50 Years of Librarianship: Parting Thoughts

June 2025: Fifty years ago this month, my new wife (and library school classmate) and I, equipped with brand-new master’s degrees from Drexel University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, loaded most of our possessions into our Volkswagen Beetle and set out from Philadelphia for Washington, D.C. I’d been hired as a Library of Congress intern, with the Civil Service rank of GS-9 and an annual salary of something like $11,000.

Last December, as I contemplated renewing my contract to write for Information Today, Inc., I realized this anniversary was approaching. Having retired from full-time work in 2018, I decided that this would be a good time to stop writing as well. And yet, I couldn’t resist the idea of one more article by way of farewell. So here goes.

A Variety of Jobs

Professionally, the journey from that June 50 years ago to today has led from the Library of Congress to the MITRE Corp., a premier systems research, analysis, and engineering organization, to the Catholic University of America, a unique academic institution. It was a privilege to work at each of these organizations and to work with smart and dedicated colleagues at each one.

Although I only ever worked for those three organizations, I’ve done a lot of different jobs:

Cataloged Russian-language books
Helped produce and distribute a computer-output microfiche catalog of library materials for blind and physically handicapped readers
Used early commercial online information retrieval systems Dialog, Orbit, and others, specializing in literature searching on technology- and social science-related topics
Introduced digital content (in the form of CD-ROMs on a standalone desktop computer) into a library collection
Managed a technical report microfilming and copy-on-demand service
Helped design and implement a first-generation corporate intranet; coded HTML pages using a plain-text editor
Negotiated and managed contracts for enterprise-wide access to digital library resources
Supervised corporate records and archives services as they implemented computer-based systems to manage digital and analog resources
Reinvented library reference as a network of customer-funded embedded research specialists/account managers, backed by more traditional library user services
Researched embedded librarianship; analyzed its implementation, success factors, and challenges; shared findings via publications and presentations
Taught librarians-to-be at the graduate level (and some undergraduates too), specializing in management, marketing, services to library clients, and the values and philosophy of library service

It’s been a career that in many ways mirrors the evolution of library services, and it’s afforded plenty of opportunities for learning and thinking about the profession along the way. Here are a few random distillations of some views I’ve come to hold. They’re under the headings of Technology, Information, Libraries and Librarianship, and Management.

Technology

I spent many years working with technological utopians: very smart people who believed that the next generation of technology would solve the world’s problems. Not only that; some of these visionaries believed it would all happen tomorrow. In self-defense, I eventually came to the view that technology doesn’t actually solve our problems—it just creates new ones.

The world we’re living in today has been shaped to a great extent by those new problems—the unintended consequences of advances in information technology. Maybe, as a culture, we’re coming to the end of the era of naïve techno-optimism. Technology assessments need to find a middle course between that naivety and Luddism. Here are two guiding concepts I suggest becoming familiar with, if you aren’t already, and keeping well in mind: the theory of diffusion of innovations and the Gartner hype cycle.

Diffusion of innovations highlights that no matter how wonderful the new technology is that we introduce today, people won’t all adopt it all at once, and some may not adopt it for a long time. It means that librarians, as service providers, still need to take into account the needs of the people who won’t adopt it today, or tomorrow, or the next tomorrow …

The Gartner hype cycle cautions us that it’s typical for those involved with early-stage technologies to oversell their merits, and that often there’s a backlash when the hype doesn’t come true—yet still the innovation may be worthwhile in the long run. Thus, librarians need to temper both their enthusiasm and their despair over technological innovations and act accordingly.

Together, these principles make the case that investments in early-stage technologies are risky, but may be worth the risk in the long run. Each organization has to assess its own appetite and tolerance for risk and innovation, and it must strike its own balance.

Information

The debate about the relationship between librarianship and information science has been running for the past half-century. Are librarians passe? Are information scientists/specialists their successors? Let’s start with the premise that librarianship is very much alive (more about that later) and is, if not all about information, then a lot about information (often in the context of education). Thus, a sophisticated understanding of information (as distinct from information technology) is important to librarianship.

Unfortunately, the dominant view of information in the library profession is what Yuval Noah Harari in his 2024 book Nexus calls “the naïve view of information,” which holds that “in sufficient quantities information leads to truth, and truth in turn leads to both power and wisdom” (p. xv). When librarians are taught that information-seeking is a matter of filling in gaps, or that the antidote for bad information is more information, that is the naïve view of information. When we proclaim with John Milton in his “Areopagitica” pamphlet of 1644, “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” we are advancing the naïve view of information.

