Infographic: A Librarian’s Worth

4 Responses

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1. Ryan Deschamps said

   on December 10, 2012 10:05 am

   Argh! Redundant apostrophe in “librarians across the country.” *cries*

2. prefer to remain anonymous said

   on December 10, 2012 1:24 pm

   I love 99% of this infographic. Unfortunately, however, it repeats the same tired statement that the field is “aging” and many librarians are going to retire in the near future that has been circulating for years and years. The ALA and library schools have been pushing that line on prospective librarians for a long time, which has almost certainly contributed to the serious oversupply of library school graduates compared to the number of actual open positions. Time and again, these promised mass retirements have not appeared.

   (I say this as a young professional who did find a full-time position, by the way, lest you think this comment is just sour grapes. 😉 )

3. Stephen said

   on December 10, 2012 1:47 pm

   Prefer to remain anonymous: I’ve seen this tired meme from younger librarians so often too. Look at the numbers. Do you really believe that the bulk of librarians won’t ever retire or die? With the average age of librarians going up, although I think that issue of too few jobs for grads is real. In somelibraries then average age is about 58. Are they really still all going to be working at 88? Some of thestaying in place is due in course to the mess with retirement funds due to the bad economy and the lack of healthcare in the US that means many tired librarians won’t retire until medicare kicks in and some union contracts and proposed policies that raise the age of retirement and create uncertainty. It’s also driven by fundamental restructuring in the library space as jobs change to adapt tonew realities about taxation and funding. We’ve seen chacnges like this at least once before when OCLC was created as a library cooperative that changed cataloguing jobs forever and the number of jobs for cataloguers went down precipitously (over 50%). But the number of jobs for IT-oriented, IS-oriented and metadata positions went up (over 50%). We are seeing and hearing of hiring shortages in many areas of libraries – especially in supervisory and managerial positions and in some geographic locales in advance of the retirement bubble. We’ll see the samethings with the cloud and training collaboratives and consortia. As a young librarian you have 30+ years to go and I understand the frustration. Use this time to prepare for the jobs that will exist. An MLS is a starter professional dgeree not an endgame. I had to take contract work ealry in my career and was lucky not to have to move. Very few of my class were hired when I graduated into the early 1980’s recession of very high unemployment and 25%+ interest rates. The retirement bulge is real and hiring will happen but only for those ready for the jobs that will exist in a 21st Century library and information ecology. Also consider the librarians hiring in vendors, publishers, web concerns, etc. Our skills play well in environment beyond traditional libraries.
   I wish you well but don’t fall into the trap of blamestorming a slowness of retirements as the only block to success.
   SA

4. Nann said

   on December 12, 2012 11:23 am

   My quibble is that mis-used apostrophe in the second-largest bubble in the first slide!