Our Role as Academic Librarians

I'm involved in an interesting discussion at my workplace about our role as academic librarians and how we are perceived by the rest of faculty, the institution, and even our own coworkers and bosses.

The other librarians and myself are working on changing, or at least tweaking, our services as instructors in the library. Much of our discussion revolves around how we are moving away from BI and replacing it with IL sessions that foster critical thinking, problem solving, and higher level library research practices. We're finding, however, that other instructors in our institution have traditionally perceived the librarians as nothing more than tour-providers or babysitters to their students for an hour or so. Our IL instructors have made some inroads with a few programs, but even those that 'buy-in' will only go so far.

Another aspect of this problem is internal. As we strive to elevate our instruction to students (which will undeniably result in increased prep and instruction time) we are also being directed to offer basic computer instruction to the students and programs (you know, how to use Word, how to use a mouse, etc.). I can't quite reconcile this dichotomy, and strongly question how we can change these perceptions if we take one step forward and three steps back in our instructional role.

And so we struggle with our own perceptions and try to resolve the issue of our value to the institution and of our goals. I'd like to hear from others who are dealing with this issue of the perception of our role as academic librarians - and I know there are a lot of you out there!!