#NotAllLibrarians: Do library professionals have an image problem?

At a picnic last Sunday, I asked a group of my friends to do something a little odd.

“Close your eyes. Picture a librarian. Describe them to me.”

They’re good sports so obliged and gave me a seemingly disparate group of terms: Female. Glasses. Pencil skirt. Old. Witch. Caring. Cardigan. Sexy. Sssh. Scary. Tea. Nerd. Wrinkles. Reading. Timid. Frumpy. High heels.

Sift through these descriptions and you find many of the stereotypes that are frequently portrayed in popular culture. The bespectacled old woman with a cardigan, the crazy cat lady, the benevolent champion of children, the know-it-all geek, the sexy wallflower. A quick google image search revealed that their perceptions more or less aligned with those of the all-powerful Google algorithm, although recent efforts to tweak the algorithm have certainly resulted in a more diverse and inclusive representation than I anticipated. Although nuanced portrayals of librarians definitely exist in pop culture, there is an unsurprising tendency to rely on stereotypes. A stereotype is “a rigid, oversimplified, often exaggerated belief that is applied both to an entire social category of people and to each individual within it” (Johnson, 2000, p. 312). They are often the result of attempts to sift through the barrage of information and summarise it into "manageable chunks” (Elligan, 2008, p. 1277). Stereotypes of librarians are certainly not exclusively negative, but by their very nature they simplify the complexities of the role and the people who undertake it.

A further dive into pop culture perceptions of librarians revealed I was not the only (aspiring) librarian with an interest in this topic. At Reel Librarians, Jennifer Snoek-Brown exhaustively chronicles the representations of librarians in film. She strictly divides depictions into categories such as: Spinster Librarian, Anti-Social Librarian, Liberated Librarian, Librarian as Failure, Spirited Young Girl, Naughty Librarian, Information Provider, and Comic Relief. Similarly, Libraries in Popular Culture and What is a Librarian explore stereotypes of librarians in popular media, and also make efforts to categorise the most common representations. The now inactive Pop goes the librarian, Images of Libraries in Pop Culture, and Librarians in the Movies have a similar focus... there's even a Wikipedia page!

Ruth Kneale's (2014) You Don't Look Like a Librarian: Shattering Stereotypes and Creating Positive New Images in the Internet Age is an extended analysis of these themes, considering the practical impact of these stereotypes, how that are changing in the digital age, and how stereotypes can be overcome. She concludes that just as the role and skill-set of libraries is changing, so to must we challenge outdated perceptions of librarians and "step up what were already doing" (p. 132). Although attempting to be motivational, I have to admit to finding it a little disheartening that she so unquestioningly framed these representations as a problem to be overcome. As Manley (1996) noted over two decades ago, our obsession with the stereotypes of librarians could actually perpetuate them, reinforcing “our reputation as stuffed shirts” (p. 136). Unfortunately, in an era where teacher librarians need to constantly advocate for the value of the role they perform (see, for example the multipronged campaign of Students Need School Libraries) it is hard to turn the other cheek.

In their 2014 book The librarian stereotype : deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work, Nicole Pagowsky and Miriam Rigby frame the issue quite differently through an edited collection of critical examinations of stereotypes surrounding librarians. The book presents the argument that seemingly negative stereotypes of librarians can be challenged by focusing on increased social justice and amplifying the voices of marginalised groups. I was initially drawn to Annie Pho and Turner Masland’s claim that “the larger problem is that the public does not know what librarians do, which produces misconceptions about our professional image” (p. 265), which aligns with the advocacy approach of Students Need School Libraries. However, a more challenging assertion was made in Melissa Langridge, Christine Riggi, and Allison Schultz’s chapter, Student Perceptions of Academic Librarians: The Influence of Pop Culture and Past Experience, in which they note that "(i)t's not the stereotype that's the problem, it's the obsession with the stereotypes" (p. 240). This certainly resonated after my deep dive into the librarian blogosphere! Interestingly, they found that while patrons judge librarian approachability by the nature of their past exchanges, the librarians themselves are guilty of an obsession with the existing stereotypes and tend to focus on "whether their clothing choices perpetuate the media-generated stereotypes" (p. 242). Perhaps the most effective way to deconstruct negative librarian stereotypes is to create inclusive institutions where diversity is the standard. And maybe to resist the urge to categorise and classify ourselves as rigorously as we catalogue our library resources!

References

Elligan, D. (2008). Stereotypes. In R. T. Schaefer (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Johnson, A. G. (2000). The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kneale, R. (2014). You Don’t Look Like a Librarian : Shattering Stereotypes and Creating Positive New Images in the Internet Age. Information Today, Incorporated.

Manley, Will. 1996. Our Image, as Images Go. American Libraries, 27(5), 136.

Pagowsky, N., & Rigby, M. (Eds.). (2014). The librarian stereotype : deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work . Association of College and Research Libraries, A division of the American Library Association.