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[Have a bonus entry in this series! - there might be some bonus episodes all throughout the year, depending on the stuff that comes across my feeds.]
In the Library With The Lead Pipe put up Vocational Awe and Libraries: The Lies We Tell Ourselves by Fobazi Ettarh. As someone in the profession, I read through this with a lot of nodding along.
The premise of the article is that working in a library is seen as a profession that one does because one is called to it, whether spiritually or as an extreme fit for one's personality, and not because it's prestigious (female-coded, supermajority-and-then-some women in the profession), or pays well (government job). Rather than advocate for libraries as to be respected as a place of professionals, library staff often lean into this narrative for themselves, especially when describing it to new people or when giving praise for the newest and most interesting services that we provide for people.
A librarian with training in Naloxone can save a life, but then that gets seen as a thing that library staff everywhere would want to do, and then it becomes something that library staff everywhere are trained to do, and then it becomes something library staff everywhere are expected to do. None of that comes with a corresponding increase in pay or respect, nor with a decrease in their other responsibilities. Because library staff are called to the profession. That's vocational awe. Vocational awe is also much of the library staff world getting abuzz about that same librarian that saved a life and wanting to be able to do that for themselves, because they too have people in their communities that overdose and could use Naloxone if/when they overdose in the library buildings or bathrooms. It elides the part where there are people overdosing in the library building, which is a problem that needs addressing on a community and societal level, rather than expecting librarians to help patch the problem by getting trained on using anti-overdose drugs.
The article itself is an excellent read on just these grounds, linking the modern library to the monastic origins of the profession and the associations with clergy and sacred spaces. Then it gets into the second segment, which is that the public library has a terrible history of siding with oppressors and working to uphold the ideals of white supremacy in the United States. Not just the refusals of libraries to give service to black and brown people, but continuing to contract with a service like Lexis-Nexis, which has been helping build a surveillance system that will try to guess whether a person is a terrorist or not and may use browsing in public places as part of their data-gathering. This is one of those spaces where I cuss out the unwillingness of the profession to seriously advocate for owning the content that they want to provide to their users, so that they are not at the tender mercies of the vendors and their ideas about privacy and data collection, and to figure out how to jam it through the very thick heads of the Congresscritters that the idea of only offering licenses for electronic and software content should be replaced with a law that says companies must actually offer someone the right to own the things they are buying, and that the price for owning should not be more than [X] percent more than just buying a license to use it. Yes, it would take time and effort and legislation, but that's an excellent spot for, say, the national professional organization to try and make inroads and legislative accomplishments.
In any case, the conclusions of the article points out that being situated as a calling profession makes it very easy for librarians to be taken advantage of, burnt-out, underpaid, and to remain a mostly white women profession, while pushing away and gatekeeping prospective library staff because they're not passionate enough about their (potential) job to be willing to accept all of these conditions as part of getting into the club.
This is all true, and yet, I do feel like there are good reasons for youth, children's, school, and teen services librarians to...at least want to work with those audiences. It's not about vocational awe in this case (although all of the female coding and majority-and-more of women in the profession is even more true of the divisions that work with children and teenagers), but a certain amount of practicality involved. You can learn how to give good services, programming, and collection development to an audience that you are indifferent to or hate, but that's a lot of effort to go through, and I can't say it would be good for your morale or feeling like you're getting paid enough for the work.
More importantly, though, at least to me, is the part where I see children and teenagers as a precious resource that's good for the library's continued existence. Not that you want to annoy too many people in your services area (but you will, because good collection development and access policies will annoy people), but if you turn a child or teenager off to the library, there's a good chance they're not going to return as adults. Except, maybe, if they have children of their own or they suffer an economic crash that brings them back to our doors. Children and teenagers are pretty perceptive about whether or not the adults in their lives actually like having them around or are just tolerating them for the sake of something else. There's also more than a few things that children and teenagers do that's developmentally appropriate for them to do, but that will generally annoy or aggravate adults around them. It takes significant amounts of self-control not to let animus creep into your decision-making when you're being exposed to something that's giving you negative impacts day in and day out.
Which is not to say that you have to be all sweetness and light around children and teenagers if you want to get into that part of the services. Because that would be essentially validating the idea of vocational awe as necessary and important for library staff, and to do that after I've spent all this time saying how vocational awe is a terrible idea would be more than a mite hypocritical. The awe part is not, in any way, necessary, and is still pretty harmful. Practically speaking, it helps in the customer relations part of the job if you're not actively opposed or entirely unimpressed by the people that you're supposed to be helping. So, it's entirely possible that while librarianship is still the profession that you'd like to be part of, you may want to steer clear of the family of youth or school services if you don't actually want to have to interact with them on the very regular.
A more traditional library school might do a better job of helping students get into the specializations that they are interested in, but the information school that I got my degree from were much more concerned with the information part of things, and how people related to their information needs. There were some parts of trying to figure out which parts of the information universe a person was interested in, but being a i-school instead of an l-school, their orientation was different. It's taken me doing an unofficial mentorship or two to pick up the skill of being able to help students figure out their specialization, rather than being able to apply my librarian skills to the question and get a good result. There's a lot you don't learn in library school.
