Steve Thomas: Bobbi and Sam, both of you, welcome back to the podcast.
Bobbi L. Newman: Thank you.
Sam Helmick: It’s great to be with you, Steve.
Bobbi L. Newman: It’s always great to be here.
Steve Thomas: Both been on the show before, and today we’re gonna talk mostly about library education, library credentialing, based on an article that you both wrote together in Inside Higher Ed called “The Case for a Professional Foundation in Librarianship,” and there’ll be a link in the show notes here if you need to see that, if you didn’t already read it. But I wanted to start off by just getting a feel for your own personal experience in library school. What’s the most valuable thing that you feel like you personally learned when you were in library school?
Sam Helmick: For me, I think it was how fundamental and instrumental libraries are to civil societies. Having that background of knowledge to recognize that an informed constituency is one that is better equipped to govern itself and how libraries and information access fit into that infrastructure, whether it’s policy or social acumen or just digital navigation, I think really was the bedrock of how important this work was going to be for me for the decades to come.
Bobbi L. Newman: This is why I like working with Sam. They always sound so smart, and then I have to come in and… first of all, library school for me was 25 years ago, I think, at this point, close to it. And so I had to do a little thinking back that far because we’re a profession for lifelong learning, and I learned a lot since library school as well, right?
But I think for me, the things that I have brought forward with me through technology changes and things like that are the foundational ethics and values that librarians hold, not just here in the US, but around the world. And if you look at IFLA, CILIP in the UK, and ALA, there’s a lot of overlap in all the places.
Steve Thomas: I think that would be my answer too, though I jokingly say at work a lot of times it’s taking that cataloging class so I understand what a catalog record is. I have never been a cataloger, but just that cataloging class was so helpful in my brain, helping it organize things.
The article that you all wrote together, what prompted you all to write the article in the first place, and then how did you all end up working together to write the response that you wrote?
Bobbi L. Newman: So I saw the article on social media, and the headline and the claims caught my eye. Sam and I, we’re both in Iowa City now, been running in the same circles for a while, and I was complaining on Facebook, and Sam responded with a very well-thought-out comment. And I said, “Hey, wanna write a response?” And together, we did.
Sam Helmick: Absolutely. And I think the reason that I shared so many of my own thought bunnies about it was first is that Bobbi has always curated spaces online for engagement, where you can kinda think your thinks and feel your feels so Bobbi probably gets way more of me than anybody else on social media. But the other piece of it for me was that as a person who was humbled to represent this profession, I have met so many wonderful students entering it, going through it, academics providing that education, I understand the importance of the degree, and I wanted it to have its due day in court. It also kinda just rustled my jimmies a little bit to see a complete absence of consideration to public and school libraries, because academic librarianship serves everyone.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. And obviously every job in libraries doesn’t require a master’s degree in library science. We’re not claiming that at all whatsoever. But there are jobs that do and when people are thinking about it, maybe the person who wrote the other article or just other people in the outside world, but we’ve all encountered, “You need a master’s degree to work in libraries?” But what do you think people misunderstand about the role of the MLS, the degree? What does that degree really bring to the table?
Sam Helmick: For me, I think it reminds us of the fundamentals, the core values of our profession, and in an information age, how there needs to be folks that are dedicated to the science of those core values. For me, and for ALA of course, they are access, equity, intellectual freedom and privacy, but also public good and sustainability. And if you think about the onset of data centers, you think about the onset of AI, where we’re refusing to give students the right and passage of struggle, which is so instrumental to learning, the vulnerability that is instrumental to learning, the autonomy and the voyage of discovery that’s so instrumental to learning. I’m really concerned about dismantling degrees that not only influence legislation and policy but public perception and our academic ability to safeguard these facets. Public good, sustainability, intellectual freedom, privacy, equity, and access cannot defend themselves, and that is why this profession has stood as a foundational cornerstone to civil societies.
Bobbi L. Newman: There’s that old fable or I can’t think of the word, metaphor, about the different people feeling the parts of the elephant, the blind people feeling the parts of the elephant. I think people see about libraries the piece that they feel, right? And it’s the piece that they interact with. So I think when we’re speaking of the general public as such, they see the thing they interact with, whether it’s story time, it’s books that come in, sometimes they see it as computer help. But I don’t know that anybody who is a user of libraries necessarily sees the big picture. Because there are so many pieces, it would be unusual for someone to access the whole picture all of the time.
