one hundred different things to one hundred different people. It would be like defining the term "teacher" and placing everyone from "Sunday School Teacher" to "College Professor" under that term and asking everyone to justify "teaching" as a profession. I almost hate to reprint the list of ten reasons here, but here they are.... I'll discuss a few of the "professional librarian" issues following the list:

1. Librarians Have No Monopoly on the Activities They Claim
2. There are No Consequences For Failing to Adhere to Ethical Practices
3. Librarianship is Too Generalized to Claim Any Expertise
4. ’Librarian’ Assumes a Place of Work, Rather than the Work Itself
5. Peer Review in Librarianship Does Not Work Because There is No Competitive Process to Go With It
6. Values Are Not Enough
7. The Primary Motivation for Professionalization is the Monopoly of Labor
8. Accredited Library Schools Do Not Adequately Prepare Students for Library Work
9. Competing Professions Are Offering Different Paradigms to Achieve the Same Goals
10. Nobody Can Name a ‘Great’ Librarian

When Ryan says "Professional Librarian", that narrows the field down, at least in my opinion, to those who have a Masters' Degree in Library Science (MLS, MLIS, etc.) and work in a specific area of librarianship. I'll take specific issue with reason number three above that Librarianship is too generalized to claim expertise. My expertise is "law librarianship"; I have a MLIS and a JD (as do about 1/2 of those who are members of the American Association of Law Libraries - AALL); I work as a law librarian in a law firm, and; my expertise is in legal research and knowledge management. However, all of these are 'voluntary' skills and accomplishments, as there are no laws, regulations, or ethical requirements that prevent anyone that happens to work in a library, regardless of qualifications, to hold themselves out as a librarian.

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of this discrepancy is the fact that the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington does not have a Library Degree, nor was he ever trained as a professional librarian. Billington has done wonders for the Library of Congress since his appointment in 1987, but the fact that he's done great things does not diminish the fact that the highest post in the country with "Librarian" in the title is held by someone that is not a professional librarian. This would be like appointed someone that has never been a lawyer to the US Supreme Court. There's no law preventing a non-lawyer from becoming a US Supreme Court Justice, but it has never happened. I could be wrong here, so correct me if I am, but I believe that the Librarian of Congress has always been a "political" position and has never been held by someone with a library degree.

I'm being a little unfair in this example, as Billington's position is primarily one of obtaining funding and essentially being the equivalent to a Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a large organization. To be a COO in a law firm or accounting firm does not require you to be a lawyer or accountant. But on the other hand, COO's of law firms or accounting firms don't take on the title of 'lawyer' or 'accountant' either. Therefore, this tends to advance reason number four above that 'librarians' assume a place of work (the library), rather than a profession.

There are a number of valid issues raised by Ryan and his list of ten reasons, so I'm only scratching the surface with this post. I'm pretty confident that I could personally defend why I hold myself out as a professional librarian while admitting that the profession (especially through its professional organizations) needs to do more to enhance the reputation of the profession. Although it is frustrating to work in a profession that is constantly being asked to defend why it is still relevant in the age of Google, I still love being a law librarian and continue to do my part to keep the professional relevant and vibrant in this exciting time of ever expanding access to information.

Today's my last day in New York and I'm ready to get back to Houston where the bathtubs don't sit in the middle of my living room, surrounded by two walls of plate glass windows, overlooking a park full of joggers. As I mentioned earlier this week, a few bloggers were asked to come to NYC to take a fresh look at Wolters Kluwer (WK) IntelliConnect product and give them some feedback about what we thought about it. I'll give a more in-depth review later, but I did want to make some comments of what I thought about the people I met with yesterday. 

The meeting was held on the WK training floor, there were four bloggers including me, and about eight or nine WK folks. After a short introduction and an overview of the product, we started having a real conversation about what was good, what needed fixing, and where the product and market were heading in the future. All of us seeded to have had some lightbulb moments throughout the day where some of our preconceived notions were challenged and most of us walked away at the end of the day a little better understanding of each other. 

Wolters Kluwer is going through a transition right now where it is attempting to move away from being a 'holding company', to one that is integrating all of its different acquisitions into one platform.  As many of us remember, WK's IntelliConnect had a number of problems on its initial launch last year, and has been scrambling to regain its footing after stumbling out of the gate. I specifically  asked them if they understood the image problem they had from some of its users, and they all said that they do understand that, and that was one of the reasons they asked us to be there.

One of the notions I had to overcome was the fact that IntelliConnect is not a legal research tool in the same way that Westlaw or Lexis is designed. IntelliConnect is designed for 'power users' in specific legal practices. It was interesting listening to the conversations between the bloggers telling WK that they need to make changes in the interface to work in a way that younger associates expect their online research to look and feel. At the same time, WK kept coming back at us with the fact that the product was developed to work the way that their advanced users wanted... And that was to make it more like using the books than using online research. That brought up the question that none of us could find a simple answer to, and that was how do you balance the needs of researchers that on one end of the spectrum are traditional treatise-in-the-books kind of researchers versus the incoming Google 'give me a search box and let me go' type researchers? That seems to be the $64,000 question... Which is probably how much this bathtub in my hotel room costs.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post that discussed all the benefits that Twitter had over traditional listservs. I'm still a big advocate of Twitter and how much information I can gather in a short period of time, but listservs still may be the King of social networks when it comes to communicating with a professional network. I learned this first-hand this week when I asked for some help from my fellow law firm librarians.

I'm flying up to New York this afternoon to meet with the programmers, sales reps, and marketers for CCH's IntelliConnect product. CCH, part of the mega-legal-vendor Wolters Kluwer (WK), has asked a few law bloggers to come meet with them, review the product, give them some feedback about their product. [note: WK is paying for the flight and hotel room, and six-months subscription to a couple of IntelliConnect databases ... and hopefully dinner!!] I'll blog about the experience next week and let you know about my meeting with this group, and what I think about the product. The biggest problem that I had was the fact that I'm really not a power-user of IntelliConnect (although I do use it, and my firm has a significant subscription with the product in the Health Care area). In order to bone up on my ability to come to New York prepared to ask the tough questions, I turned to the Private Law Librarians listserv for help... and the help poured in!!

Within minutes of my sending an email to the list explaining what I was doing, I received about a dozen or more responses listing out problems and suggestions that my peers would like me to bring up while I'm there. Some of the issues were simple requests, while others pointed out significant issues that they had encountered with the product. Thanks to the folks on the listserv, I go to New York better prepared to discuss the product as a representative of not just a blog... but as a representative of a community of professionals that still monitor the 20th Century social networking tool called a listserv.

The experience reminded me of why I loved listservs years ago, and why they are still very relevant today. So listservs, please accept my apology for thinking that your importance in the professional social community was coming to an end. Although other social networks may try to replace you, you are still one of the best resources out there for gathering feedback from a network of people with a common interest.