Salutations!

Most are likely well aware of the pervading “librarian stereotype,” — middle-aged female with graying hair in a tidy (or messy) bun wearing glasses and cardigan who owns cats — and I, for one, feel completely at home embracing and embodying most of the perception of the LIS profession nowadays, with the exception of “crazy cat lady” being a synonym of “librarian” since I’m a dog kind of gal. Glasses used to be part of my “librarian” persona complete with neck chain and hair in a bun; cardigans will forever be my superhero cape.

To my knowledge, there is not a stereotype for “information scientist” that has to do with gender, physical appearance, personality, and habits. The first mental picture that comes to mind when I think of the term “information scientist” is a combo deal of Doc Brown from the Back to the Future trilogy in the 1980s and Mr. Dewey the librarian-turned-pagemaster from The Pagemaster movie in the 1990s. Great Scott! I just keep seeing Christopher Lloyd in my mind’s eye. It seems ironic to me that gender roles in librarianship began as male-dominated where “bookmen” worked in sophisticated academic institutions “because they were scholars, not custodians” (as cited in Rubin & Rubin, 2020, p. 272) in the middle of the nineteenth century and completely morphed into a profession dominated by females, so much so that Garrison was quoted as referring to nineteenth-century librarians as “tender technicians,” because “women occupied professions distinguished by their nurturing characteristics… librarianship among them” (as cited in Rubin & Rubin, p. 541). I think Garrison must have been alluding to the late nineteenth-century or even the twentieth-century, due to the fact Rubin and Rubin point out, that by 1919, out of the fifteen library education programs in the country, ten had been founded by women (p. 278), with the majority of students in such programs at the time being women. 

I also find it interestingly doubtful that Stauffer’s masculine model in LIS schools is discussed as still existing today, having roots in the dominant cultural view of Dewey’s day, notably “a distinct separation between the appropriate work for males (leadership, administration, bibliography) and females (routine clerical duties and nurturing functions such as children’s work)” (as cited in Rubin & Rubin, p. 276). The gender pay gap specifically does not seem to play a role in the librarian and information scientist stereotypes; Rubin and Rubin reported on a 2014 Library Journal salary survey which declared “women made 89 cents for every dollar made by men” generally in different positions across library types (p. 310), while “data from 2017 showed that women were paid less in systems, web development, and programmer positions but had a slight advantage in digital acquisitions and digital curatorial positions” (as cited in Rubin & Rubin, p. 310).

The stereotypes regarding archivists and museum workers that spring to mind also come from the entertainment industry; they are either highly intelligent and sophisticated consistently like historian-cryptologist Dr. Benjamin Gates and archivist Dr. Abigail Chase in the National Treasure movies or extremely bumbling and inept, at least at the onset, like the night watchman Larry Daley in the Night at the Museum movies. Honestly, I think I watch too many bookish or library-themed movies and absorb them way too easily; I find myself actually adding bits of different characters I admire or connect with on some level into my personality and modus operandi, sometimes even my speech pattern, which one of my work-friends finds hilarious. I’m totally going to make a librarian meme someday with solely film/TV librarian images that are important to me in the style of the “What My Friends Think I Do” memes.

RLGing,

Sarah Hope

Reference: Rubin, R. E. & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.