In response to the concerns about gender imbalances and the librarian's image:

I work as a cataloguer in a small film archive, which is part of a large
academic library. The usual pattern is repeated at my institution - women
dominate all levels of the hierarchy, and are in the majority in every
department, and yet the University Librarian at the top of the tree is a
man.

The same is true of education, especially primary education, where
virtually all the teachers are women but they always find some bloke to be
head. Some people expect to find a man in charge, but judging by most of
the females I know in the profession, they're unlikely to allow this
situation to persist for too much longer. The more noise is made about the
subject, the more conspicuous the lack of top women is going to be, so it
should be continually discussed and addressed.

The profession is seen by many people I know as rather anal and
unimaginative, and this is certainly mirrored by the depiction of
librarians in movies and TV. There are quite a few amusing studies of this
process on the internet if you care to do some searching, and a memorable
example is in the recently re-released 'It's A Wonderful Life', where in
the nightmare sequence, the hero's wife is, in the alternate universe, a
dowdy spinster librarian (the adjectives are clearly seen as synonymous
with the job she's doing).

However, before anyone gets too upset about this stereotyping, it's worth
considering that all jobs get the same treatment. All police are racist,
all truck-drivers are morons, everyone who works with computers is a nerd,
and all nurses are saints: none of this is true, but all of these
assumptions are made.
Librarians don't deserve special treatment - everyone suffers from a
certain amount of pre-judging: it isn't as if librarians are being singled
out.

Besides, there are some pretty dreadful people kicking around libraries,
whose priorities are not to provide a service and to keep information in
order so it can be used, but who like to keep things in order for order's
sake, and despise the users who come in and mess it all around. My feeling
is that you can be someone who works in libraries, and it's just like any
other job (you go home and the end of the day and switch it all off), or
you can be a Librarian (Capital L), and be fastidious and overly ordered
all the time. Anyone who has an alphabetised and indexed CD collection at
home should start wonder about themselves. We're in a service industry,
like it or not, and however good we get at that service, we shouldn't ever
forget that we are here for the benefit of customers, or clients, or users,
or whatever else you want to call them.

Finally, the only real hassle I get from people I know nowadays is that
they can't believe how little I get paid. If your friends make fun of what
you do, they aren't your friends.

Tim Turner
Cataloguing Assistant
North West Film Archive
Manchester Metropolitan University
email: [log in to unmask]




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