And I think that leads to what people think about the idea of books, but I think it also leads them to view us as a static profession, and I can see you both nodding and the listeners won’t be able to see that, but we, those of us who work in libraries know that we’re not a static profession, right? Lifelong learning, professional development is new. The advent of the internet changed everything about how libraries function and what they do, and we’ve all been in libraries long enough, we’ve seen a lot of changes come and go.
And so I think people think libraries and they think books, and they think it of sort of a technical credential, right? You go to the MLS and you learn cataloging, you learn reference skills, and you’re qualified. But professionally, what the degree is bringing to it is that you’re formed into a profession with a shared ethical foundation, and I talked about that in my first question. In the US, that’s ALA, but we have IFLA, we have other professional organizations that also bring that in there. And those core values, if you look across them, are generally the same as Sam said, right? Intellectual freedom, privacy, the public good, service, social responsibility, and I think that is the thing that a lot of people miss out on when they’re thinking about the MLS and about libraries in general.
Sam Helmick: And not to make this inherently American, right, but as the American representative just a couple scant months ago, so much of it is foundational in how we operate as a government, as we operate as a society. It’s so embedded in the First Amendment that it’s difficult for me to actually disassociate this degree from the work of the First Amendment as it is practiced in our nation.
Steve Thomas: Let’s talk about that foundation a little bit, because when people are, again, seeing just parts of the job, they would be shocked to know that somebody working in an elementary school library and a public library and Harvard Library and the law library all share the same core degree, credential. So what is it that is that foundation that goes across all of those different settings that unites us all?
Sam Helmick: So if I can wax on this first, Bobbi, I feel like we can go back to even Ranganathan’s five laws, right? And so when we say books are for use, that means a lot of things. The first is we’re going to be curating collections that are meaningful to our service area, and that could be students, that could be employees in a corporate library, that could be a public library. But books are for use. We’re not saying that the presence of an idea is its endorsement. It is up to you to do with the information what you want, and we respect our communities enough to trust them with their collections.
When we think about every reader, their book, we’re not here to pontificate. We’re not here to pressure or endorse a specific viewpoint. We’re here to support your ability to access information and help you apply it responsibly to make your life more advanced and successful. But to every reader, their book too. I love a lot of nonfiction and sci-fi, so if I’m on the book mobile and people wanna talk about that, I’m your guy. But if you’re looking for romance or if you’re looking for modern literature, I’m not your reader. And accepting that and embracing it and creating environments where everybody understands that while we have cultural and community conversations, we are not marionettes of each other. And continuing to create procedures, collections, policies, and processes that honors that fundamental belief is important.
But then also saving the time for the reader. Whether it’s an access issue or a barrier issue geographically, economically, or socially, we’re supposed to be continuing to create pathways of access and ease between the student, the patron, and the resource. So we’re trained and dedicated to be always asking the question of who’s not at the table, and how could we get them there more easily?
And then lastly, the library is a growing organism. To Bobbi’s point earlier, we know we’re not a static profession, but we do need to be brave enough to grow at the rate of the societies we serve.
Bobbi L. Newman: Yeah. And I would say that the foundation that you’re getting in the MLS, the values and ethics, things that we’ve talked about, that stays the same, right? I guess I’m repeating what Sam said, but it stays the same across the library that you’re working in, and that might include things like intellectual freedom, privacy, but also could be metadata, cataloging, those kind of things, research methods. Those are applicable regardless of the public you serve, whether that’s students, whether that’s a corporate library, where it’s other colleagues, if it’s the general public if you’re a public library. That thing you take with you is your underlying foundation, and then what you build upon that is your specialization or your area. And people change those, right? There are people who have gone from public to academic because that foundation carries them through that.
Sam Helmick: And what I love about it is because those fundamentals exist throughout the patron, from the entire life, from, K4 and you got like a hamster named Matilda and everybody comes and visits her at the library, to you go to your academic library and they’re actually going to download your dissertation and it’s going to be part of the scholarship of this university for the rest of existence. Your privacy, the ease of access, here to thought partner and support you, those are through lines from the entire learning journey.
Bobbi L. Newman: Is Matilda the North Liberty Library’s?
