Why libraries need librarians

Vox reader Alexia Cherry asks: I work at a public library and I think a lot of the talk about libraries is generally uninformed about what librarians actually do. So many people that I interact with are shocked that you need to have a master’s degree to be considered a professional, and many people don’t know about the wide variety of library jobs available.

People do indeed seem to find librarians oddly mysterious! In August, Western Illinois University laid off its entire librarian faculty and at the same time insisted the university would still have “adequate coverage in the library.” The school seemed to be operating under the belief that librarians are only warm bodies who exist to check books in and out, and that they only have master’s degrees in order to artificially jack their wages up. Anyone, this line of thinking goes, could keep a library running without much work. They just need to know how to scan a barcode. 

But then, libraries are undervalued in general, perhaps because they are such radical institutions. The truism is that if you tried to invent the public library today, the right would never let you get away with it — giving so many things to the public for free, and subsidizing them all with taxes, imagine. How many other spaces do we have left where a person can go and spend hours on end and still not be expected to buy anything? 

Perhaps on a subconscious level, we tend to undervalue libraries culturally in order to keep them from reaching their full potential. If we pretend that they’re bizarre federally subsidized bookstores, we don’t need to think about how they’re enormous warehouses full of knowledge available to anyone who walks in, staffed by professionals highly trained in sorting, extracting, and preserving that knowledge.

What do librarians actually do?

Let’s take a brief look at what libraries need and how librarians provide those needs. 

All libraries, from the public to the academic to the corporate, need to be cataloged in order for anyone to know what books are in them, where each kind of book is, and what those books are useful for. In the library sciences, cataloging is its own highly esoteric specialty, closer to coding than anything else, and it requires careful technical training. Catalogers describe each notable aspect of a book, then classify each aspect so it’s searchable. To do it, you have to learn not just multiple classification systems, but also get training in how to describe a book you may have not read, what parts of it are most important, and which categories will supersede others depending on the library you’re classifying for. A cataloger must make judgment calls on whether to code in spoilers (do you classify a spy novel as “double agent” even if that’s the big twist at the end?) and how far down you should keep subdividing.

Cataloging is such a rigorous and precise form of information processing that it’s one of a librarian’s most lucrative skill sets in the information era. Some librarians, after grad school, go off to work in corporate archives, where they catalog and preserve information about the company’s history for internal usage. (Not a particularly glamorous job, but the private sector tends to pay better than the public.) Fresh library school graduates can use the same skill set to process papers at historical archives, but there they’ll also need to know how to handle fragile antique documents without damaging them, and potentially how to repair books at the end of their lifespans.

All libraries also need acquisition specialists, who are the ones facing heavy scrutiny in our book-banning era. The acquisitions department is responsible for deciding where the holes in a library’s collection are and how to fill them. They make the call as to whether it’s a good idea to bring in a book full of errors — say, a book on creationism — if patrons are requesting it, or whether it’s worth it to keep around a book on a controversial subject — say, teen sex ed — if patrons are protesting against it.

Most libraries need research specialists who can help patrons figure out how to access what they’re trying to look up. If you’re trying to flesh out your family tree, a research librarian can usually tell you what newspaper archives to consult, and get you access to those archives free of charge. If you’re trying to write an academic paper, a research librarian can walk you through the process of which databases best serve your specialty and how to navigate them.

How are public libraries different?

Public libraries require all these specialties, too, and more. Most public libraries have a mandate to serve the communities in which they exist, and so they offer more resources than many people are probably aware exist. 

Public libraries in places with a large immigrant population will frequently offer free ESL and citizenship classes. Many libraries help connect patrons to social workers, food banks, public health, and legal resources. Many others will let patrons check out things like cooking equipment, musical instruments, board games, and even seeds. 

Because public librarians are one of the only third spaces left that don’t charge money, librarians find themselves working as de facto social workers for unhoused people — in addition to the literal social worker that many libraries now have on staff. Many libraries train their staff in using Narcan to revive people overdosing on opiates. Some offer hygiene kits and clean clothes for unhoused people. All of that is despite the low salaries public librarians can expect. The average salary at the New York Public Library system is just around $52,000 per year, under the $69,000 estimated to be the cost of living in New York. 

A library is both a vast, complex technology designed to preserve and organize information and a physical space that exists in order to serve its community in whatever ways it can. The people who work there have to go through enormous amounts of training in order to do both — even if their labor is often invisible to those of us who enjoy its fruits.