The Accidental Librarian

Citation

Caldwell, P. (2009), "The Accidental Librarian", Library Management, Vol. 30 No. 8/9, pp. 657-658. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120911006601

Pamela MacKellar's The Accidental Librarian sets out to provide “a straightforward introduction to basic library principles and practice for accidental librarians”. In fact, it provides some valuable information for accidental and “deliberate” librarians alike, but with some very important qualifications. It does, I would imagine, provide an excellent and comprehensive primer for librarians who are:

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  working in the USA; and

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  working primarily in smaller rural public libraries or special libraries.

For anyone living outside the USA, or, I suspect, in a large US city, this book will be of somewhat lesser value. That is not to say that it is of no value at all. The earlier sections of the book, which focus on general management of library services, are extremely useful presentations of the basics of these activities. In contrast, Part IV on Career Development is of little or no use to anyone outside the US. Maybe the concept of the “accidental librarian” only applies to that small segment of the library world, but that would seem unlikely.

Part I, Basic library principles, defines the “accidental librarian” and provides background information on the role of libraries and librarians in society. The statistics and examples are exclusively focused on the US. The chapters on community profiling and community needs assessment are particularly useful. They persuasively make the case for the adoption of this approach as the basis of library service provision – something libraries of all types and in all countries should adopt.

Part II on Basic library practice constitutes the heart of this book, and provides detailed practical information at a basic level on collection development, ordering and acquisition of library materials and organizing the library's information. Further chapters in this part discuss library programs, general management and marketing. One omission in this part would seem to be any information on basic financial management – a major source of stress for the untrained and a key area of responsibility for library managers of all kinds.

Part III is focused on the role of technology in libraries. Here again, the implicit target audience for this book has a large impact on the information presented. There are wide variations across the world in the level of take‐up of automation, and some sections of the part will be of little interest where this has been more rapid and complete. In contrast, the informative chapter on Library 2.0 will be of general interest to most librarians.

As stated earlier, Part IV concentrates on career development with detailed, but exclusively US, lists of contacts, further education resources and certification options. Again, these are very useful for the target audience, but limited in their coverage.

If I place myself in the shoes of an accidental librarian managing a small public library in a rural area of the USA, this book would appear as an invaluable collection of information and resources. For the rest of the library world, it provides some interesting and useful morsels of information, but at the cost of a lot of material of limited relevance. This book would benefit from a wider perspective and range of examples and resources, or at least, from the target audience being more explicitly stated.