Sam Helmick: She is. I am such a fan. If I can mention Matilda in every third podcast, it’s kinda what I’d do. We don’t have a Matilda at Iowa City Public yet.
Steve Thomas: I gotta get Matilda on the podcast.
Bobbi L. Newman: You do. Yeah.
Sam Helmick: I don’t know if you can book her. She’s pretty…
Steve Thomas: I know, she’s pretty famous. Her booking fee is woo, out the wazoo.
Sam Helmick: It’s five pellets. It’s crazy.
Steve Thomas: And Bobbi I’m pretty sure you were one of the people, and I am too, that made that jump, that you were in public and jumped to academic, and I was working at an R1 research library, and then jumped to public because of something that I wanna talk about a little bit too, is that I realized at that level if I was ever going to be say, an art librarian at that level, they’re like, “Okay you have your MLS, where’s your art degree as well?” Oh, I have to have two degrees to do this. Ugh. And I think that’s how some of the people are coming at it from the other side of this argument is “They already have the art degree, why are you gonna make them get a master’s degree when they can just learn all the library stuff?”
You learn something in a different way when you’re… like, can you learn all of the knowledge? Sure, but you can learn the knowledge of any master degree on your own, in some way, but not in the right way, when it’s packaged together in the right way, in the right program, and with a group of colleagues with you. It’s not just a corpus of knowledge that you download into your brain.
Bobbi L. Newman: It’s critical thinking and engagement with the ideas, right? ‘Cause now I’m a SLIS instructor, right? Part of the point of school is that, one, you’re engaging critically with the readings or the material that we’re using in class. You are applying it to your own framework. You are thinking through things with your fellow students, whether that’s face-to-face, online, via Zoom or if you’re doing asynchronous classes, through text more that way. And then, getting feedback from somebody who has maybe a little more knowledge than you. Not always, but sometimes.
Sam Helmick: And sometimes I feel like I can still look at our profession from the outside, right? ‘Cause I came to libraries a little bit late in life, just about 20 years ago. And I think about the importance of the social and political capital of having such a community of practice in academia, and how maybe that’s become more profound and obvious recently with bills and legislation than before.
But if we’re going to be a society that’s grappling with is an answer acceptable or is the correct answer acceptable? Is an answer acceptable or is the scholarship and the getting to it and really learning and researching and embedding and saturating yourself the principle goal? We’re grappling with these as a species right now. And so to eradicate a discipline and its academic houses that really dedicates itself to saying, “We’re a higher form of creation because we curate and make not only information, but opportunity accessible to you,” feels pretty profound.
I think about academic spaces and to even get to co-author an article, an editorial, in Inside Higher Ed was not on my bucket list as Sam Helmick, public librarian. But I do feel the wonder and the excitement of being able to go into research myself and know I actually know that this is what Ranganathan said. I can find the source material, and I can discover this. I am not obliged to take the word of an algorithm. I am empowered to discover the formula, to figure out algebra, and to understand how the universe unlocks itself as a human being with my own mind, and this is what libraries do inside and outside of academia.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. What does it mean to be part of a profession, not just that you have this degree, not that just you have to have this job, but you are a librarian in that you are now part of this field? The profession as a whole, and I guess having the previous past president of ALA is a good person to comment on that of just being in charge of a larger profession, what does that look like?
Sam Helmick: I think there are a lot of ways to look at this, right?
And I really think about it, I’m sorry, but from my public library lens where nobody has rushed in and said “Quick, who has the MLIS? I need help.” And why I would like to remind library workers, which is what we all are, library workers, of this point is because there is a public trust embedded in all of us by default of the profession that we have to protect, steward, and honor.
The bar is pretty high for all of us. And so I really do think of us all as library workers building a profession, and frankly, we do that in tandem with the communities we serve. I’ve always thought of this as a relational collaboration as a library worker with whoever I’m happening to rock the bookmobile with or sit on a reference desk with on both sides of the desk.
But I think the fundamental question for me is not what the labels are, because I also have a criminal justice degree. Does that mean I’m a paralegal or an attorney or a sheriff? There are different labels and different roles and different interdisciplinary things in all types of fields.
But now that I’m in librarianship, and what library school really taught me was that we’re starting to ask the question of what is academia really supposed to do? And right now I think the question is it purely vocational? And so education is no longer a starting point where I continue to assemble my philosophy and grow in librarianship.
