Aspirational Statement in response to the draft Competency Statement for CARL/ABRC Librarians

I've been meaning to create a statement that encompasses my feelings and aspirations for librarianship, in response to and refuting the competencies statements that breed like deformed rabbits. Please let me know what you think.

My first draft/beginnings: "I am a Librarian"

 

We are academic librarians who are members of a knowledge-based community called LIS, who leverage knowledge and expertise in service of furthering knowledge, as individuals and as groups of interested parties. We do not work in isolation as we are deeply connected to others, people working within and beyond our field in service to the dream of expanding knowledge. We are grounded within our own knowledge even as we expand that knowledge, and the majority of us consider central to our activities the historic core principles, values and ethics of our field, originally created as the fundamental building blocks of our community. We may have offices and home libraries, but we tend to congregate where information aggregates or where creativity happens that fosters new knowledge, and continue to respond to the needs of those communities aggregating information and knowledge, and create opportunities to respond (including curation and storage) in whatever form is desirable.

As academic librarians we formulate careers and expect workplaces to respect and incorporate those careers in complement to the needs of those units called research or academic libraries, and with respect to the needs of the members of the university. We expect a complementary relationship to be more than the sum of its parts, driving both the library unit and librarians to greater successes. These libraries are run by both librarians and administrative librarians and as such expect administrative librarians to reflect the values, principles and ethics of the profession. If those administrative librarians are to be leaders, we expect them to nurture and lead in exemplifying the values, ethics and principles of the profession. 

I am still processing the CARL statement. I have huge concerns but I needed to cleanse the air, thus I have started by refuting their version of an aspirational statement with the beginnings of my own.