Legal Research

Are Librarians Invisible

By admin

There is a man hiding somewhere in this picture. It is Liu Bolin, an artist who can paint himself like a human chameleon and hide in plain sight.

At a conference recently a question from the audience made me think about this. The questioner thought that service from librarians needed to be “seamless and invisible”. I understand her point that about making thing easy for our users. But, have we gone too far? Has humility started to work against us? Perhaps we need to get much better at making the magic of librarians and our services more visible. If we make our professional service look as easy as Google, it sems to me that we encourage those replace-them-libraries-and-librarians-with-the-free-web suggestions and threats.

Other key professions have found ways make their value and services more visible and valued. Maybe we need to study them and add a few skills to our toolkit. Like I often say, most medical and legal information is online and you never hear anyone suggesting that we don’t need doctors or lawyers for that reason. What do we need to change? How do we make librarian magic more visible without messing up the magic?

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on February 10, 2011 (boomark / email).