LISNews: Librarian News

[visit my blog for uncensored version -- a while back I semi-promised to tone down the cursing.]

This trend of deprofessionalizing librarians, in Edinburgh's (Scotland) case, calling librarians "audience development officers" deserves a ginormous WTF??!!

Where do Audience Development Officers work? In a library, or in an Audience Development Station? I don't even know what those three words are supposed to mean. It's like they took all the words in the dictionary that could relate to a librarian and threw them all out and these were the three that were left. Seriously, all I can think is that an Audience Development Officer is just someone who opens the doors in the morning and lets people into the library.

Culture leader Cllr Deidre Brock said: "Growing use of the internet for reference and information is enabling us to structure the service so that our staff can better cater to our customers' needs."

Really? "Enabling" Let's put that positive spin on a bad situation.

So Dierdre is telling us that libraries are killing off the librarians.

Figures show there were only 66 full-time equivalent (FTE) qualified librarians in May this year, compared to 85.2 a year earlier. And 24 per cent of the city's 26 libraries no longer employ a head librarian.

Under the council's libraries review, all 300 staff are to be given new job roles and job descriptions, while staff have new teams and managers. -- Read More