Another Session

I went to another session between the roundtable and my poster session, but it wasn’t worth much. At ACRL there is a variety of formats for presentation. The more formal ones are a straight presentation on a topic, a panel discussion, or contributed papers. The latter is an hour session split into two 30-minute segments of people presenting their research. I liked these ‘cause they don’t labor their points until you want to rake your eyes out. By the time they give the point and the results of their research it is time for questions – a fine idea.

So the set of contributed papers after the roundtable were not particularly groundbreaking in nature. The first speaker talked about his findings that students working in the academic library might have better retention rates because they are more acclimated to the system of scholarly research and they are better suited to help their peers who also reap benefits from their library employment. OK. I have been saying that working in libraries has made me a much better student for years. Maybe I just needed to publish…

Second paper was harder for me to follow…two folks presented some methods and findings of their research regarding recruitment and retention of librarians. They focused on the Carolina’s(North?) because that’s where they were from. They basically said we need to do more of both recruitment and retention….shocking I know.

One figure they threw out was: of all the Carolina librarians that they surveyed only 55 pct said they were brought to the profession through experience from working in a library….they are lying….not the presenters…the librarians they asked. EVERYONE I have EVER talked to regarding this has (as noted before) pointed out that they never really thought of librarianship as a career, they worked in a library and got sucked in. I am sure there are some exceptions…but those who thought they were destined for a career in the profession without practical work experience probably didn’t last long. Just my opinion of course.

It is too bad that these presenters were charging us to work towards better methods and best practices for recruiting and retaining individuals in the profession, yet, they didn’t show up to our roundtable where we were offering critical insight on JUST this aspect of the profession…Our round table was one step ahead of them….I’m just saying…

Still, I commend them on their effort. I just can’t help taking a lot of this recruitment and diversity stuff as anything but “lip service” (as an unnamed colleague of mine referred to it). It’s important to me…but now it seems that people just like to be on record saying it…”Diversity is important”…when it comes to getting your hands dirty…ehhh…if you realllllly cared, if it was realllllly your mission and something that was important to you, the rain would not have kept you away…I’m just saying….