What Is In a Name, Anyway?

So, we live in a world that is flooded with information.

There's oodles of it out there just waiting to be wrangled and made sense of (apologies to Mr. Hauge, 6th Grade English teacher, for this grammatical construct). And yet as a profession we still fail to make the connection between what we have been trained to do, and how it translates in the real world to saving users time, money, and maybe some heartache by making that information discoverable, useful, meaningful, and manageable (see Ranganathan's Five Laws).

Over the last couple of years, the Special Libraries Association's Alignment Project has sought to address this disconnect. Recently SLA members have been in a frothy discussion about a name change for the association. For me the L-word is a mixed bag. On the one hand most people have a pretty clear idea what they think a Librarian is:




Unfortunately it's a limited and antiquated idea. On the other hand, Information Professional or Knowledge Engineer can be misleading and confusing. I think it is important that whatever we call ourselves it should convey what we do instead of being a rigidly defined position description or job title. If we want to be taken seriously at the C-level where budgets live and die, then we need to speak in a language that will be instantly recognized by those decision-makers.

I don't really know the answer, but I do know what I love doing, and it's connecting people with meaningful information. It's in the thrill of the hunt, it's in the elegance of the synthesis and presentation, it's in the satisfaction of helping others look good or make a well-informed decision.