Is it really just a, like it’s a track right into the job and then you can check it off the list? And I think that libraries are in that mix because we serve in so many facets of the American and world experience. But at the end of the day, this is a fundamental question about what is education for. And for me, it’s a starting point. So I have the degree. I’ve had it for 15 years. I had the honor of serving as ALA President, but I’m still an incredible work in progress, and not only will my colleagues and associations and communities of practice and future classes and development that I take at my library school continue to grow me, but so will the communities that I serve if we’re listening and receiving feedback from them in the ways that we should.
Bobbi L. Newman: So I think for me, we think about libraries as a building of books, and I would say it’s not a library if there aren’t the library professionals working in there. And I’ve started shifting my language to just say library professional, right? Because if you’re working in the building, you’re a professional. I do think there’s a value in the MLS obviously, but we’re not just stewards of paper on the shelf, right? But we’re the stewardship of what’s inside those books, what that they are the gateway to, of information, of imagination, of expanding your mind and possibilities.
I like to think the idea of helping people move from just consuming content to thinking about how that content fits in their own information scope and in their world and their knowledge and their place in the world as well, and so we have this professional culture, I think, of continuous learning that library schools hopefully start and build upon, as opposed to just one-time technical training. Cataloging is something I took as a class in library school, and I think that it has probably changed over the years. I don’t do cataloging now, but I think probably the core concepts are pretty close to the same. You can train somebody to do tasks for a specific library in, I don’t wanna say, let’s say a few weeks or, maybe a couple months, but you can’t give this internalized ethical code that I feel like I’ve talked about too much already especially that’s gonna hold up under pressure.
And the pressure part is, I think, especially important right now because we all know what’s happening with libraries here in the United States and the pressure that they’re finding themselves in. I don’t know if either of you saw the PEN America report that just came out. And for me, it’s that professional foundation that I hope is giving librarians who are experiencing that something to hang onto. It’s a life raft right now.
Steve Thomas: But I think from what you’re saying about catalogers, yeah, you can teach somebody in a few weeks to do the technical tasks, but are those the people who are gonna grapple with the Library of Congress subject headings and how we do this, and what’s the ethical obligations to look at how people were referred to in the past and, really really targeting Dewey for its faults, and trying to find ways to work around that, or any cataloging system, not Dewey specifically, but just how can we make it more equitable and inclusive? You’re not gonna just teach that in a few weeks. That kind of thinking through those topics is not gonna come through. Yes, typing in a MARC record, sure, we can teach that pretty easily, but that’s not why we’re getting the degree.
Bobbi L. Newman: Yeah, and I will say as somebody who was a cataloger for a very brief point in my career, I did mostly copy cataloging and very little original cataloging, but one of the things I remember with the copy cataloging was importing records for DVDs that the library had, and the rating from the Motion Picture Association would be on there. And I don’t know if you guys know about the problems with the ratings from the Motion Picture Association, but they’re problematic. And so then this led to an issue with, do we keep these in our catalog? What value do they have, et cetera, kind of conversations that my library degree prepared me to one, flag, and then have a conversation about.
Sam Helmick: I think that’s so important, Bobbi, because if you don’t have that foundation, you don’t even know what questions to ask sometimes. We recognize this when we’re supporting our communities and helping them pursue knowledge, but to have a third-party entity make determinations on the ratings of materials for a public collection is incredibly fraught, and we need to be equipped to ask those types of questions because we are the firewall between privacy and access to those entities and those we serve.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. We have a little librarian Spider-Sense thing of “Oop, wait a minute. Hold on. That’s an issue I need to be thinking about.”
Sam Helmick: Yes.
Steve Thomas: And I think that’s why it’s important, especially in leadership roles, to have the MLS in place because then your knowledge and everything is gonna leech out to your staff, and you’re gonna teach them things. Like anybody can recommend a book, we take a whole reader’s advisory class, so we learn techniques to do things and different ways of thinking about things. And so of course we’re gonna teach that to our non-MLS staff as well so they can help recommend books to people, but the leaders, they’re the ones that are making those big decisions. They’re able to, like you said, ask the right questions.
