Through vocational mythologies that reinforce themes of sacrifice and struggle, librarianship sustains itself through the labor of librarians who only reap the immaterial benefits of having “done good work.”
I agree that these narratives are toxic. The comments the author is making are important because it's better to address accomplishments that people make without using themes of sacrifice and self-denial.
because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution, when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased
This reminds me of an article I read recently about the erasure of people of color from (once-French-controlled) colonies in the Caribbean on an archival collections level due to the state not prioritizing records about them for preservation and documentation in addition to what happens when librarians of color speak out about professional things.
with such expectations, job creep can become a common phenomenon. The problem with job creep manifests in multiple ways. One, what employees originally did voluntarily is no longer considered “extra” but instead is simply viewed as in-role job performance, which leads to more and more responsibilities and less time in which to accomplish them
This is important and troubling — as an academic librarian, while my job does change and evolve, I don't experience the same level of job creep as those in public librarianship. This entire article has been insightful about the concerns of a large percentage of those in the library work force, and I wonder what can be done (as someone in the academic sphere) to make things better for colleagues in other types of library jobs who are dealing with this stress.
Indeed, the first Western librarians were members of religious orders
I disagree with this statement. It is important to acknowledge the long-standing tradition of libraries themselves and their place in society before Christianity. Libraries were also often housed in religious spaces (such as the Mouseion in Alexandria), and people filling social roles that would evolve into the modern librarians have existed since the Sumerians, and there were people filling these roles in Western societies in the Classical world.
Their narratives of receiving the “call” to librarianship often fall right in line with Martin Luther’s description of vocation as the ways a person serves God and his neighbour through his work in the world.
They also fall in line with things like the Hippocratic Oath, where ideals of professional ethics and norms are sworn upon entering a profession and treated as an oath in either a sacred or secular context. In a critical information literacy context, where many of our institutions within librarianship are admittedly flawed by our intrinsic biases (especially the colonialist and white biases of modern Western — especially USA — libraries), it becomes even more important to teach and discuss professional ethics as a counter to holding unrealistic ideas about what our profession is and does. http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics
We showhow the rise of large datasets, in conjunction with arising interest in data as scholarly output, contributesto the advent of data sharing platforms in a field trad-itionally organized by infrastructures.
What does this paper mean by infrastructures? Perhaps this is a reference to the traditional scholarly journals and monographs.