Transformation of the Library Profession within the Last Decade and its Future
Grażyna Wojsznis
Abstract
The origin of the profession of the librarian, i.e., its evolution from an occupation into a job between 1918 and 1939, the raising of the overall professional awareness of what it means to be a librarian after World War II and ongoing present–day debates upon the character of library activities mark the various stages of the shaping of this profession in Poland. Educating library staff, organizing library structures, working methods and communication styles within libraries have been evolving together with the economic, cultural and technological transformations taking place in this country. All these factors force the librarian to adjust and adapt to the changing needs of the library users, which is best observed in technical universities’ libraries.
The libraries’ vital activities have not always been centred around collecting volumes, cataloguing and making them available to the public. Originally library activities consisted mainly of collecting books, whereas a librarian (that is a courtier, lover and connoisseur of books, a custodian of the collection, often priceless) was supposed to protect the precious volumes from the readers. An independent profession of a librarian began to exist as late as the middle of the nineteenth century.
Polish librarianship began to develop intensively after 1917. Such phenomena as the campaign against illiteracy by making books and libraries more easily available to the general public and the guidelines pertianing to the national cultural policy created a new image of the librarian as a person who was knowlegeable about and actively engaged in social, political and economic life of those times. The post–World War I period also witnessed the development of the network of public, scientific/academic and specialist/professional libraries which stimulated the need to catalogue collections and create bibliographies in order to popularize collections outside specific libraries. All these activities called for professional library staff. [1]
After World War II further development of the profession was hindered by the lack of qualified academic staff in Poland. A librarian was no longer an academic and his/her research work stopped being top priority. This trend was reversed when library science developed as an independent field of study. Its main objective was to educate future librarians. Recent years have been marked by attempts to find new structures and working methods as well as the development of library staff and their professional skills.
The phenomena mentioned above have been reflected in the history of the Main Library of Szczecin University of Technology whose origins go back to 1946. The library was organized by people who had no professional background. Nor did they have any extensive experience as library workers. They raised their qualifications by attending various courses or taking up studies as they worked for the institution [2]. It is also difficult to allocate them to concrete work stations/positions within the library.
The year 1955, when Józef Czerni’s concept/idea of decentralizing by organizing specialized faculty reading rooms, marks the beginning of the library’s rapid growth. Originally the reading rooms were supposed to be branches of the Department for Lending the Holdings. However, it soon turned out that the necessity to coordinate, standardize the collections’ registers, make the structures transparent and take communal decisions or actions created a network of reciprocal relationships between faculty reading rooms and various other divisions of the Main Library. In order to function well, the reading rooms had to take over some of the library functions which theoretically were not theirs.