Sam Helmick: Learning to catalog was one of the most painful experiences of my own life. I’m not a very technical or detail-oriented person. I’m more of a fly on the seat of my pants, “let’s do a story time with penguins today” type of person. But having the foundation to understand how libraries are part of a larger ecosystem and where that story time or that catalog record fits into the larger system has really been the difference of what type of a librarian I was allowed to be at the offset of my career.
And I’m gonna put my advocacy hat on ’cause it’s my jam. I could put it on toast every day. And watch the patterns. You’re starting to see it in academia, but you saw it in schools first, and you didn’t see it with the book titles first. You saw it with, “Do we really need credentialed librarians in this space? Do we actually need one per library in the school district? Why don’t we get rid of these requirements?” And then we were less equipped to protect the privacy and intellectual freedom and access of our students. And then you see it happening in public libraries because our budgets are values in action, and so we’re starting to say, “Do we really need credentialed positions? Are we willing to pay for that? Are we willing to pay for tuition or training or certification? Do we really need that many librarians in a urban library?” And now we’re seeing it in academia. And so I would remind folks that while we’re having this relevant conversation within our profession, other people are weaponizing it outside.
Bobbi L. Newman: Yeah. Absolutely.
Steve Thomas: How do you feel like the library education prepares a student for those pressures that you’re talking about? How does that degree prepare us to take on these issues like intellectual freedom or privacy?
Bobbi L. Newman: I think that this is the, I like to think, that this is the moment where that education really starts to prove its worth. It’s that life raft, you’re clinging to because in that moment, you’re not responding as a person, right? This is your professional foundation, so it’s not your personal beliefs. You’re not responding with your political beliefs. It’s your professional code of ethics and standards.
If you look at ALA or IFLA or other organizations, there is this idea that we have to oppose censorship, right? Not just not perform censorship, but oppose it in all its forms, and so that the idea that material selection is governed by professional considerations, not political, not my personal morals or my personal ethics or my own religious beliefs, but my professional standards. And that’s not just the policy that one library has or even an American library policy. This is our foundation, our bedrock of our profession, ALA’s Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read statements.
And so my hope, and I send this out as a beam of hope to anybody listening or any library professionals out there, that if a book challenge happens, that they know that they’re not alone. That is not something that you have to take upon yourself. It is not happening to you alone, but the profession stands behind you. So when a librarian is responding to that, or a library professional is responding to that, they’re not improvising a personal opinion. It can feel personal. It can feel like a challenge to your professionalism. We often associate deeply personal with our profession as well, but it is not. It is something that they’re responding to with all the professional obligations that our education and our certification hopefully equips us with.
Sam Helmick: I really can’t add to that. I think Bobbi really recommends the degree so well, and we’re so thrilled to have her in our own U of I.
I will say that life experience as a dyslexic child where my mom allowed me to buy comic books really taught me that graphic literature is literature. But when I went to library school, it taught me about the higher vocabulary and the economy of language and the sight and the phonetics that actually helped struggling readers, and so my life experience prepared me on a personal level to help with that reader’s advisory when I was a children’s and teen librarian. But library school actually gave me the data, the science, and the educational pedagogy behind it.
Another example is when I was supporting, as the president of the Iowa Library Association, a community that had literal books burned for their LGBTQIA content. I actually got my degree 15 years ago in the good old days when we weren’t banning books every single day. So I didn’t have that as my focus for my degree, but you know what I did have as my focus? Policies, processes, and procedures by boards of trustees or boards of regents and how to do that work with power mapping and understanding case law and viewpoint discrimination. Not only did I have the personal wherewithal from life experience to know what I needed to defend, but then I had the tools from my graduate degree to not only help myself make those connections to be supportive, but then to understand how we do trust these processes and have for generations and allow the process to respectfully unfold.
Steve Thomas: In the discussion of all this, the lack of diversity in the profession has come up. What do you think library schools, employers, professional organizations, other librarians in the field even, what do we need to do to make the MLS more accessible and inclusive? What do you think are those things in the way, or what can we do differently as a profession?
Bobbi L. Newman: So I think for me, when we were writing this response, we wanted to dig into some of the data around this. As I was doing some reading, I realized that this is a broad sort of decades-long cross-professional pattern. Librarianship is not the only place where this is an issue by any means. It’s not unique to libraries or higher education or those kind of things. And this is not me trying to pass the buck on this discussion, but rather to center it in a larger framework within our profession.
