Librarians as Links? Librarians as Link Generators

In the introduction of the UW Libraries Librarian Personnel Code, there is a line about librarians that has stuck with me:

Librarians serve as the link between the University’s instructional and research programs and the University Libraries’ resources by providing reference and information services, offering user education and information management training, and assisting with the establishment and use of automated information resources. (2017, p. 4)

First, I think it was the structure of that sentence that caught my attention. I noticed how its first two words (“Librarians serve”) are the main subject and verb of the clause, while everything else–prepositional phrases loaded with nouns, adjectives, gerunds, and compound structures–modifies the verb “serve.” Everything else answers the question “How do librarians serve?”

Here is my attempt at diagramming that sentence:

My diagram illustrates that librarians are expected to do a lot of complex, compound, nestled, and accumulative serving in the University of Washington Libraries, and in this documentation, in the following sections, I believe I make the case that I now do this serving at the Associate Librarian level.

Second, in the quote from the Librarian Personnel Code above, the word “link” made me pause. For a moment, I remember thinking, “Yes, I’ve been a good, strong link these past five years, especially through the COVID pandemic” or “Hmm. I don’t think anyone could say I’m a weak link…”

But then all that thinking about links made me remember things Buckminster Fuller had written about in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Fuller (2008) writes this:

The tensile strength of chrome-nickel steel, which is approximately 350,000 pounds per square inch, is 100,000 P.S.I. greater than the sum of the tensile strengths of each of all its alloyed together, component, metallic elements. Here is a “chain” that is 50 percent stronger than the sum of the strengths of all its links. We think popularly only in the terms of a chain being no stronger than its weakest link, which concept fails to consider, for instance, the case of an endlessly interlinked chain of atomically self-renewing links of omni-equal strength or of an omni-directionally interlinked chain matrix of ever renewed atomic links in which one broken link would be, only momentarily, a local cavern within the whole mass having no weakening effect on the whole, for every link within the matrix is a high frequency, recurring, break-and-make restructuring of the system. (p. 78) [Emphases mine.]

I will definitely not diagram any of the sentences–especially the last one–in that quotation!

I do, though, want to focus on the lines I’ve emphasized. In the first one, Fuller references the old metaphor about links–that you’re only as strong as your weakest one–and he not only points out that that concept is a cliche but also asserts that it’s a failure of imagination and even in comprehending reality. In fact, there are systems, there are chains, that share connections in such a way in which strength is distributed through links and not concentrated in any one connection.

So while I wouldn’t completely disagree with the Librarian Personnel Code, which tells me that librarians serve as links, I’d want to add that my much more important work–and the true work of an Associate Librarian–is being a generator of links, links that end up with a strength far greater than the sum of its parts.

Yes, as an English Studies Librarian, I have been a link between the Department of English and the UW Libraries, but through helping faculty and students with their research, assisting in organizing half-day conferences, and teaching and supporting digital scholarship, I have generated so many more links between people and audiences and communities and resources and projects.

As a Research Commons Librarian who trains and supervises undergraduate student workers, I have assiduously served as a link that connects a busy service point to library users, but I have also produced countless more links by way of the creative written-reflection program I’ve devised for these workers. Through written reflection, the students describe how they relate to their work in the UW Libraries, and I, by reading these reflections, discover new ways to understand and work with them.

The UW Libraries High School Internship, which is a program I run from the base of the Research Commons, is another way in which I’m not just a link but a generator of links. In this program, high-school students who are going to be first-generation college students learn about and experience college life and college libraries. They make memorable, lifelong links as they go through the internship, and if they choose to attend the UW–and if they want to work in the Libraries–then I interview them and hire them to work in the Research Commons. Right now, of the seven undergraduate student workers I supervise, five of them are graduates of the UW Libraries High School Internship, and every day, working with them, I see that they are link generators, too. They are the ones who, on the first day of the fall quarter, brand new students notice and seek out for help. They are the ones who make new UW community members go from thinking “That’s the library” to “That’s my library.”

Going back to that second emphasized line in the Buckminster Fuller quote above, I believe that I, as a link generator, have brought about a system that is not defined by strong links or weak links. Instead, there are so many myriad, matrix-ed connections that some of them might even fall away and disintegrate, but, in the end, the overall structure is just as strong and just as regenerative. In any system, like a library system, I suppose you need links, but engines of links are far more important to keep and promote.

References

Fuller, B. (2008). Operating manual for spaceship earth. Lars Muller.

University of Washington Libraries. (2017). Librarian personnel code. https://www.lib.washington.edu/about/employment/hr/libpersonnelcode/view