We have failed to incorporate insights of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics into our thinking and practice, and that failure has limited our effectiveness. Specifically, the 1974 work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (“Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases”) and others (see 2011’s Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and the eighth edition of Max Bazerman and Don Moore’s Judgment in Managerial Decision Making from 2012) document the many biases that work against rational thinking and influence how people process information.

For one example, when we encounter information, how often do we seek out and cherry-pick information that reinforces what we already believe, as opposed to rationally considering all of the evidence? And another: Advertisers, propagandists, social media companies, and individual influencers have figured out that it’s content that arouses strong emotions, such as fear and anger, that makes an impression, sticks with us, keeps us engaged, and provokes reaction—and they use that insight to keep us from thinking.

Our failure to recognize the insidious factors at play in human information processing has been especially damaging to our efforts to promote information literacy and combat misinformation. Too much of our information literacy teaching assumes rationality on the part of our audience. Because it doesn’t confront their underlying cognitive and emotional challenges, it fails to connect. One of the most important roles librarians can play is to advance rational thinking and information literacy, but in order to be effective, we need to deepen our approach.

Libraries and Librarianship

Fifty years ago, most people would have defined a librarian as someone who worked in a library. Today, if you ask people to define a librarian, they would say that she is someone who works in a library. And “she” is the right word; then as now, we are predominantly women.

I’ll leave it to others to quantify this, but it’s my impression that the power dynamic has shifted in the profession during these last 50 years. That is to say, women are no longer confined to being largely the invisible assistants to male leaders, but hold a far greater proportion of visible, powerful leadership positions. In library school 50 years ago, for example, nobody ever mentioned Belle da Costa Greene—when I taught in library school a decade ago, it was my colleagues and students who had to educate me.

As for the relationship between librarians and libraries, I don’t think we’ll get past the idea that a librarian is someone—that is, anyone—who works in a library any time soon. There are two reasons for this.

First, after a period when the techno-optimists were declaring the total virtualization of libraries, the library as place experienced a resurgence. It seems likely to endure, albeit in the face of a general know-nothing, anti-learning attitude currently sweeping our culture. Librarians will continue to work in libraries. But at the same time, there’s been a noticeable shift toward librarians getting out of the library: teaching in classrooms, visiting institutions, and embedding with project groups and organizational units that need their expertise. We’ve become much more community-oriented than we were 50 years ago, and so we exist in a hybrid reality. Some new development may come along to upset this balance, but I hope it continues.

Second, the profession continues to be ambivalent about the value of education for librarianship. “What I didn’t learn in library school” articles are always popular. Many librarians think that a liberal arts education plus a year or two of library experience are all you need. I am not one of them. While there are exceptional individuals, and some of the ambivalence is justified by weaknesses in some library science curricula, I continue to believe that a properly designed library education confers insights not easily obtained in any other way. If conscientiously applied, it contributes to more effective performance and better library services.

Management

The great majority of librarians work in organizations. Management skills are essential to the delivery of library services, as they are to any aspect of organizational performance. I spent most of my career as a supervisor/manager, and I expect most master’s-degreed librarians still do. I never took the available management course in library school, and I expect most students still don’t. For years, I went along, managing by the seat of my pants and with the benefit of some in-house training, but one of the smartest career decisions I ever made was to go back to grad school as a mid-career librarian and get a second master’s in management. Then, when I transitioned into full-time teaching, I had the privilege of teaching the library school management course I had never taken. Along the way, I’ve developed some strong views.

First, there’s a lot of bad management around. I attribute this to a number of factors. One is that many managers overrate their management skills. They don’t think they need to improve, so they don’t invest any effort in development. For example, in my experience, managers think they do a great job of communicating with their staff—and the employees consistently say their managers do not communicate enough. But more than that, the fact is that management is hard. It calls for a multiplicity of contradictory skills and characteristics; it’s a balancing act, a tightrope walk. The ideal manager is flexible yet firm, personable yet coldly rational, gentle yet confrontational, detail-oriented yet visionary, open yet reserved … you get the picture.

None of us is all of that, which means that being a manager is one of the most challenging, interesting, and occasionally rewarding career paths a librarian can take. Unfortunately for the profession, too many librarians are afraid to take it. We are a profession of introverts, and many of us think that introversion means we cannot succeed as, or enjoy being, a manager. But I’m convinced that good managers are not born—they’re developed over time.

The process of becoming a manager starts with realizing that management is essential and accepting that we are the ones who have to step up. From there, it requires recognizing that it’s a process that takes time and not being too hard on ourselves when we make mistakes, as we inevitably will. Then there’s choosing the path to acquire the necessary knowledge. For me, the graduate school management degree program was the right one. For some, that library school course in management might be the way, although I see those courses as an appetizer; they’re a tasting menu of management concepts, not the full entrée. For others, independent reading and reflection may be the way to go. There’s a lot of useful management literature around. Oddly, one source I keep coming back to even in my post-retirement volunteer work is the 2001 book Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Whatever the path, I hope more librarians will develop their skills and take on management roles. I believe that those who do will find that librarianship and management make a powerful combination.

Conclusion

Halfway through my 50-year career, the start of a new century and a new millennium triggered lots of speculation about the years ahead. Among the most perceptive prognosticators was the late Barbara Quint, editor of Information Today, Inc.’s Searcher magazine. In her January 2000 column, she offered a Millennium Wish List, stating:

The whole world should go online. … Of course, to bring people everywhere online, we have to make sure that people everywhere have the educational background to use and to take advantage of information tools.
Computers should become human. They have already begun to talk and listen. Soon they will learn to answer questions. … As they perform more mundane tasks, computers will have to get friendlier, if only to maintain good channels of communication with users.
Authors should become answerers. … Why not let authors communicate directly with readers? Then when users have questions or opinions or comments, they could address authors immediately and have a chance for a useful response.
Librarians, not libraries. Everyone should have access to all the information they need or want all the time. … We must burst out of our buildings and shake off the limits of print formats[.]

The fate of these wishes in the ensuing 25 years illustrates what the next generation of librarians can expect. The first has come true, with consequences unanticipated by most of us, but hinted at by Quint: The internet “empowers users, and from that sense of empowerment, who knows what wonders—and horrors—can grow?” We now seem to be on the verge of the second wish, although it hasn’t happened as rapidly as its advocates predicted. Quint didn’t address its risks and unintended consequences, but her question about the effects of the internet certainly applies to AI: From it, who know what wonders and horrors will grow? The third wish seems to have changed into something quite different from what Quint imagined. Digital publishing and social media have made the publishing process much more of a dialogue between creators and readers, but it hasn’t made authors into answerers as she proposed. Finally, with the benefit of 25 years’ hindsight, we might amend “Librarians, not libraries” to read “Librarians and libraries.” Our focus on embedding and community engagement puts a spotlight on the professional skills and contributions of individual librarians and yet does not diminish the role of the library as an institution.

I have just one wish to add. For a long time, it’s been my belief that the world needs more librarians—it just doesn’t know it. Librarianship is not only a profession, it’s a culture and a frame of mind too. At its best, it’s a positive influence on communities and society, and it lifts up everyone it touches. It enriches the soul and the mind. Uniquely, librarians see things through an information lens, and that turns out to be a huge benefit. So my wish is that the influence of librarians on society will continue to grow. May the next generation of librarians rule the world.

Selected Works

I first worked with Dave Shumaker when I was the editorial assistant on his book The Embedded Librarian in 2012. When I became editor of Information Today and ITI NewsBreaks in 2016, I brought along some authors I’d had a good relationship with to write for me at the magazine. For the past near-decade, he has been one of my go-to writers for thorough conference coverage, probing interviews with info industry leaders, and thoughtful takes on the state of librarianship. Below are some of Dave’s writings. I wish him well in his retirement!

—Brandi Scardilli

Recent Conference Reports

“Global Summit on Disinformation Traces Battle Lines in the War Against Disinformation” (Oct. 1, 2024)

“Hallucinate, Confabulate, Obfuscate: The State of Artificial Intelligence Today” (Nov. 7, 2023)

“And Now for Something Completely Different: MozFest 2023” (April 11, 2023)

“NISO Plus 2023: Encompassing the World of Scholarly Information” (Feb. 28, 2023)

“Entrepreneurial Librarianship Is Alive and Well: The Entrelib Conference 2022” (Dec. 6, 2022)

Interviews

“Is AI Your Ally? An Interview With Rochelle Grayson” (Aug. 27, 2024)

“A Work in Progress: CCC and Artificial Intelligence” (April 16, 2024)

“An Interview With Safiya Umoja Noble, 2023 Miles Conrad Lecturer” (March 7, 2023)

“Building Trust: An Interview With the National Library of Medicine’s Patricia Flatley Brennan” (March 8, 2022)