Defining Cybrarian

Susan C. Hunnicutt, Student, Wayne State University Library and Information Science, schunnicut@aol.com.

It took Christopher Columbus almost four months to get lost in the New World. Today the stars in the sky, the oceans of the earth, and even its tiniest and most remote population centers are mapped in such great detail that a navigational problem like the one Columbus struggled with is impossible to imagine. Yet it is still possible to get thoroughly lost.

When people today imagine getting lost, some of them think of cyberspace. Like the real world in which Columbus lived, cyberspace offers an infinite number of accidental destinations. Unlike the real world, any one of the infinite numbers of accidental destinations is only milliseconds away in cyberspace. Course corrections can be quite speedy, but then, the next thing you know, you can be lost again.

Cyberspace seems to hold as many secrets as the earth itself.

This fact has had a huge impact on the lives of professional librarians in the past decade, and it is shaping the future of libraries in ways that no one can fully anticipate. A great many librarians who trained in the sixties, the seventies and the eighties never imagined the hyper-nodal, interactive world that has come into being in their workspace in only a few short years. They feel overwhelmed. Some of them are grumpy and out of sorts. They do not understand computers. They are secretly suspicious of the people who use them. They worry that no one will read books anymore, and that the space- time continuum will become superfluous. They wonder if people can eat in cyberspace, if they can make love, buy homes, or raise children? They wonder: “Is it possible to dream of retirement in cyberspace?”

Some librarians, like the crews of Columbus’ day, dream of mutiny. Others imagine alternative futures, built on the serendipitous synthesis that continues to emerge as the universe is expanding in their workspace.

Enter the cybrarian. No one really knows what a cybrarian is, because a cybrarian is not one thing. A cybrarian is a mutant being. A cybrarian is a work in progress.

Work in Search of a Definition

While the word cybrarian has been in use for a number of years, it has no single meaning. A search for the terms cybrarian and cyber-librarian on Google revealed one possible reason for the lack of definition (2002). Like the word librarian, the word cybrarian points to a whole range of functional skills that cluster around organizing, caring for, publishing and providing access to expressive works that have been captured and fixed through the use of some technological medium.

Whatis.com (2002) says: “Cyber- is a prefix used to describe a person, thing or idea as part of the computer and information age. Taken from kybernetes, Greek for ‘steersman’ or ‘governor,’ it was first used in cybernetics…” It also defines a cybrarian as, “a library and information science professional that specializes in using the Internet as a research tool.” Notice how the use of the pronoun that, rather than who, turns the person into “part of” the information machine. This is a grammatical error of the kind that only a poorly programmed human could make.

Southfield Public Library web page has a site titled, “Technology Reference Tools” that has access to dictionaries and encyclopedias that define the vocabulary of computing and Internet (2002). These sites were searched for the term cybrarian. A few of these sites, such as Computer Currents High-Tech Dictionary and PC Webopaedia, did not have references to cybrarian.

Cybrarian has also been used in discussions about integrating computers into the literacy mission of the schools, distance education, teaching computer skills to people of various ages in a variety of educational settings, and doing online research for a fee.

Cybrarian Services: Cybrarian as Cyberworld Explorer

Netlingo.com defines cybrarian as, “a person who makes a living doing online research and information retrieval. Also known as ‘data surfers’ or ‘super searchers,’ these individuals are not necessarily librarians” (2002). Four examples of this variety of cybrarian were found:

Scherer Cybrarian Services. Their web page rhetorically asks, “What is a Scherer Cybrarian?” The answer, as envisioned by Scherer Cybrarian Services executive officers Wendy Goldman Scherer and Andrew Scherer is this:

“You're busy writing, marketing, handling clients, running a business.
You need competitive information.
You need statistics for a presentation.
You need to know what the press is saying about your company and your industry... and your competition.
You need trends.
You need information... and you need it now.
What you really need is a research assistant.
Scherer Cybrarian is your research assistant.”

Scherer Cybrarian Services provides online research services to businesses for a “competitive hourly rate” in which they will discuss at the first meeting, at no charge, with a new client (2002).

The Medical Cybrarian. The Cybrarian Research Service at the Health World Online website offers the services of their Online Medical Librarian who provides individualized information packages obtained through Internet and database searches, particularly MEDLINE (2002). The fee for this service is $50.00, billed in half hour increments. Clients can submit their questions online at the Health World website and pay for the services with their credit card.

