The Annoyed Librarian made a very interesting post today.
"Last week someone left a comment on the More Hip Librarians post that puts in concrete terms my own view of the alleged "librarian shortage." The person wrote:
"My cranky two cents on the putative librarian shortage:
My wife is a registered nurse. There really is a nursing shortage. If she puts a resume up on the internet, she immediately gets e-mails and phone calls from recruiters wanting her to interview for real jobs, available right now. Any time she wants a raise, she can just get another job. Her pay has been going up several thousand dollars per year, for several years. Experienced Master's level nurses can easily make six figures these days. A nurse can blow into town on Friday morning, and be working by Monday. That's what a 'shortage' looks like. Does any of this sound like the library field?
There is no librarian shortage."
I couldn't agree more. It's a simple matter of economics. If there's a shortage of something in demand, then the price for that thing goes up. If the price of the thing isn't going up, then there isn't a demand. And if there isn't a demand, then there can't be a shortage. Librarian salaries aren't rising, thus there isn't a shortage of librarians. Any idiot should be able to understand this, and yet most of the ALA idiots can't seem to grasp this simple concept.
Now what there definitely seems to be is a shortage of morons willing to spend a couple of years in graduate school so they can go work in the middle of nowhere for $20K/year. But that's not a librarian shortage; it's a moron shortage. I never thought I would be saying this, but we do apparently have a moron shortage in this country, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The idiots I hear talking about how they can't find librarians never seem to make the connection. If you can't find librarians, then you need to pay more money. If you can't afford to pay more money, then the problem isn't a shortage of librarians, the problem is a shortage of good jobs. Libraries seem to want intelligent and capable people to pay for a library degree and then take low paying jobs in undesirable places. Many libraries only think they have a demand for librarians, when they really just have a desire for librarians. For some strange reason, these libraries find that their demand for morons doesn't satisfy their desire for librarians.
But the ALA keeps rolling out the lies and propaganda. One would think that any decent human being would be disgusted to continue telling such lies, but maybe the folks at ALA have been telling the same lies so long they actually believe them."
"Last week someone left a comment on the More Hip Librarians post that puts in concrete terms my own view of the alleged "librarian shortage." The person wrote:
"My cranky two cents on the putative librarian shortage:
My wife is a registered nurse. There really is a nursing shortage. If she puts a resume up on the internet, she immediately gets e-mails and phone calls from recruiters wanting her to interview for real jobs, available right now. Any time she wants a raise, she can just get another job. Her pay has been going up several thousand dollars per year, for several years. Experienced Master's level nurses can easily make six figures these days. A nurse can blow into town on Friday morning, and be working by Monday. That's what a 'shortage' looks like. Does any of this sound like the library field?
There is no librarian shortage."
I couldn't agree more. It's a simple matter of economics. If there's a shortage of something in demand, then the price for that thing goes up. If the price of the thing isn't going up, then there isn't a demand. And if there isn't a demand, then there can't be a shortage. Librarian salaries aren't rising, thus there isn't a shortage of librarians. Any idiot should be able to understand this, and yet most of the ALA idiots can't seem to grasp this simple concept.
Now what there definitely seems to be is a shortage of morons willing to spend a couple of years in graduate school so they can go work in the middle of nowhere for $20K/year. But that's not a librarian shortage; it's a moron shortage. I never thought I would be saying this, but we do apparently have a moron shortage in this country, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The idiots I hear talking about how they can't find librarians never seem to make the connection. If you can't find librarians, then you need to pay more money. If you can't afford to pay more money, then the problem isn't a shortage of librarians, the problem is a shortage of good jobs. Libraries seem to want intelligent and capable people to pay for a library degree and then take low paying jobs in undesirable places. Many libraries only think they have a demand for librarians, when they really just have a desire for librarians. For some strange reason, these libraries find that their demand for morons doesn't satisfy their desire for librarians.
But the ALA keeps rolling out the lies and propaganda. One would think that any decent human being would be disgusted to continue telling such lies, but maybe the folks at ALA have been telling the same lies so long they actually believe them."
posted by Anonymous at
10:39 AM
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5 Comments
