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ABSTRACT: A review of
factors affecting the image of librarians which concludes that
librarians feed and support negative images of themselves. Basic to the
promotion of libraries is the need to ensure that every library worker
believe in his or her own worth.
Before I go on to
explain why I have chosen to consider the question of the image of
librarians in this way, I want to tell you a story. It is a very
personal story and one for which, quite frankly, I have gone round and
round trying to find a substitute that would be as powerful in setting
the scene for this paper. In the final analysis only this one seemed to
convey the message as exactly as it should be conveyed.
Almost half a
century ago, in a place where there was no humanity, a concentration
camp in Eastern Europe, a perfect stranger cared enough to give a child
a sense of his own humanity. From somewhere in that sea of mud,
someone, whom he in later years remembers as an old man but who, as we
well know, could equally have been a young woman, found a stone, a
small, dark, misshapen pebble. He gave it to him saying, 'Never forget
that you are spe cial. You own a piece of the universe.'
The child survived
and grew up, without family, unsure of his own identity, having
forgotten his own name, unsure of his exact age never having known his
date of birth, having lived through horrors that you and I can only
imagine, to be the most secure and loving person - entirely, I am sure,
because he did have such a clear conception of his own unique
worth. He died tragically, as a fairly young man. The last words he
said to me were:
Not to
participate in the legitimate joys of this life is an offence against
God
That is a
quotation from the Talmud and it was an injunction which I have very
much tried to take to heart. Think about the words carefully. The verb
is participate not spectate; it is active, not
passive.
The most
legitimate of all joys, in fact, the joy without which all other joys
are diminished, is joy in oneself. Self pride and self joy are as vital
to the individual as are air and water . A person's self esteem is a
measure of the extent to which he approves of and accepts himself, and
regards himself as praiseworthy, either absolutely, or in comparison
with others. Self esteem determines one's health, one's looks, one's
success in one's profession as well as in one's private life.
Negative Images
Yet when I look
around the library profession it seems to me that we worry more about
our libraries than we do about ourselves. We promote them, dead things
though they are, while ignoring or at best only briefly acknowledging,
those who make libraries and their services live. Even worse, we tend
to blame others for our image problems instead of firmly shouldering
the blame and getting on with taking positive and workable steps to
change th at image.
Those who have low
self esteem are shy, easily embarrassed, eager to be approved of and
easily influenced by social pressures. Insecure people, that is those
who have not formed a stable se lf image, are very sensitive to the
reactions of others, since they are still seeking information that will
shape their self image. Those who have achieved an integrated identity
are no longer so bothered by the reactions of others, and are not upset
if o thers assess them incorrectly or react negatively towards them. I
put it to you that, in a very real way, we feed and support negative
images of librarians.
I am not talking
so much about the way we tend to react with shrill denials when
librarians are depicted by the advertising industry as dried up,
lisle-stockinged, lemon peel mouthed old ma ids, even though such
denials tend to suggest to others that perhaps there is some basis for
such criticism. In our society it seems that the way to confirm a nasty
rumour is to deny it publicly. Because of this I would oppose the
suggestion that we mount an advertising campaign that specifically
tries to dispel the stereotype on the ground that it would probably
inadvertently contribute to the stereotype. The more you shout that
there is no problem, the more you plant the idea that there is a
problem.
Stereotypes
And there is a
problem. The subconscious cannot accept a joke. It takes every form of
labeling seriously. That is why, however much we deny it, individually
and collectively, to a ce rtain extent, we do accept as accurate the
stereotypical image of librarians and therefore we tend to behave in
ways which reinforce that image when we should be treating the
stereotypical image as the joke it is, accepting that on a conscious
level, peop le for the most part know a joke (even a bad one) when they
hear or see one.
Every profession
has its negative stereotypes - the Shylock lawyer, the fat cat
overservicing doctor, the paedophile clergyman - and the negative
stereotypes of other professions are, I sub mit, far worse than ours
because ours is the only stereotype that does not suggest an element of
exploitation of others
The Image Problem
Let us take a
minute to examine our so-called 'image problem' a little more closely.
What are the components of this image about which we complain? Basic
appearance and personality, status and salary would sum it up fairly.
While we are focusing on the derogatory components of our public image,
we do not always recognise that librarians are actually held up as
believable people by the advertising business. Professionals do not
like the adve rtisements which show libraries and librarians as quiet
and stodgy, but they tend to overlook the implied compliment in some of
those ads which show librarians as knowing what they are talking about.