Jackie Richardson, special research librarian. A story about Jackie Richardson appeared in Scene, the Colgate University alumni magazine. After a brief career teaching high school English, Richardson enrolled in a Masters in Library and Information Science program at Queens College. She was then employed as a special librarian doing editorial research for Worth magazine. Richardson, who said she does not enjoy writing, reported getting a lot of satisfaction from locating great material for magazine articles written by others.

“I can learn and research a lot of facts and information,” said Richardson, “but then once I have that package, I turn it over to somebody and it’s up to them to synthesize it” (Roepe, 1997).

Tina Brantley, cybrarian for SAS Institute. Tina Brantley specializes in locating historical photographs, drawings, maps, charts, text, audio or video for use in multi-media educational software products. Like Richardson, Brantley began her career with a B.A. in English and then completed an MLS. She describes her work roles as part detective and part paralegal because she needs to understand copyright law and how to negotiate the use of intellectual properties. In addition to the Internet, she also searches for material at museums such as the National Archives and libraries, including the Library of Congress (SAS Institute, 2003).

Cybrarian as Agent of Change: Addressing the Changing Occupational Culture

In addition to librarians who function as “cyberspace explorers,” the word cybrarian has been used in discussions of the changing occupational culture of libraries where print resources continue to be used with newer digital media. A paper delivered at the 64th General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions reported on the JULIA Project, an attempt by a the staff a Danish scientific and technical library to map, in advance, the direction libraries would take as more information was digitally stored and communicated.

The library management anticipated that technological change would create stress among workers, even as a new set of critical skills emerged. To ameliorate the stress, the project’s goal was to create a long-range, continuing education and in-house training program to help librarians and paraprofessional staff adapt and excel in the new digital information environment. Its objective was, “to ensure that the transition to the hybrid library was a direct process, by which the design of new jobs, new work processes, qualifications and on-the-job training were well considered, thereby preventing feelings of insecurity naturally felt with regard to drastic changes in the work environment.”

The JULIA Project paper reported that the process of planning for change was turbulent despite the best intentions of the library administration. Visits were made to libraries where the Project coordinators thought change had been effectively implemented. They expected to find retooled job descriptions more appropriate to the new digital library environment. What was discovered was that at that time, there were no leaders in the field.

The paper suggested that rather than creating clearly defined job descriptions, a more fluid, organic work environment was needed. Components of the new environment included a culture of competitiveness that challenged employees to improve their skills, organizational changes that would empower individuals on the front line to make needed changes, and the facilitation of “self-organized or group-organized” educational experiences.

“In short, instead of creating the job description, the important thing is to facilitate the framework for the individual staff to create and change the job on a continuous basis,” stated the JULIA Project paper (Find, 1997).

The JULIA Project identified the following as staff competencies required by the new hybrid library environment. They need the ability to use communication tools including MS-Office, e-mail, e-conferences, HTML, browsers, Internet Language, and the ability to read, write and speak English. They require personal qualities including curiosity, “self-starters, risk-takers, self-educators, (who are) flexible.” They also need social qualities including the ability to tolerate chaos and stress, pro-active orientation, and ability to work in loosely defined environments.

Educational and Instructional Roles of the Cybrarian

In 1997, two articles used the term cybrarian harmoniously with the findings of the JULIA Project report. After a controversial 8-year experiment with computer-based distance education at the University of Maine at Augusta, Thomas E. Abbot, Dean of Learning Resources and University Development, reported on the development and evolution of Internet as an emerging learning system. Abbot’s article stated that while the World Wide Web is the center of today’s information economy, it also puts professional librarians at a disadvantage if they remain passive observers of its content. Abbot argued that the most important service librarians can provide will be instructing faculty and students in accessing, applying, and evaluating information from the Internet. Abbot then speculated that the role of librarians will be to teach students the information literacy and life-skills they need to thrive in the new information economy (Abbott, 1997).

Another use of the term cybrarian was defined by Ted Nellen (1997). Looking 5 years into the future for a class assignment, Nellen said, “In 2001, I wish to be working as a Cybrarian…a person who integrates, infuses and injects Internet technology into education.” Nellen, who started teaching English full-time in 1974, had been teaching in a web-based class since 1994. At the time his article was published, he reported that 8 classes a day, from English to foreign language classes, as well as classes for deaf and hard of hearing, were using the Internet in their studies. According to Nellen, a cybrarian possessed good teaching skills infused with technological know-how, knowledge of the Internet, and management skills. He envisioned emerging responsibilities and activities of cybrarians employed in educational and civil service positions.

