Partnership, Not Service

by

Bill Mayer, University Librarian at American University here in Washington, DC, gave a colloquium presentation last week on academic libraries in the 21st century. It was a terrific presentation, and the video will be available on the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science soon. I recommend it!

One of the themes of Bill’s vision was “Partnership.” I agree — I think it’s a key concept for innovative, effective librarians.

After the colloquium, though, I got to thinking about the difference between Partnership and Service. Now, service is a hallmark of librarianship at its finest. As a profession, we pride ourselves on our “service ethic”. It’s part of that altruism that goes along with professionalism.

But isn’t Partnership something different? It is to me. When I think of Service, i think of a one-way relationship. The customer asks, the librarian provides. But Partnership is a relationship of mutual and shared responsibility. It’s a state of being in the same boat, of succeeding or failing together. If we are partners, we give and get, and we both take responsibility for the outcome.

Seems to me that Partnership, not Service, describes the relationship that the embedded librarian needs to develop vis a vis others (note: I won’t call them customers, because that implies the service relation). And in building the relationship, the embedded librarian gives as much weight to what she needs from the partner as to what she offers to the partner.

So maybe it’s time to transcend our traditional notions of service, and focus more on library partnerships.

3 Responses to “Partnership, Not Service”

  1. Says:

    Indeed! If I am anticipating needs and working in the white spaces, I am definitely more of a partner! It’s a two-way street.

  2. Says:

    […] From Educator to Organizer? Jump to Comments On his Embedded Librarian blog, David Shumaker recently mused about the difference between working as partners with our faculty/clients/users/populations/patrons and working to serve them. Shumaker is a former corporate librarian who now researches embedded librarianship, and his brief thoughts on moving from a one-way relationship of service to client (the “information waitress” model of librarianship) to a more mutual partnership in which responsibility is shared are worth a read. […]

  3. Says:

    […] Shumaker, D. (2008, November, 17). Partnership, not service. [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://embeddedlibrarian.com/2008/11/17/partnership-not-service/ […]

Leave a Reply to From Educator to Organizer? « Social Justice Librarian Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s


%d bloggers like this: