(Re)Positioning Librarians: Young People's Views on the Information Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than 2,000 students entering their first year of university studies completed questionnaires about the work roles, future employment prospects, educational requirements, status, and starting salaries of twelve occupations. Their responses were compared with U.S. and Canadian government labor-force projections. The results revealed a complex interplay of gender relations in the students' perceptions of the occupational world and their roles within it. The results also revealed an interesting positioning of the job title "librarian" relative to other fields. Unlike their assessment of the other occupations included in the study, the students considerably underestimated the level of education required to be a librarian (most did not believe that librarians require a university education). They also underestimated librarians' average starting salary and rated the occupation's social status and future prospects to be lower than the other job titles. Taken together, the results indicate that young people beginning their university studies hold views about career prospects in the information sector that are consistent with some laborforce analysts' views of occupational winners and losers. The students see status, opportunity, and success to be attainable in fields such as computer engineering and systems analysis. Unfortunately, they view the occupational present and future for librarians in a somewhat dimmer light, a worrisome result in view of labor-force data that suggest reasonably strong salary and employment opportunities for this occupation in both the United States and Canada. The implications of these findings for library and information science (LIS) education are discussed in the context of gender and identity politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".