What is The Ubiquitous Librarian?

The Ubiquitous Librarian is everywhere! The Ubiquitous Librarian constantly seeks new ways to interact with users. The Ubiquitous Librarian is all about participation. It’s about stepping outside of the library and interacting with patrons wherever they may be: online, in the classroom, in the hallway, at football games, in the cafeteria, off campus. Instead of trying to force them into the library, into our world, the ubiquitous librarian is embedded into their world. It’s about not pushing the library agenda, but rather about participating in the larger community we serve.

 

Put simply: Instead of trying to make your library seem cool, be a librarian and do cool things.

 

This concept developed out of my experiments with blogs. I was using LiveJournal to communicate with friends and discovered the journals of several students. By “be-friending” them and following their lives, I was able to find a natural and meaningful channel to help them. This process was later streamlined and evolved into: The Ubiquitous Reference Model. I am trying to push this concept further in both the physical and virtual context.

 

This blog asks you to rethink the role and traditional values that librarians hold. This blog seeks to break the stereotype and explore the possibilities of a new identity. This blog asks you to step outside the library and become ubiquitous.

Comments

[david]

congrats on the new blog! sounds like an excellent concept.

[Cal Gough]

Best wishes on the new blog. (Loved your videos on the old blog, by the way.) I hope your postings will, at least occasionally, be relevant to public, as well as academic libraries: God knows we (often embarrassed by our catalog) toilers in the public arena need inspiration, ideas, etc. too!

Cal, a librarian at an unnamed but easily identifiable large public library system in Atlanta

[lukethelibrarian]

Rockin' cool. I was very intrigued back in mid-2004 when some library bloggers started tossing around the idea of the "mybrarian" heading out to provide library services out beyond the library walls. Last summer, I blogged about one individual's "mybrarian" experiment and included links to some of the prior discussion in that post.

I'll be very interested to hear your ideas about ubiquitous librarianship -- it sounds like the spirit of the "mybrarian" has come alive again.

[Troy Davis]

I agree with the idea that making the library seem cool is a lost-cause of sorts. I'm reminded of a something I read recently, an essay entitled "after the book" where the author, in a general description a library's "system of organizing" things writes that it “enacts a formalized vision of how the world is put together, of what are the optimal sight-lines between the human mind and phenomenological totality.”

Phenomenological totality is where the cool is. In my experience, as a librarian, and working with students, I find that students seek an intimately established relationship to their info-universe (in fact they are already structuring it so) and we would do well by abandoning the caricature of the library as a repository and adopt the perhaps utopian notion (utopian aspirations are cool too) of the library as an experience-making or structuring place and space. Dewey (John, not Melvil) was right on when he argued that individuals crave "aesthetic" experiences, which are simply refined prosaic experiences.

Steiner, George (1973). “After the Book?”

[Meredith]

Good luck with the new blog and I really look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on the direction libraries are going in with social software and, in particular, how to be a ubiquitous librarian in the physical world. I think we will certainly see Ubiquitous Librarianship move beyond social networking software and blogs. Cool stuff!