And so I think Sam made a really solid point in the article which eliminating the credential doesn’t fix the problem. The goal is to diversify the profession, not eliminate it, not dissolve it. I know a lot of people say that in order to have diversity in the profession, we need to eliminate the requirements or eliminate the credentialing. I don’t think our goal is to lower the bar, but I think what we need to do is widen the door to get more people in. I think that solution looks like investing more in getting people access to scholarships, and I know the Spectrum Scholarship exists, but going beyond that there’s the larger problem of funding for financial education in general. It’s getting worse currently with the current administration.
And then looking at ways we could maybe do partnerships with minority-serving institutions historically. I think also we need better pay for the degree so it’s a more viable option. When you’re looking at investing in higher education and the cost of higher education, you should be looking at the salaries for the profession you’re going to go into, right? So financial support, increased financial support for students, and then improving library salaries overall.
Sam Helmick: I think that’s incredibly well said, and I don’t wanna say anything controversial here, but when folks tell me they wanna diversify a field by eliminating the educational and credential components, that feels like bigotry with extra steps to me. I know it’s not meant to be, but closing an academic door does not open a professional one. And choosing to close an academic door because it isn’t a clear or straight throughway to a professional one, again, really begs the question, what is academia for? Is it just for a vocational path, or do we actually consider education and edification of the human mind and soul to matter?
And so if we want more diversity in our profession, we cannot cannibalize ourselves and continue to have arguments about whether or not we believe in ourselves and the degree is worth it. I also think with the Spectrum Scholars having their 20th anniversary, our current president of ALA is a Spectrum Scholar. I think it’s important to highlight and venerate those voices of leadership so that our profession not only seems kind, generous, and supportive of each other but also is amplifying the diverse voices that are leading it forward.
And then it doesn’t just end at the degree. Again, budgets are values in action. If you can go into an information field and work in the private sector for three times more money, and you’re not gonna get attacked about certain books being on the shelves, why would you invest in libraries? So I think continuing to push for stronger funding, better legislation, protecting libraries’ and readers’ rights throughout the states, is the work that we can do to make this a profession that people who are already vulnerable can feel welcome into.
And then just remembering that the work of the degree is not all-inclusive. As a manager for the past 15 years, so much of my work in cultural competencies and continuing to grow and understand how to supervise and support five generations of library workers is something that I’ll never be done doing because the work of culture is never over. And why would it be, right? It’s important, valuable, wonderful work. And so I guess I have a lot of thought bunnies hopping around in my head here right now, Steve, but to me, if you want more people to bring their diverse perspectives and lived experiences to the profession, make sure that it’s a profession that’s wonderful and inclusive and supportive to each other and continues to fight against the grain of seeing it dismantled.
Bobbi L. Newman: And I wanna add, too, and this is not an argument against diversity, I don’t want it to be framed like that, but I think some people believe that if we get rid of the degree, that the person they’re working next to in the library who doesn’t have a degree, who shares their values and their beliefs about the value of libraries, and probably some of their ethical foundations, because we have conversations that gets passed along.
I wanna remind people what Sam said earlier about, we’re having this conversation with each other, but other people are watching. And what happens if we eliminate the degree is not that person gets a job in the library or gets better pay. What happens is the person who’s now in charge of the library is somebody who doesn’t have the foundation and beliefs in intellectual freedom, doesn’t understand how collection development is done professionally, and you get people in the library making decisions about what materials are there, what programs and services that are offered that don’t have the foundations that we do about the importance of serving everyone in the community, that you don’t choose books because of your own personal religious or moral beliefs, or just the books that you personally wanna read. I’ll fill the library with fantasy books and travel memoirs, right? That’s my preference, but I, when I was in the public library, I chose other books. And so I’m not trying to be like “ooh boo, boo, boo, scary” but I want people to think a little bit more through this step.
It’s always the story, “Oh, this person I’ve worked with is so amazing,” and that’s the person that you’re thinking of, but that probably is not going to be the person who gets the job. We want libraries to have this foundation where they support diversity, where they support the whole community, where they’re welcoming to the people in the community that need them most. And that’s really important.
Steve Thomas: As we’re moving toward the end of our time together, I just wanted to end on a sort of inspirational message. If there are people listening here, and they wanna go to library school, they’re considering it, what would you say to encourage them to do so?
