What's in a name? The University Librarian

Around the top table of your organisation can we tell who the librarian is? Or maybe there has never been one – so could you/will you be the first? Very few senior management teams, except for national libraries, now have a member with the librarian label. We’ll often find Finance Directors (FD), sometimes Human Resources (HR) directors, but rarely a librarian. Why is that, particularly in higher education institutions (HEIs) where we are one of the ‘oldest’ educational professions? So, we’ve been around a lot longer than the ‘FD’ but we’re not on the Senior Management Team (SMT).

The historical trajectory of the position of the librarian and the library is an interesting path to trace. If we look back within the university sector – libraries formed part of the foundation stones for HEIs to be created – to become a university, you needed a library.

One of the most beautiful and succinct descriptions of the origins of a UK university library is the neat summary of the ‘History of Cambridge University Library’, which eloquently (though on a far longer timescale than for many organisations), describes the formation of the library within the University from the mid-14th century (University of Cambridge, n.d.). I also particularly enjoyed the Wikipedia entry on the Library, which states that ‘The official office of Librarian of the University was not established until 1577, when William James was appointed Librarian’ (Wikipedia, n.d.). There is a discrepancy of over a century between the two narratives and I think that we can all be glad that we didn't start our jobs with a hundred years of backlog administration.

However, other HEIs did not wait 100 years to appoint a librarian. Aberystwyth University was ‘born’ at 9.00 am on 16 October 1872 with two professors and a Registrar-Librarian supporting the first Vice Chancellor, with a student population of 26 (Aberystwyth University, 2019). So, in Aberystwyth, at the outset at least, the leadership team had a librarian at the table.