thoughts on CAUT's Librarian Conference 2012: Contested Terrain

Overall the Conference was worth attending as it brought a significant number of librarians together from across the country to discuss the trend of de-professionalization at a participant (not theoretical) level, reinforcing and increasing solidarity and placing everyone on the same page with respect to events happening and potential methods for dealing with these events.  It was very much a “this is the status quo what are we going to do, how are we going to respond” conference.

As such, I personally was disappointed. Not enough time was spent clarifying the causes of de-professionalization and the theories and ideologies pushing their way into our workplaces. In order to understand how to best improve our lot, I believe we need to better understand the forces behind this movement or the root causes. For example, neoliberalism or libertarianism was mentioned in no great detail, and discussion of the uncritical acceptance by academic library administrators of ideologies abhorrent to the promulgated values of librarianship was absent. Neither was the logical conclusion to continued de-professionalization considered…the disappearance of academic librarianship. (After all, if we’re doing research and teaching with library staff doing everything else, there is really no need for such a thing as librarians is there?). There was little to no investigation and reaffirming of the values that drive librarians and librarianship, values that explain much of the conflict found in our libraries today (the clash of democracy versus neoliberalism). Two of the sessions attempted to provide explanatory context, one within librarianship itself and the second within the broader landscape of human rights, public good and digital labour, and the need to redesign the labour framework with respect to this new way of working. 

I was also disappointed that that concrete responses by the attendees as a body, and as representatives of librarians at multiple universities, did not occur at the conference itself. One of the ironies of libraries and librarians is that most statements regarding libraries apply to our users. Few statements exist that would extend those same rights to the library workers. Up until now this extension to us had been assumed. IFLA’s Code of Ethics for Librarians and Library Workers, released in August of 2012, was mentioned as something we should consider endorsing. It contains language with respect to professionalism and employer/employee and colleague relationships. Unfortunately not enough people were aware of this statement and had read it, so no movement to endorse occurred.