A LOOK BACK
Changing Times & Changing Roles ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS THEN AND NOW
By Mary Atwell Archivist, Collection Development Services Manager The 20th-Century Librarian When you picture a librarian, what do you see? Probably she (and it usually is a “she”) is wearing comfortable shoes and a pleated skirt, blouse and cardigan sweater ensemble. She wears glasses and a stern look. While librarians of the past 30 years have fought hard against this image, it was unnervingly accurate throughout the 20th century. The 20th-century academic librarians were collectors of books. Behind the scenes, librarians perused publishers’ catalogs and sent book reviews to faculty for input. They purchased new books and created catalog cards for the books using subject, title and author. Index cards were filed in the card catalog, and books were stamped, labeled and shelved. Out at the desks, librarians answered questions and helped students find books, maps, magazines and reference materials. Staff checked books in and out and kept reading areas quiet and clean. Consider for a moment when knowledge was not accessible with a swipe or quick search on an electronic device. Academic libraries had to be sure that their collections included the breadth of knowledge needed for all of the 70
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students and faculty in their institutions. This was not an easy task and required, above all, space —space to house enough of the world’s knowledge of the humanities and sciences, stored in books, maps, journals, newspapers and more, to satisfy the College’s needs. Before the internet, the questions we “Google” today, beyond checking the household dictionary or encyclopedia set, belonged to reference librarians. Huge collections of reference books were near their desks to answer both academic and random questions. Questions that search engines answer in seconds took time for librarians; they looked up facts, statistics, definitions and explanations in encyclopedias, atlases and maps, and dictionaries. Students could not check out reference books because librarians and other students needed access to them daily. Keyword and natural language search methods did not exist, but Library of Congress subject headings did (and still do). A librarian was required to navigate them successfully.
The 21st-Century Librarian The internet forever changed our relationship with information and wreaked havoc on traditional publishing models. As early as the late 1970s, professionals predicted that both libraries and the printed book would die out by the turn of the century. While neither prediction actually occured, the methods of delivering information to students have undergone an enormous shift away from print materials and traditional purchasing models. The 20th-century librarian spent most available funds on books, while the 21st-century academic librarian weighs the costs of expensive and expansive databases to meet the needs on campus. Academic databases aggregate journals, magazines, reports, e-books, white papers and data
