Over at Random Access Mazar, Rochelle has a long-ish think piece about librarians’ status vis-a-vis faculty entitled
Comrades-in-Arms: The Professor and the Librarian. The always stimulating Dorothea of Caveat Lector has responded with Joining the Club. If you are at all interested in this subject, you should read both of those posts right now. I can wait.

For myself, I want to build productive, collegial working relationships with faculty. As the liaison librarian to our humanities departments, that is an important part of my job. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that the faculty view me as “one of them,” nor do I think they should. I feel my role at the college is something altogether different.

I am a generalist; I serve eight departments. While I wish I knew as much about music and Romance languages as I do about English and art history, it simply isn’t possible for me to be a subject expert in all the areas I serve. Perhaps if I were a single-subject bibliographer with a Ph.D. in my field I would want the faculty to see me as more of an equal, but this isn’t that kind of job, and I’m not that kind of librarian.

I don’t expect all faculty to see me the same way. I think many faculty view their liaison librarian as a consultant in a very limited area; someone to call in for library instruction to their students, or to help build an electronic reserves page, or to coordinate buying materials for the library to support their classes. A few probably view us as something like customer service at the phone company: the people you call as a last resort when things are broken and you are already ticked off.

My hope is that if I can help a professor in one of those areas, then he or she will think of me again in a different capacity. Eventually, our working relationship would “fill out” a bit, and I could help them see ways that the library touches their students, their assignments, and their own research. My hope is that they will see me as a liberally-educated, tech-savvy, humanist librarian who is dedicated to helping faculty and students reach their academic goals (and not as a bureaucratic, technocratic, narrow-minded librarian who just wants people to follow library policies and leave him alone).

And those faculty who don’t call? I try and make sure they know who I am, and know what I do, and know that I would love to help. But I can’t force them to work with me. Instead, I try that much harder to reach out to new faculty, who tend to be very open to working with a librarian (especially when I ask them what books they’d like me to buy for the collection in their field).

Lastly, Rochelle begins her post with some mentions of faculty status for librarians, though most of her piece seems to deal with “status” in a less-formal sense). I have never worked in a place where librarians have faculty status, so I can only speculate on the topic. I wonder if faculty status has less to do with trying to win respect from the faculty (which I think is misguided), and more to do with getting respect (in the form of salary, leave time, etc.) from the administration.