The Portable MLIS: Chapter 1 Reflections

As I read “Stepping Back and Looking Forward,” the first chapter in The Portable MLIS, I was struck by the idea that librarianship is a profession which undergoes constant evolution and is inexorably linked with cultural development. Over time, change occurs in many professions through the usual course of technological and scientific advances, but librarianship presents a unique manifestation of this phenomenon because, historically, libraries have been “invented and reinvented” (Rubin, 2008, p. 4) to meet the rising needs of a community. For example, the remarkable changes in the medical field during the past century have not occurred as a result of the appearance of new needs, rather, doctors have found more advanced ways of responding to the same unchanging need; curing the sick and healing the injured. Rubin explains that, contrastingly, libraries “emerge and change as a function of the particular societies that produced them” (2008, p. 4).

If libraries are reflections of our culture, librarians are the ones to ensure that they reflect that culture accurately and completely. This realization brought me a deeper comprehension of the responsibility a librarian has to uphold such values as intellectual freedom, public service, education, and knowledge preservation, and I understood why Rubin used the word “humility” several times in this chapter (2008, p. 10-12)! In a sense, our modern libraries are as much repositories of information as they are expressions of freedom itself. Every time a librarian is involved in censorship or discrimination he or she directly threatens that freedom.

The second implication is whether libraries are still viable in our Google driven society. Can they compete with “the Net’s speed and convenience” (Rubin, 2008, p.13)? The very fact that this question is being asked is evidence that change needs to occur. As the “information age” gives way to the “connected age,” librarians are obligated to make libraries competitive by changing once again to meet the public’s informational needs.

Rubin, R. E. (2008). Stepping back and looking forward: Reflections on the foundations of libraries and librarianship. In Ken Haycock & Brooke E. Sheldon (Eds.), The portable MLIS: Insights from the experts. Westport, Connecticut, Libraries Unlimited.