I once heard a
wonderful story about an apology made by a representative of an
advertising agency to a nutrition scientist who had complained that a
librarian had been used in an advertisem ent for bread rather than a
dietician. He explained that marketers had determined that librarians
are viewed by the public as more believable than dieticians! When you
look at this particular issue quite dispassionately, you have to come
to the conclusion that there are a lot worse things than being thought
to be helpful or intelligent. It should be a matter of comfort to us
all that our stereotypical old maidish, shy and given to detail image
is actually a reassurance that the public does not seek out li brarians
for their physical or personal charms.
I'm not suggesting
that our image could not be better, but we should accept that why
librarians are seen the way they are reflects complex social and
cultural forces that have short changed traditionally 'pink collar'
professions, both in remuneration and respect. I am concerned about the
effect of our public image on ourselves, in particular about the way in
which members of our profession seem to accept that everyone else has a
right to c hart our own destiny. As a result, in our professional area,
we fail to exercise our most basic freedom as individuals. Each of us
has the freedom to choose how we will respond to the circumstance in
which we find ourselves.
While we cannot
always control what others do to us or what happens to us, or indeed
what others think of us, each of us can control how we react to what
others do to us, how we cope with what happens to us, and how we
respond to the opinions of others.
Self Limitations
Most of the
limitations that keep us from realising our full potential are
artificial, merely being imposed on us with our permission by
circumstances or by other people. The real limitatio ns that rob us of
our freedom to make the best of what we have and of what we are, have
to do with the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Our
attitudes hold us back from becoming all that we were created to be. In
short, our mental image of our selves determines more about us than any
other single factor affecting our lives and the question we must ask
ourselves is whether we are, perhaps unconsciously, actually seeking
out the sort of criticising public image we believe we have, because
critici sm is preferable to getting no attention at all.
The Importance of
Words
William Faulkner
once gave some very good advice to a student:
I have found
that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self
respect and whatever courage is demanded is to know where you yourself
stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from
Words play a very
important part in influencing how we see ourselves. Most of our
thinking is language based. We are, as a species, very proud of our
language based thinking system and we believe it to be rather wonderful
- which it is. It is the only game in town and our culture is so
dependent on language based thinking that we cannot really conceive of
anything else. Yet language based thinking has some very serious
deficiencies and dang ers. By its nature, language based thinking gives
distinctions, separations and categories. This is hardly surprising
since this is the very purpose of language. Language based thinking
tends to give identity and permanent labels. And therein lies both it s
strengths and its dangers.
We have all heard
of self fulfilling prophecies. Our subconscious accepts and acts upon
whatever we label outselves. Besides the dangers of the categorisation
and permanence of language based thinking, which are bad enough, there
is the related and in many ways greater danger which comes from our
merry acceptance of warped and sanitised language. The sort of
statement which we all make and accept at face value without realising
just how rid iculous it is -'You make me so angry', for example. No one
can make us angry; we choose to react to some behaviour in that way.
But the inaccuracy is deeper than that. We label what we feel 'anger'
and therefore we imagine that we actually do feel angry i n that
situation because it is socially acceptable to call it anger (which it
patently is not) and it is not socially acceptable to call what we are
feeling frustration at failing in an attempt to manipulate another
person's behaviour in accordance wit h our own selfish wishes - even
though that would be the more accurate description. If we are to
succeed, not only in creating success in the truest sense but in
individual promotion activities, we have to take William Faulkner's
advice but we have to make sure that the words we use do not contribute
to the problem by disguising what it actually is.
The Prometheus
Principle
I believe that the
most urgent problem librarians have to overcome is not the image we
have outside the profession, but rather a grave problem within the
profession, a problem caused by what I choose to call the Prometheus
Principle. You will recall that the Greek god Prometheus was such a
trickster that he could change into any person he chose to be. He
changed into so many different people that eventually he forgot who he
was. I tend to t hink that precisely because we, as individuals, do not
have a positive enough self image, we are tending to apply the
Prometheus Principle to our libraries, and that is a problem.
A good, positive
self image is not self centred egotism, personal complacency, smug self
satisfaction, and disdain for others. A good positive self image is
accepting yourself as the person you are, holding warm and
nonjudgmental regard for others, being willing to take risks, finding
positive ways to express your individuality, and being self reliant and
self determining. In short, someone with a positive self image is never
a manipulator and certainly never a willing victim.