In the Library With The Lead Pipe put up Vocational Awe and Libraries: The Lies We Tell Ourselves by Fobazi Ettarh. As someone in the profession, I read through this with a lot of nodding along.
The premise of the article is that working in a library is seen as a profession that one does because one is called to it, whether spiritually or as an extreme fit for one's personality, and not because it's prestigious (female-coded, supermajority-and-then-some women in the profession), or pays well (government job). Rather than advocate for libraries as to be respected as a place of professionals, library staff often lean into this narrative for themselves, especially when describing it to new people or when giving praise for the newest and most interesting services that we provide for people.
A librarian with training in Naloxone can save a life, but then that gets seen as a thing that library staff everywhere would want to do, and then it becomes something that library staff everywhere are trained to do, and then it becomes something library staff everywhere are expected to do. None of that comes with a corresponding increase in pay or respect, nor with a decrease in their other responsibilities. Because library staff are called to the profession. That's vocational awe. Vocational awe is also much of the library staff world getting abuzz about that same librarian that saved a life and wanting to be able to do that for themselves, because they too have people in their communities that overdose and could use Naloxone if/when they overdose in the library buildings or bathrooms. It elides the part where there are people overdosing in the library building, which is a problem that needs addressing on a community and societal level, rather than expecting librarians to help patch the problem by getting trained on using anti-overdose drugs.
The article itself is an excellent read on just these grounds, linking the modern library to the monastic origins of the profession and the associations with clergy and sacred spaces. Then it gets into the second segment, which is that the public library has a terrible history of siding with oppressors and working to uphold the ideals of white supremacy in the United States. Not just the refusals of libraries to give service to black and brown people, but continuing to contract with a service like Lexis-Nexis, which has been helping build a surveillance system that will try to guess whether a person is a terrorist or not and may use browsing in public places as part of their data-gathering. This is one of those spaces where I cuss out the unwillingness of the profession to seriously advocate for owning the content that they want to provide to their users, so that they are not at the tender mercies of the vendors and their ideas about privacy and data collection, and to figure out how to jam it through the very thick heads of the Congresscritters that the idea of only offering licenses for electronic and software content should be replaced with a law that says companies must actually offer someone the right to own the things they are buying, and that the price for owning should not be more than [X] percent more than just buying a license to use it. Yes, it would take time and effort and legislation, but that's an excellent spot for, say, the national professional organization to try and make inroads and legislative accomplishments.
In any case, the conclusions of the article points out that being situated as a calling profession makes it very easy for librarians to be taken advantage of, burnt-out, underpaid, and to remain a mostly white women profession, while pushing away and gatekeeping prospective library staff because they're not passionate enough about their (potential) job to be willing to accept all of these conditions as part of getting into the club.
This is all true, and yet, I do feel like there are good reasons for youth, children's, school, and teen services librarians to...at least want to work with those audiences. It's not about vocational awe in this case (although all of the female coding and majority-and-more of women in the profession is even more true of the divisions that work with children and teenagers), but a certain amount of practicality involved. You can learn how to give good services, programming, and collection development to an audience that you are indifferent to or hate, but that's a lot of effort to go through, and I can't say it would be good for your morale or feeling like you're getting paid enough for the work.
More importantly, though, at least to me, is the part where I see children and teenagers as a precious resource that's good for the library's continued existence. Not that you want to annoy too many people in your services area (but you will, because good collection development and access policies will annoy people), but if you turn a child or teenager off to the library, there's a good chance they're not going to return as adults. Except, maybe, if they have children of their own or they suffer an economic crash that brings them back to our doors. Children and teenagers are pretty perceptive about whether or not the adults in their lives actually like having them around or are just tolerating them for the sake of something else. There's also more than a few things that children and teenagers do that's developmentally appropriate for them to do, but that will generally annoy or aggravate adults around them. It takes significant amounts of self-control not to let animus creep into your decision-making when you're being exposed to something that's giving you negative impacts day in and day out.
Which is not to say that you have to be all sweetness and light around children and teenagers if you want to get into that part of the services. Because that would be essentially validating the idea of vocational awe as necessary and important for library staff, and to do that after I've spent all this time saying how vocational awe is a terrible idea would be more than a mite hypocritical. The awe part is not, in any way, necessary, and is still pretty harmful. Practically speaking, it helps in the customer relations part of the job if you're not actively opposed or entirely unimpressed by the people that you're supposed to be helping. So, it's entirely possible that while librarianship is still the profession that you'd like to be part of, you may want to steer clear of the family of youth or school services if you don't actually want to have to interact with them on the very regular.
A more traditional library school might do a better job of helping students get into the specializations that they are interested in, but the information school that I got my degree from were much more concerned with the information part of things, and how people related to their information needs. There were some parts of trying to figure out which parts of the information universe a person was interested in, but being a i-school instead of an l-school, their orientation was different. It's taken me doing an unofficial mentorship or two to pick up the skill of being able to help students figure out their specialization, rather than being able to apply my librarian skills to the question and get a good result. There's a lot you don't learn in library school.
