LES Blog

This post isn’t directly related to the business of being an English literature liaison, though perhaps it is a condition found more often among that breed than in other varieties of academic librarian.

I have a complaint, in the sense of the word defined in the Concise OED 11th Edition, revised, online:  “an illness or medical condition, especially a minor one.”  It is this:  even though I am a tenure-track member of the faculty of my university, I just don’t feel like One of Them. One of the departmental professors, I mean. And a good deal of this second-class citizen complex has to do with the very nature of my job.  We librarians are in the service profession, whether we work in a corporate, law, public, or any other kind of library. And in a university, one of the groups of people we serve are our faculty colleagues. They research, we research. They teach, we teach. They serve on university-wide committees, and so do we. But we’re also standing at the ready to help these colleagues with citation searches, fill their materials requests, anticipate their needs, go to bat to protect their ever-shrinking share of the acquisitions budget.  Does Assistant Professor of American Literature X do that for Assistant Professor of British Literature Y?  I don’t think so.

Another factor contributing to my professional insecurity is the fact that the folks who dole out money in my institution use credit-hour production as their primary means to assess value.  The library doesn’t produce credit hours.  Therefore, we have no measurable value.  I’ve heard it said that the library doesn’t have students, but no student graduates without the library.  Even if that sentiment exists at the purse-string level, how does that translate into money?  Right now the reference staff in my library is down by half, and with budget cuts, we have no expectation of being able to fill the vacancies in the next year or possibly two.  Faculty lines are in danger of disappearing forever.  When teaching departments can’t hire the faculty they need, courses don’t get taught.  Or, they get taught by adjuncts and graduate assistants, which is often unfair to students and instructors alike.  When the library has open faculty vacancies, the desk remains staffed, the BIs are still given, the collecting still gets done.  The publishing expectations don’t go away and neither do the service obligations.  We just cope.

I’m not complaining (in the sense of the word meaning to “express dissatisfaction or annoyance”).  I love my job.  I think I was meant to be an academic librarian – either that, or the decades I spent pursuing various university degrees made me unfit for any other life.  I feel appreciated and, from time to time, respected by the teaching faculty.  I like that my days are all different from one another.  It makes me feel warm and fuzzy when, as one of my Philosophy faculty members recently told my Dean, I “saved his butt.”  I adore the students, for the most part.  I even get a fair chunk of travel money to attend ALA, ACRL, and other conferences (partly because there are so few of us to claim the funds).

Why should English literature librarians be more susceptible to this malaise than other subject specialists?  According to Thea Lindquist and LES’s own Todd Gilman, academic librarians with PhDs in English Language and Literature rank second only to those with PhDs in History.  (“Academic/Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates:  Data and Trends 1965–2006.”  portal: Libraries and the Academy, 8:1 (2008), pp. 31–52.)  As Lindquist and Gilman also discovered, most of us, myself included, earned our MLS after earning our advanced subject degree.  When I started down that oh-so-long road to becoming Dr. Golomb, I intended to spend my days enlightening students and making a name for myself as an expert in contemporary British drama, not supporting others in those pursuits.

I’m glad my career shook out as it did.  Librarians are cool people, downright fun, and we keep our teeth out of each other’s backs.  I just wish I felt a little more entitled when I address my departmental faculty as “colleagues.”