Reflection

The word cybrarian does not yet appear in any dictionary, in spite of it being used to define a particular kind of work since the late 1990s. Tracking the use of the word on the Internet is a way of mapping the evolution of the information field as it moves further into the digital age.

It is paradoxical, in a way, that the dimensions of cyberspace have come to overwhelm human consciousness—in particular the consciousness of librarians-- at precisely the time when in many ways the world seems smaller and more amenable to human manipulation and control. From the development of global positioning satellite systems to the patenting of biological life forms, the purpose of technology is to bridge great distances, to conquer the wildness of the world and control it. However, from the vantage point of some librarians, technology has itself taken on the character of the wild and uncontrollable. Rather than a tool for conquering a frontier, technology has come to define a world that eludes the grasp.

Libraries have always been well-lighted, orderly places. It is what is expected of them. Light and order are the gift of librarians, and (this is another paradox) however many mysteries libraries contained, there was at least the illusion that the mysteries could be parceled out in safe portions by the person who turned on the lights, who knew where everything belonged, who interacted with the patrons, and who returned each book to its proper place and turned off the lights again at the end of the day. Librarians were more groundskeepers than explorers. Whatever treasures they guarded, they were more likely to be seen maintaining the hedges at the edge of the property than venturing beyond them.

In accomplishing their work, the cybrarians cited in this paper functioned more as steersmen or navigators than as groundskeepers. Like explorers on the high seas, they routinely ventured beyond the edges of their personal known worlds in search of information, or a new way of doing things, that could satisfy a particular human need.
What remains a constant is that people turn to librarians because of their ability to shed light on artifacts of human consciousness and to arrange them in an orderly, useful manner. Choices still need to be made.

Perhaps the greatest difference between librarians and cybrarians is this willingness to venture beyond the edges of the personal known world in order to do the work.

However boundless the horizons may seem, the sense that cyberspace contains more secrets than the earth itself is an illusion. Every example of a cybrarian mentioned in this paper is the story of a real person struggling in a purposeful way with the material of the “real” world and in some sense achieving mastery over it. Patrick Flannery echoes this sentiment:

“If we see the Internet as a tool that changes what we as librarians ultimately seek to do, then the Internet, big or small, has voided our future. If we see it, however, as a context for achieving what have always been our professional goals, then the Internet, whatever its size, becomes a tool… in our hands” (1997).

Now, if the word for what these people do would just find its way into the dictionary!

References Cited:

Abbott. T. (1997). Maine college cyber-programs offered internationally. The Journal of Library Services for Distance Education, 1(1). Accessed at http://www.westga.edu/library/jlsde/ on February 18, 2003.

Find, S. (1998). Changing the culture: job design, work processes and qualifications in the hybrid library. Paper presented at the 64th annual general conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Retrieved at http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/135-96e.htm.

Flannery, P. (1997). Internet Size and Growth. In Ensor, P. (Ed.), Cybrarian’s Manual. Chicago: American Library Association.

Google (n.d.). Cybrarian (definition). Retrieved November 12, 2002 from http://www.google.com.

Health World Online (2002). Cybrarian Research Service. Retrieved November 12, 2002 from http://www.healthy.net/cybrarian.

Netlingo (n.d.). Cybrarian (definition). Retrieved November, 2002 from http://www.netlingo.com.

Roepe, T. (1997, January). Cyber-librarian. Colgate Scene On-Line. Retrieved on February 18, 2003 at http://www.colgate.edu/scene/jan1997/cyber.html.

SAS Institute (2003). Check out cybrarians, they’re today’s high-tech librarians. Accessed at http://www.sasinschool.com/resource/pages/brantley_cybrarians.shtml. From Leeper, A. (2002, Winter). Check out cybrarians: they're today's high-tech librarians, American Careers, 13(1).

Scherer Cybrarian Services (2002). What is a Scherer Cybrarian? Retrieved November 12, 2002 from http://www.scherer.com.

Southfield Public Library (2002). Technology reference tools. Retrieved November 12, 2002 from http://www.metronet.lib.mi.us/SFLD/tech/techref.html.

Whatis (n.d.). Cybrarian (definition). Retrieved November 12, 2002 from http://www.whatis.com.

you are: contents > Article 1 (top)