Are We Forgetting
What Service Is?
We are lucky. We
work in a profession that facilitates development of self esteem.
Librarianship is a service profession and one of the most beautiful
rewards in life is that any time you try to serve someone else you
serve yourself more. It gives you genuine self respect. But I wonder
whether we are forgetting what service really is.
The profession
appears to be becoming loud apologists for librarians rather than quiet
supporters. There is a headlong rush into change - change of all sorts.
We have changed the name of our Association. We seem to be purging the
word Librarians from as many titles as possible. There is a move away
from the recognition of the basic role of reading, and the broader role
of the library in communicating ideas, which are areas in which the
profession has some measure of monopoly, in favour of a push from
within the profession for libraries to concentrate on the narrower,
information management aspect of libraries, which most definitely is
not an area unique to our profession.
The Prominence Myth
One of the reasons
for this move is our acceptance of the prominence equals success myth.
When most of us think about people who we think of as examples of
success and motivat ion we tend to choose prominent people. In a
sectionalised profession such as ours, there is perhaps slightly
greater opportunity for people to become prominent within our closed
groups. Yet I suggest to you that one of the reasons that librarians
have a less than great self image is because the prominence myth is a
shabby view of success.
A lot of
unhappiness arises when people are taught to see themselves as failing
when realistically they are not. Within our profession, the opinions of
those of us in prominent positions ar e given far too much precedence
by others. People tend to imagine that success is getting to the top 1%
of one's profession and that those who have achieved that are somehow
better qualified to set the direction for all of us and what is worse,
that until you have made the grade what you have to say is of little
account. The truth of the matter is that it seems that all one actually
has to aim for is to get into the top 20% of one's profession and the
impetus of that will keep one succeeding in terms whic h professionals
accept as success - ie promotions, prominence within the profession,
invitations to speak at conferences and so on.
Every single
person who is part of our profession brings to that profession a unique
combination of experience, talents and insight, and has therefore a
unique contribution to make - just a s long as he or she does not
assume that because he or she is not yet prominent, success has not
been achieved. For the profession to virtually ignore this treasure
store of talent until the individual has been given the imprimatur of
prominence is to con tribute to a victim ethos.
Studies show that
in the commercial world, at least 90% of ideas for profit improvement
and growth flow upwards in an organisation (given of course that the
organisation has a positive clim ate, open communications, a team
approach and a company-first attitude). So it is possibly not too
outrageous a thought that a collective acceptance of the prominence
myth could contribute to a lessening of overall effectiveness. But even
those who are pr ominent in our profession have the unfortunate
tendency to fall for the prominence myth - or, at least their behaviour
and reactions would lead us to believe that this is the way they think,
because it would appear that they regard those who are prominent in a
more general sense, such as politicians, to be more successful than
themselves and therefore are endowed with a greater right to determine
the future direction of libraries.
The Enemy
Occasionally Pogo,
that great philosopher of the comic strip, has a way of putting his
claw right on the problem. Once, after trying to fight a battle that
did not exist, he gave us this bi t of insight:
We have met the
enemy and he is us!
Thoreau said it a
little more poetically:
As long as a
man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
In other words,
the greatest obstacle in our way on the road to success is ourselves.
The Victim Ethos
I started this
paper with a reference, albeit oblique, to Hitler's so-called 'Final
Solution'. It is a subject that has always intrigued me, not from the
point of view of why he was so determined to eliminate so many
different groups of people - irrespective of the scale on which it
manifests itself, insanity is still insanity - but from the point of
view of why so many people went so apparently meekly to incarceration
in horrendous conditi ons, and ultimately to extermination.
If one reads
European history, particularly Eastern European history, one can see a
pattern, repeated instances where many of these groups apparently
accepted the right of others to conduct pogroms against them - it would
seem that there was an ingrained belief that if individuals did not
fight back, the punishment would be milder and the culture would
survive.
There is a single
line in Die Madchen aus Viterbo, a radio play by Gunter Eich, which
epitomises the victim ethos. An elderly man and his granddaughter are
sitting in their apartment waiting for the SS to come and collect them.
To while away the time they are reading an old magazine in which there
is a story about a group of girls from Viterbo who got lost in the
Catacombs on a school trip to Rome. In their discussion of this inciden
t, a discussion which is really about their own situation, the
grandfather remarks:
You must sit on
the chair you are walking towards.
