Everyone Needs a Librarian

by Jennifer Grant

People are catching on that library studies might not sound hip, but let me tell you it is useful! And it is fun. You get all these looks when people ask, "What do you do for a living?" and you tell them, "I'm a librarian." You want to stop and shake them and tell them, "Hey, look! This is a really great profession. Everyone needs a librarian. And if they don't have one they're probably so far behind in whatever it is that they're trying to do that they'd be crazy not to have one employed anywhere."

The word "librarian" holds a lot of stigma. People like to call themselves an information specialist. But whatever the name every corporation or association, non-profit organization, school, public library, or academic library employs some kind of information worker. If you're a corporation or research organization and you don't have a library you're probably behind your competition.

It's really a booming career. Competitive intelligence is extremely hot right now. If you are trained at UB's SILS, they're really moving toward the information side of it: the processing of information, the using of databases, computers, everything. You have to be extremely computer literate when you graduate from the program.

It pays off. Show up on your first day of work and you're not lost. You know what you're doing, which was surprising. I thought, "After I graduate at UB am I going to start in the work world and be a little bit lost? Is there going to be a large learning curve?" Well, there really wasn't one at all. UB had prepared me so much. I had my hands in government documents, indexing, business sources, management, abstracting, all kinds of things. These are the kinds of thing that librarians do on a day-to-day basis, depending on where you work, of course. But you can do pretty much anything, from being an archivist, indexer, corporate librarian, and it's all very exciting.

People who don't know what it's all about might think it sounds kind of dry, and they might have old-fashioned views as to what it is, but it's certainly a booming profession.

In 1999, SILS joined the Department of Communication in creating the UB School of Information Studies (SIS). In March of 2001, SIS changed its name to the School of Informatics.