Extinction of Librarianship ( Professional Identity Crises)

Extinction of Librarianship (Professional Identity Crises) @

M S Sridhar*

We have been hearing about endangered species, tribes and languages. The list can be extended
to add some professions. Librarianship is one such profession speculated as endangered and is
often said that the profession is facing identity crises. Periodic reorientation to meet changing
needs is essential for every profession. In this sense, no doubt, librarianship is at crossroads due
to fast developments and changes taking place in the information horizon during last one decade
or so. At this juncture, some opportunists have taken extreme view and made hue and cry about
extinction of the profession. Futurology is like a hammer in the hands of people who could not
resist hitting wherever a nail is found. The essence of the issue is that whether libraries have
become redundant in view of recent developments. Or only certain functions and services of
libraries have become redundant with a strong need for repositioning the profession. If so, the
need of the hour is exploring other options and diversification as ‘life is not about limitations,
but about options’. This requires dynamic leadership to steer the profession out of such crises
with ground reality rather than flying with speculations.

Even after assuming, for argument sake, that libraries are on their way to extinction we need to
raise at least three questions: 1.Why and how such extinction is approaching? 2. Are the
functions and missions so far fulfilled by libraries (or at least significant part of them) are being
successfully taken over by new substituting agencies like the Internet? 3. Is there migration of
people (users and professionals) away from the profession? The first question leads us to
examine whether our libraries are no more required or no more relevant in the changed
circumstances. It is difficult to say that libraries are totally not required or relevant. But if any
citizen or a real user (for that matter ex-user of libraries) says so, then the individual priorities
(on his list of activities) have drastically changed and he is really not able to cope up with
pressure of time to use libraries. The requirement and relevance are certainly relative and keep
changing with time. After all one man’s information could be another’s noise! The fact is that
there always existed a large proportion of nonusers of libraries. In other words, through out
history, use of libraries is a minority event and large majority of population, in almost all
societies, bypassed libraries. It is an unpalatable bitter truth for librarians. Of course libraries
have been there as prestige centers, symbols of welfare measures and as insurance tools to
mitigate the feeling of future need for unforeseen information and knowledge. Libraries are no
more required entails that the group of non-users is bulging with more and more new nonusers.
Hence whether libraries are required/ relevant or not has to be answered by one-time users and
not by any of those belonging to large chunk of permanent nonusers.

The second question about the extinction of libraries is that whether the functions and missions
so far fulfilled by libraries (or at least significant part of them) have been successfully taken over
by substituting agencies like the Internet. It is amply clear that ICT has been an extraordinarily
aggressive technology. It is not sparing any sphere and it does not demarcate any boundaries or
categories as far as information management is concerned. Every moment, ICT invents,
reinvents and explores new possible ways and means of improving information services. As
against this ever dynamic explosive tool, librarianship with its long held traditions, inbuilt inertia
and self-created bonds is rather no match in adapting to changed circumstances. For ages, codes,
canons, rules, comas and even full stops have been the ‘sacred tools’ of librarianship. It is true
that library professionals are experts in classification and they are the first to create metadata.
But unfortunately, they did not aggressively create plenty of metadata and did not allow mixing
of metadata with primary data like what IT did. For over a century, library catalogues including
recent automated ones never allowed users to create their own personslised subsets like
M S Sridhar 1
Extinction of Librarianship ( Professional Identity Crises)

bookmarks/ favourites and play lists of IT. One main reason for the current state of affairs of the
profession is that libraries have been dedicatedly, rigidly and probably lopsidedly emphasized
select tools, schemes, means and techniques as the essence of the profession for ever. This mind
set and mass hysteria with stubborn resistance to change and wantonly made complicated tools
unfortunately relegated the core task of ‘managing services’ to a secondary position. Change
became forbidden and negative in the profession. Alas, it forgot that change also means progress
and growth! It is interesting to note that in a relatively new engineering college in Bangalore
with its 25000 books (1000 titles multiplied by 25 copies) a committed librarian tried to satisfy
all the canons of classification and assigned unique call number to each copy of each title and
made call number clearly visible on the spine of books. But he misses the fact that each shelf had
25 copies of the same title. Probably restricting classification to shelf level and stacking books
one over the other like in a book shop would have served the purpose better with more ease.

The last question on the probable extinction of the profession is about migration of people –
users, professionals or both. In a way this issue is closely related to and appears as extension of
earlier two issues. No doubt, there is lot of scope for diversification of professional work. Other
related works and services can be more effectively and comfortably handled by library
professionals than others. We hear discussions on some new rehabilitation options like ‘proactive
librarian’, ‘embedded librarian’, ‘invisible intermediary’ and so on. Hence any migration of
people, in whatever direction and magnitude, is good for the profession.

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@
“(Guest Editorial)”, SRELS Journal of Information Management, 48 (1) February 2011, 1-2.
*
Former Head, Library and Documentation, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore 560017. E-mail:
mirlesridhar@gmail.com

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