This is preaching
an acceptance philosophy - active acceptance of those things you
believe to be inevitable - which sounds all very well but is really a
form of appeasement of those we believe to be 'in charge'.
Appeasement
Many of the recent
events in libraries across this country indicate to me that there could
be an element of appeasement in the way librarians have reacted to what
is often touted as the cha nging economic climate, but which, on closer
examination, could well be appeasement of the more prominent rather
than a real attempt to address the challenges resulting from the need
for tighter management without becoming victims. A doctrine is being
pre ached which suggests that we sacrifice individual aspects of
library service presumably in the interests of ensuring survival of
'library culture'.
Let us turn to the
advice given to the library profession by Major Owens, the only
librarian-member of the United States Congress.
The library
profession is at a pivotal point. This decade is a decisive one for all
groups and individuals related in one way or another to the information
service sector. In this age o f information, the recognition of the
power of information is growing, and the business of library and
information services has been perceived as too critical to be left to
the library profession by itself.
Although he does
not say who is doing the perceiving there, I am totally convinced that
though others may be following, it is the profession which first
generated this perception.
The self image of
individuals within the profession collectively transmits an aura of
insecurity. We easily credit animals, particularly horses and dogs,
with a sixth sense that enables the m to perceive fear in humans. We
tend not to accept that we all possess that sixth sense and the way in
which we relate to others, whether or not they have credibility in our
eyes, is largely determined by the aura of confidence they project.
This is not New
Age gobbledegook - it is pure, proven fact that people treat you in the
manner which your manner demands. 'What you are speaks much more loudly
than what you say' is a statement which has been confirmed again and
again through research. Effective communications are dependent 9% on
the words we use, 38% on how we say it, and 53% on body language.
Assuming this
research is correct, we can say that 91% of our communication is
directly related to our attitude, as attitude will have a dominating
impact on how we say things and our body language will be predominantly
controlled by out thinking and our emotional state which in turn are
largely determined by our philosophy.
Owens advises us
to create a solidarity among all those who carry the title of Librarian.
The tragedy, he says, is that our abundant knowledge and paper
plans are not enough. The need is for focus, for concentration, for a
central guiding strategy...If the library profession did not exist, it
would have to be invented. Despite the fact that society presently
refuses to recognise this, librarians still have the duty to conduct
themselves under the assumption that librarians everywhere would raise
the profession to a new level of pride and profundity...Such a firmly
held and articulated position would serve as a beginning bulwark
against the intruding forces which seek to manipulate library and
information policies to serve vested interests...Constructive arrogance
is clearly one of the qualities needed for the success of any
profession.
We face the danger
that the effective librarian will be replaced by the efficient library.
It is a danger that will be made even more real if we continue to allow
a poor self image to limit us.
Just before George
Bernard Shaw's death a reporter asked him if he could live his life
over and be any of the people he had known, or any person from history,
who he would choose to be.
I would choose, replied Shaw, to be the man
George Bernard Shaw could have been but never was.
It is time for us
to take steps to ensure that we change the way we look at ourselves,
that we start behaving as if we are the people we want to be, rather
than the people we believe we are . Of all the possible target groups
for promotion activity by the profession, I suggest that at this
juncture the most important group is those who work in libraries.
Without ensuring that everyone who works in a library in Australia both
knows what libra ries are for and how important they are to each
individual citizen of this country as a whole, and ardently believes in
his or her own worth as a library worker, any other promotion
initiative will achieve less than we would hope for.
Earl Nightengale
tells the story of a professor who asked a group of college educators
to boil down into a brief statement of all the books every written on
how to motivate people. After a long discussion they came up with the
following statement which says it all:
What the mind
attends to, it considers; what it does not attend to, it dismisses.
What the mind attends to continually, it believes; and what the mind
believes it eventually does.
We have to make
sure that what we actually do is what we set out to do. WE have to be
positive in our outlook, and proud of the fact that we are Librarians,
and that pride must be evident in everything we do. The image that the
world has of us, and which does have a bearing on our effectiveness,
will only change if our self image changes first.
Perhaps the
library profession needs a slogan, not a public slogan, but rather a
private slogan, almost a secret password binding us together. I put
forward for your consideration my nomination, the words of Ralph Waldo
Emerson:
What lies
behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what
lies within us.
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