new skills, same as the old skills

A while back, Meredith Schwartz of Library Journal emailed me (and a whole bunch of other folks much smarter than me) to ask my thoughts on skills that future librarians will need. The article came out a few days ago and is a nice list of skills that are important for all librarians. Some of my comments were included in a section at the end about academic librarians.

Just for kicks, and in the interest of full transparency, below is what I was asked, and my full answers.

Questions:

What do you want library schools to be teaching that they’re not already? What do you expect librarians to have to do in the future that’s not already part of their job description?

My Answers:

First, 2 qualifiers

1. I can’t pretend to know the breadth and depth of what library schools are teaching now, so I really wouldn’t want to presume to tell them what they should start teaching.
2. I have only worked in research libraries, so my answers are from that perspective.

For me, there is considerable continuity in the most important skills for librarians now and into the future – curiosity and the ability to understand the role of the library in local and global context. Since my experience is all in big research libraries, I think academic librarians will need to understand the contours of what I very much hope will be a more open scholarly communication system and how to help students and faculty navigate that system to discover, use, and create scholarship.  I think librarians will have to develop new ways of evaluating scholarly objects and of teaching students how to do so.

It is possible that at some universities, librarians will need to take more active roles in supporting faculty profiles and in helping scholars put together the data needed for tenure and promotion reviews, for example. Subject librarians need to be able to learn not just the literature of the fields they support, but also the research tools and methods used – not as experts in any particular literature or method, but as generalists who have a broad sense of a field. Catalogers or metadata librarians will need to understand how the metadata they create and maintain is likely to be used (by humans and by machines) – I think this is more important than knowing any specific metadata schema.

In terms of supporting students, I’d like to see librarians be active in quickly putting together resources and activities to help students respond to and understand current events. In other words, I would like to see things like The Charleston Syllabus project be the rule, not the exception; and be led by librarians. What does that mean for the skills librarians need in the future? Same skills as now – ability to quickly discover, describe, and organize resources with a sensitivity to the audience – plus some skills in understanding social issues from multiple perspectives, skills in critical consumption of media and data, and skills in teaching those skills.

Bottom line for me – now and into the future, I’m excited about librarians who have a good grasp of the big picture. I’d like to see hiring libraries assume more of the burden of teaching specific skills to new librarians, and let library schools prepare new librarians for what will surely continue to be a dynamic, complex, agile environment.

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If I had a second chance to answer, I would add something about librarians needing to understand the ways in which structural discrimination and inequality (systemic racism, white privilege, heteronormative patriarchy, etc.) operate and how they affect not only our patrons but also the ways in which information is created, distributed, organized, and accessed.

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