What is a Librarian?

It’s Thursday, and that’s the day I go work in the Amon Carter Museum Library. So, in honor of that, I am starting a new three part blog series.

As a part of the blog where I talk about library and information issues, I want you, good readers, to have some background as to what a librarian does, and why I chose to be a librarian. This post, the first in a series of three, will describe what, in general, a traditional librarian does. The second post in the series will cover how one becomes a librarian, and the third will discuss in-depth why I chose librarianship as a career.

To be honest, the term “librarian” is much more broad than I initially thought. As a matter of fact, here’s a pretty good list of the roles of the librarian:

Public service librarian
Children's librarian
Reference or research librarian
Technical service librarian
Collections development librarian
Archivist
Systems Librarian
Electronic Resources Librarian
School Librarian
Outreach Librarian
Instruction Librarian

If you want to find out more about any of those specific roles, go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librarian. Suffice it to say that though the different roles are complex and seem very different from one another, the end goal is the same.

As you can see, there are many roles a librarian can perform, but all of them share one overall task in common: to connect people with the information they are seeking. It might be in a book, microfiche, in a database, or online. A librarian takes the massive amount of information at their disposal, and sorts out only what the patron needs. Helping people find the information they need to improve themselves – but I’ll talk more about that in the another post, where I describe why I chose librarianship as a career.

Of course, many people assume the librarians to be the bespectacled, dour, and generally grumpy ladies of so many films and TV shows. This is not the case. Just take a look at this:

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers, by Kara Jesella

Generally, librarians are creative, well-educated people. All licensed librarians must have a master’s degree, so all librarians share that minimum educational experience level. They have a knack for organization (especially for a cataloger) and also have good people skills (specifically for a reference librarian). Of course, librarians have to be well-read so they can be familiar with information on many topics. Although, to be honest, in searching for material for this post, I discovered that many librarians make very nerdy videos. But, what did I really expect?

To be fair, though, not all librarians work in traditional libraries – some are freelance, some work for corporations, government, or even in prisons. I never had any idea how broad the field really was until I started researching it as a possible career field. As the amount of information in the world increases, there will be a greater and greater demand for people who can connect people with the information they need.

Jason Dean


Even Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock knew what a great and challenging career being a librarian is: