PAGE TURNERS
by Marylaine Block
I've been taking a bit of a break from ExLibris because I've been immersed in writing profiles of a whole bunch of interesting librarians for Library Journal's 2005 Movers and Shakers issue. And one thing I can't help noticing is this: a striking percentage of the movers and shakers are accidental librarians, who'd never even considered the profession until they worked as library pages or paraprofessionals.
Which means that the people they worked for did something very right.
There are, after all, two ways you can treat your student workers and non-professional staff. You can make their work seem like mindless drudgery: put barcodes on these books and magazines, shelve these books, make these interlibrary-loan requests, retrieve these magazines from storage. Tote that barge, lift that bale.
Or you can show the workers the context for those tasks, how they fit into the service mission of the library, and how they benefit the library's users. You could: tell assistants who are inputting the ILL requests that this is just one of the ways the library helps instructors do research for their dissertations or books; tell students who are scanning articles that this is one of the ways the library helps instructors plan their courses; encourage students who are shelving reference books to dip into them and see the kinds of information that are not always available on the net.
We could rotate our library assistants and student workers through the library's departments, so they have the opportunity to observe the entire library operation and see how each position contributes to the library's mission. They should have the chance to see professional staff in action: the exquisite choreography of reference librarians juggling multiple questions while simultaneously helping a child find her mother who wandered off and showing patrons how to use the databases; the preparation and presentation of story hours; the planning and updating of the library's web site or digital collections; the way the special collections librarian helps people track the history of their family or home or parish; the thought that goes into planning library programs and events; technical services' relentless insistence on helping users find library materials in the ways they expect to find them.
We could, and should, give our student assistants and paraprofessionals the sense that they are part of a team in every department they serve in. We could, and should, encourage them to ask questions whenever they don't understand the whys and wherefores of what we're doing. We could, and should, encourage them to offer their own ideas.
If their ideas are good ones, that we put into place, we should make a big deal out of it. How many libraries have annual awards for paraprofessionals and student workers? How many have awards for best ideas of the year?
And we could talk to our student assistants and paraprofessionals about librarianship as a career. We should explain why we went into the profession, why we stay with it, the astonishing variety of careers and clienteles embraced in the word "librarian," and the educational path we pursued to get there.
If they show even the faintest hint of interest in the career, we could, and should, be mentors. We could, and should, tell them about relevant workshops, conferences, and certificate or MLS programs. We could, and should, subsidize training for our paraprofessionals as well as our professionals, with released time at the very least, but preferably with reimbursement of expenses as well.
I know people will tell me this is totally unrealistic. Why should any library director waste time and money unselfishly advancing the profession as a whole when library budgets are too strained as is? What's in it for them?
Everything.
Loyalty, for one thing. I couldn't help noticing that the librarians who were nominated for "mover and shaker" by 8 or 9 different people were the mentors, the ones who did the very things I'm talking about here, and led the nominators to embrace librarianship.
Increased understanding and support, for another. Because even if they don't choose to become librarians, they will, as citizens and taxpayers, have a better sense of the value of this particular public investment.
And a better-functioning library. People who believe there is a possibility for professional advancement do a better job. Paraprofessionals who understand the library's mission and how they contribute to it do a better job. Paraprofessionals who believe their work and their ideas are respected by management do a better job.
And if coincidentally, we create a future for our profession in the process, wouldn't that be a pretty nifty dividend?
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COOL QUOTE:
One of the freshmen in my Dante seminar just came to me, agog. I find that agogness is in increasingly short supply these days, but this man was certifiably agog — and with good reason. He had just had his first encounter with, as he put it, "a real librarian." She — for this real librarian, perhaps unlike the ersatz ones he had been dealing with all this time, happened to be female — she had, rather like Beatrice herself, shown him a new heaven and a new earth. He was loaded with books, bibliographies, and JSTOR printouts. Though it pains me to admit it, he appeared to have learned more about his subject in that hour than he had in the previous thirty-six hours of heavy rap directed by a famous medievalist. Education no doubt can be suggested in the classroom; but education happens in the library.
John V. Fleming. Libraries, the Princeton campus's unknown repository of sexiness. Daily Princetonian, January 17, 2005. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/
01/17/opinion/11826.shtml
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