Sam Helmick: I’ll tell a little story. I accidentally fell into libraries. I actually, I didn’t support them publicly a little over 20 years ago, and then I found them and fell in love, and I had just finished paying off my third undergrad degree, and I had a wonderful mentor who would not stop slapping graduate applications on my desk.
I wasn’t looking to be a manager, Steve. I liked being a teen librarian very much in my hometown, and it was a full-time gig, but I loved this profession, and once I fell in love and understood what I’d been missing out and what other people had been missing out on, I wanted to learn more, and I wanted to use it as a vehicle to help my community. And not to get ultra-religious, but I remember praying about it for a couple of months ’cause it was a financial investment and was gonna change my life. I’m a first-generation college student, and I remember my dad once saying that, “The two things that can never be repossessed, Sammy, are travel memories and education.”
And so I guess what I would say is that if this is a profession that really fills your mind and your heart and your interest, then see it for what it is, both a pathway to professional growth, but also a pathway to education and learning and assembling a philosophy about something that is very instrumental and important to the way that we all navigate the world every single day.
And then the second is I would just like to give you all a hug and a high five. I think about Mr. Rogers’ “look for the helpers.” We know that this profession is in the crucible. We know it’s in the crucible because it actually is relevant. If it wasn’t, they would leave us alone. We actually help perform public good and give opportunity and hope to people every single day. So thank you for being willing to run towards that. Thank you for being the helpers, and you can find me online if you ever just need somebody to cheerlead you on.
Bobbi L. Newman: Well said, Sam. I don’t think I can top that, but I’m always very cautious of trying not to inspire vocational awe when I try to talk about the good in libraries, and I know we’re all familiar with that. I also lucked into libraries, I guess I’ll say, and I’m also a first-generation college student, so I have had pivots, I wrote an article recently with someone about pivots in our careers, and so I’m on the pivot path right now. I’ve had a lot of pivots in my career, but I would say welcome to the journey, I know we both talked about this or we all talked about this a little bit.
I started out in a corporate library. I went to a public library system, and I dipped out of libraries for a little bit professionally. I went back to school, and then I came back, and I worked in an academic library, and now I’m a SLIS professor. And so I think one of the things I love about the the amazingness of libraries is you can spend your entire career working in one library, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s gonna be beautiful and amazing. You’re gonna develop, you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna see so much technology innovation and changes in the people that you serve, and that will be amazing. Or you may change different library systems or you move states, and you’re gonna get different experiences every time you go somewhere and do something else.
The one thing I know about this profession is that it is gonna adapt, and it is gonna change, and it will continue to be there, and it’s gonna be a journey that we’re all going to be on. And so I feel like you’re joining hands with people all, all across the country or all across the world in this same journey that we’re going on to in our pursuit of intellectual freedom and privacy and the public good. And welcome aboard, I guess.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Obviously rest in peace, Fobazi, with the vocational awe. But we understand that because we do feel, we all feel that. It’s a service profession but yeah, the important thing of vocational awe, don’t let that overwhelm you and let you get taken advantage of and all this kind of stuff. But the reason we understand what that is because we understand the draw. We understand that there’s that awe there, like a black hole trying to pull you in that you have to resist.
And I can tell you, I have to go back and look at it, 322 episodes, nobody has ever said, “When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a librarian when I grew up, and so I became a librarian.” Everybody is like us, I think, that you just stumble into it later. I got into it because my wife was going to the university where I was working as a student, and she wanted me to just have a job on campus so we could have lunch together. And so I started working at the library, and then I just was like, “Oh, this is pretty cool.”
Sam Helmick: That is the most wholesome reason I have heard, ever, and I feel like that is a “meet cute” plot line for a new novel. I’m just putting it out there, Steve, when you have extra time.
Steve Thomas: Thank you both for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. I hope to have you both back on the show again.
Bobbi L. Newman: It’s always a pleasure to be here.
Sam Helmick: Steve, always great to see you. And Bobbi, it’s always great to see you, too.
Bobbi L. Newman: Yes, absolutely. We actually should get together in person.
Sam Helmick: 100%
Steve Thomas: So long, Iowa!
Bobbi L. Newman: All right. Thank you, Steve.
Sam Helmick: Thanks, Steve.
Circulating Ideas 