The other night in class, someone mentioned how they told a customer at their work that they were going to grad school to be a librarian - to which the customer, who works partime as a career guidance person - why do you have to go to school for that and with computers will there even be a need for librarians? It also sparked off a discussion in my class and I've come to the understanding that not too many people realize what exactly it is a librarian does. I think this is partially why libraries and librarians have a difficult time justifying resources they need, and why funding is always quickly cut.

In my mind, the term "Librarian" is akin to "Engineer" - in that while we all belong to a certain field of study and a "way of thinking" - there are 1001 different variations of the position. Just as one can be a mechanical, electrical or environmental engineer so can one be an archivist, reference librarian or work in acquisitions. On top of that, Librarians seem to have many more support duties fall on their shoulders because - well - who else will do them to maintain a Library. Librarians need to have an understanding of business if they want to be able to manage the day to day operations of a library such as managing payroll, paying for the building costs like heat and electricity, balancing a budget and paying for new acquisitions and publications. Librarians need to be tech savvy as they are often called upon to do digital reference work, manage online journal databases, manage the library's terminals and network and preform various HTML duties just to name a few. Basically - a librarian is often expected to wear a multitude of different hats - even more so in smaller settings such as school libraries where it's often one person who does it all.

I think most people think of librarians based on their rememberance of what their initial point of contact with librarians were and from what they experience within a library - which is usually going in, asking for help finding a book and then checking the book out. I think a good analogy would be wondering why someone who works for the Sears corporation would need an advanced degree, because how hard is it to stock shelves and run a cash register? The don't think of the massive back end of the Sears corporation like the CEOs, CIOs, Marketing Department and all the other individuals who work for the company.

This is why it is important for Librarians to make the public aware of what it is we do in the first place - and how important and diverse our duties are. We need to take steps to change the opinions that people have that all librarians are responsible for is checking in and out books, shelving books and telling people to "shhh" if they get too loud. They need to understand that we are training to be CEOs, Marketing Reps, Customer Service reps, Information Technology Specialists and a whole slew of other positions - because we have to be. And we have to be librarians on top of that.