Having recently celebrated the anniversary of a significant numbers of years as a librarian I thought I’d use this opportunity to look back on my time in the profession and think about how being a librarian has changed but stayed the same in those years.
When I joined the profession in the 80s The Pretenders were on tour and to conduct research students crowded round banks of card catalogues full of typed 5x3 inch (not metric note) cards which recorded the printed contents of the library in alphabetic and subject order. This was the only way to find the books they were looking for. Students also queued to photocopy pages from magazines which they had read but then wanted to keep copies of for the pictures or diagrams. Abstracts and indexes gave access to articles in printed journals and magazines. These indexes were subject based, took ages to be produced and were consequently always out of date. They were unwieldy and cumbersome. The internet had not yet moved from specific military to public use, and no one had dreamed of AI.
Librarians bought books and journals, classified and catalogued books and learnt to how use journal indexes and abstracting services and then showed students how to use these tools to find the material they needed. Reams of printed guides were created. Then, as now, librarians tended to support specific subjects since no one could be totally expert in the distinct support systems of all disciplines. I specialised in supporting law which had a set of subject support tools more esoteric than most and, amazingly, a small red computer connected by a modem to a telephone line. This was called Lexis. Its use was not rocket science but it was envied by librarians from other disciplines for its ease of searching as well as the accuracy of its results.
To say the internet changed everything in the nineties would be an understatement. Everybody could now find everything, all at once. Or could they? The idea of being able to quickly and easily locate good sources rather than unreliable ones became ultra important and so information literacy was, if not born, then certainly boosted. Yes, students could find loads of stuff but which was the good stuff? Which was the stuff to use as evidence in your assignment and get the best marks? How could you reference it to be certain you wouldn’t be accused of copying from Wikipedia?
Librarians needed to teach students how to research and how to present research to best effect in academic work. The lines between librarians and academic skills tutors began to blur.
In my opinion, research in the twenty first century is in some ways harder than it was in the last. There is so much material available that it can be a nightmare deciding which resources to rely on. The pressure is made worse by the immediacy of all the resources jostling for attention on a laptop. Interlibrary loans or document delivery can now be done worldwide within 24 hours and, even if you can’t get the source quickly enough, you can surely find an AI enriched summary somewhere on the internet.
So many years later and yes unbelievably, The Pretenders are still on tour. The one thing which hasn’t changed in all these years is the students and how good it feels to support and help them. I can honestly say that, at least since I escaped from the Cataloguing department early on, no two days I’ve worked have ever been the same. And that is the joy of being a librarian.
