Birds of a Feather Flock Together: The Congruence of Personality Types within Librarians’ Subject Specialties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Review of:
 Williamson, J.M., A.E. Pemberton, and J.W. Lounsbury. “Personality Traits of Individuals in Different Specialties of Librarianship.” Journal of Documentation 64.2 (2008): 273-86.
 
 Objectives – To investigate the personality traits of a range of librarians and information professionals using the Personal Style Inventory (PSI), and to investigate whether the personality traits of those in person-orientated library specialties differ from those in technique-orientated specialties.
 
 Design – Self-selecting survey.
 
 Setting – Solicitations to complete the survey were sent out via 10 e-mail discussion lists, and paper copies were made available at the annual American Library Association conference in 2002.
 
 Subjects – 2,075 librarians and information science professionals.
 
 Methods – Participants completed the survey either in print format, as an e-mail attachment or a Web form. The survey format was an adaptation of the PSI scale using 13 of the accepted 16 scales, namely:
 
 • adaptability
 • assertiveness
 • autonomy
 • conscientiousness
 • customer service orientation
 • emotional resilience
 • extraversion
 • openness
 • optimism 
 • teamwork
 • tough-mindedness
 • visionary-operational work style
 • work drive
 
 Responses were analysed using a two-step cluster analysis technique, and participants were grouped into seven clusters.
 
 Main Results – The largest group of respondents was cataloguers at 23.7%, followed by other (health or law) 19.1%, academic reference librarians 13.2%, special librarians 12.3% with all other groups in single figures. Respondents were divided up into the following seven clusters.
 
 • Cluster 1, the “unadaptive” group -- so labelled because several unadaptive traits such as low emotional resilience, low optimism, low teamwork, and low work drive are included.
 • Cluster 2, “adaptive academic reference librarians” -- high on customer service orientation, extraversion and teamwork, and low on tough-mindedness. 
 • Cluster 3, “adaptive cataloguers” -- low on customer service orientation and possessing a more operational work style. 
 • Cluster 4, “adaptive special librarians” -- high on autonomy, customer service orientation and extraversion. 
 • Cluster 5, “adaptive distance education librarians, public librarians, records managers, and school librarians” -- possessing a visionary work style and scoring high on adaptability, assertiveness, customer service orientation, emotional resilience, high extraversion, openness, optimism, and teamwork; scoring low on tough-mindedness.
 • Cluster 6, “adaptive other information professionals” -- also possessing a visionary work style and with high scores on adaptability, assertiveness, autonomy, customer service orientation, emotional resilience, extraversion, openness, optimism, teamwork, and work drive.
 • Cluster 7, “adaptive archivists and systems librarians” scoring high on assertiveness, openness, and tough-mindedness.
 
 Most clusters were comprised of a single occupational group, with only Clusters 1 and 5 made up of individuals from more than one group.
 
 Conclusion – The results indicate that different librarianship subspecialties can be differentiated by personality traits, and that individuals are likely to be drawn to either person-orientated or technique-orientated library specialties depending on their personality traits.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.102 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".