Lee Hadden sends “us this interesting piece of library research from the Library Quarterly. Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb, have written “The Portrayal of Librarians in Obituaries at the End of the Twentieth Century” which looks at librarian obits published between 1977-200.
“While it is doubtful that Jane Davies, Adolf Placzek, Dina Abramowicz, and Emily Reed met in life, they shared common bonds in death. All four passed away in February-May 2000, and all four were more than eighty-five years old when they died. All four were also librarians, and it is because of their profession, or, rather, the contributions they made to it, that their obituaries appeared in the New York Times (NYT). Readers of NYT obituaries in early 2000 were thus presented with four images of librarianship in a relatively short period of time. What could they have deduced about librarianship from these, and other, obituaries of librarians?
“
Lee”
An interesting article
I hope that people (and particularly money people)can learn to value librarians before their obits hit the paper…while they’re still at the library.
Portrayal of Librarians
The problem is that the profession through its professional organizations and even on a local level needs to define itself. Librarians serve a wide range of constituencies with different bibliographic needs. Unfortunately, the media, the public, and even library patrons seem to look at the generic librarian. No one would look at a generic doctor, lawyer, or accountant. Those professions have specialities and specific constituencies. The public seems to be more aware of that. The problem is how we present ourselves and what we do. I have been in acdemia for over thirty years and have found that professors on campus don’t always know what we do and how we have helped them in their work. How many scholarly books thank the librarian in their books that helped them? How many professors realize that the quality of their student’s work is impacted by the help of the librarians? I think that our colleagues should do some introspection and taking stock of our place in the community, university, and elsewhere. The preoccupation with political agendas can possibly further confuse the public of our position and make them believe that we are political activists. We badly need to dispel the idea of a generic librarian and promote the idea of the bibliographic expert.
More about the NYT than about librarianship
This article says a lot more about the nature of who gets obits in the Times, which styles itself a national NEWSPAPER OF RECORD than about librarianship. Directors of large institutions, people who made large-scale ‘newsworthy’ changes, published authors — these are the folks who get into the Times, in any field of endeavor. So discovering that these are the librarians who get included is not very insightful.
A much more useful research project would be to look at obituaries in a smaller paper.