The Librarian Of Today

Who Would Be a Librarian Now? You Know What, I'll Have a Go.

My friends laugh at me but training to be a professional librarian is a sort of calling – like becoming a priest, only with warmer business premises

Anonymous [The Guardian] | March 5, 2016

Who would want to become a librarian now?” asked an anonymous public servant on National Libraries Day, seeing before them a graveyard of dead libraries and old reference desks filled by volunteers. A valid question, and one to which I’ll reply: “You know what? I’ll have a go.”
I’m training to be a professional librarian, having just finished a lecture on “semantic web ontologies” and “linked data”, and sat dumbstruck in front of a “Dewey Decimal assembler” without a clue as to what I’m looking at. The course is challenging – it’s a three-year master’s degree that bites eye-watering chunks out of my wages. Why am I doing it to myself?
The fact is, I can’t not. It’s a sort of calling – like becoming a priest, only with warmer business premises. I can’t stand by and let public libraries sink. I won’t.

Source: http://knox.libguides.com/librarianship

<more at http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/mar/05/librarian-professional-calling-priest-degree; related links and articles: http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/feb/06/library-visitors-austerity-job-applications-loneliness (For many library visitors, I'm the only person they've talked to all day. As austerity creeps further into people’s lives, more are turning to libraries like mine for help with job applications or IT skills, or to stave off loneliness. February 6, 2016) and http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-age-of-google-librarians-get-shelved-1452461659 (In Age of Google, Librarians Get Shelved
A library-science degree can’t compete with online search, but we still have a role. January 10, 2016); further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics (Informatics Wikipedia article)>