I came across this article today : The Anti-stereotype Sterotype which looks at the image of librarians in the media with a twist. In a bid for libraries to seem cool, hip, and exciting, institutions often go out of their way to shine a spotlight on the more unusual subgenres of librarians: tatooed libraians, punk rock librarians, lipstick librarians etc. The old librarian stereotype is dead, long live the new stereotype.
In hindsight I would have liked to address this issue at Hollywood Librarian, and hopefully with Hollywood Librarian II planned for Spring 2010 we can discuss the dangers of the new stereotype. But first of all do we even agree there is a new stereotpye?
We recently updated our library website with photos of library staff and I noted that most of the photos taken were of the younger members of staff.
ReplyDeleteI also noticed that on faculty pages there appeared images of library assistants rather than subject librarians because they were ultimately more photogenic and interesting i.e. did not look like stereotypical librarians.
There is a new image of the modern day/Web 2.0 librarian an action at the moment and I think that we are trying too hard to erase the old stereotype that we are creating a new contrived image.