Best job of 2008?
I’ve gotta hand it to the U.S. News and World Report, because apparently they’ve given librarianship the go-ahead as a “Best Career” for two years straight. Ok, I get it. The profession is changing, it’s less about organizing and collecting information than disseminating it anymore, and the work environment is nice. That’s why I chose to be a librarian and go to library school. But, do they really get that – digital, academic, public or otherwise – people are more inclined to see us as expendable than most other professionals? That the Nietzschean “herd” doesn’t need us to help them because they already know how to find what they want. 
Think about it this way: History, Philosophy, Biology, etc… are all primary fields of research. Librarianship is predominantly a service related field. That said, since the services that librarians offer (research support and information organization) are axillary and not primary then they aren’t absolutely necessary.
In a pinch people can find things on their own.
Throw in automation which has been common since the 1970′s. It replaces librarians with computers that do the same job. It also makes it oh-so-easy to cruse on over to Yahoo instead of to a reference desk. Plus, for most people something just “feels” off to ask a librarian for help. Nobody – much less a tenured professor – wants to look like they don’t know how to do something as mundane as finding an article!
I appreciate what the U.S. News and World Report is trying to do here, but “Best Career” or otherwise I’m under the impression that they are simply trying to give librarians the credit that they see as due; not the credit that the general public provides. For better or worse it’s public opinion that matters and no matter what we as librarians do (or what the U.S. News thinks) I wish the article would have mentioned this…
