Thing 16: Advocacy, speaking up for the profession and getting published.

Not long after I became a fully fledged new professional I went to a friend's party. Someone there asked me what I did for a living and I proudly said I was a librarian. His reply was 'oh that must be boring', this was accompanied by a look of pity. Well, he got the extended version of how interesting it is, how I meet many different people, learn lots about technology and get an enormous amount of job satisfaction from helping people. When I asked him what he did (printing) I had to bite my tongue so as not to say 'oh just lots of photocopying then'.

Of course if I say to someone I am an 'information professional' they are impressed because they have no idea what one is, 'librarian' on the other hand tends to conjure up the old stereotype. Only today I was chatting with someone, whilst in a queue, and mentioned that I had just delivered a lecture about finding information - they thought I sat at my desk all day long looking at books and had no idea that lectures were part of my job.

If we, as a profession, want to get everyone else to view us in a positive way we have to get our message out there. I think it's important to tell people what I do and why I do it - surely we need to be seen as an attractive profession so as to keep recruiting to the ranks of friendly librarians/information professionals. Advocacy and speaking up also keeps us visible which is particularly important whilst cuts etc are being made to services and staff. We have to shout about the good stuff we do or others will think we are sat here doing nothing.

It's not done on some big public stage but by simply talking to others I meet through work and outside of it, making sure family members have joined (and used) the public library and presenting a positive image of librarians in my day to day work, I hope that I'm doing my bit.

I was going to write that I've never had anything published and then realised that I'm about to hit the button that says 'Publish Post'! So I guess that counts. I've put some little things in the in-house staff newsletter but that's it so far. Something to aim for in the future...