INTRODUCTION
The 2025 BIALL conference’s title, making mention of Birmingham’s historic name as the City of a Thousand Trades, made me wonder how many of those trades remain today in Birmingham. Perhaps not so many; perhaps many new trades have appeared since the phrase was coined. Either way, professions both grow and decline in importance in response to changing societal needs. What about our profession? What does its future look like?
According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of people in the UK whose job is classified as ‘librarian’ has dropped in the last four years from 23,000 to 20,000 (i.e. since they have a record of professions by job title in the UK).Footnote 1 This is a relatively alarming decrease in a short timeframe.Footnote 2
A large part of this decrease is likely to be due to large scale recent closures of public libraries.Footnote 3 My local public library is one of those that has been closed, despite the best efforts of The Friends of Harold Wood Library Group, of which I am the secretary (importantly, we haven’t yet given up the fight).Footnote 4
I fear that the ease at which councils have justified closing libraries is based, at least in part, on what I would view as a dumbing down of the profession in public libraries over the last few decades. When I was studying for my MA in librarianship in 2004/5, I had to take a two-week placement at a library service. I chose public libraries, feeling that I was unlikely to work in that sector after graduating, and so I viewed that two-week placement as an opportunity to see what I might be missing.
Most of the librarians I met at that time at the Westminster public library service (where I did my placement) were qualified librarians. I wonder how many would be qualified today. Certainly, by the time I was working at the University of Essex (2013-18), where I was responsible for the University’s stake in a partnership library with Southend Borough Council, only a small proportion of the public library staff there were qualified.
My general impression, which of course isn’t the impression that everyone will have, is that councils possibly see libraries as easy targets for cuts because much of what is done in them today doesn’t necessarily require professional librarians. For example, events desired by my council’s library strategy include “Baby bounce, Wiggle and Giggle … Chess clubs, Craft events” for children, and “Knit and Natter groups, Gratitude Club, Craft events, Games Club” for adults.Footnote 5 All these events sound like a lot of fun, but I am not sure that they require professional librarians to carry them out. And if the work done in libraries doesn’t require professional librarians, maybe the workers in libraries could be considered by budget-holders to be expendable.
This idea then of the need (or not) for professional librarians within libraries was my starting point regarding the longevity of the law librarian profession, and to a slightly lesser extent, I wanted to consider academic librarianship. How much of the role of a law librarian (and university librarian) consists of skills and expertise that only law librarians (and university librarians) would have?
METHODOLOGY
To answer this question, I decided to keep a record of job adverts for the six-month period ahead of the conference to see how many of those jobs were asking for expertise that only a law librarian would have, and how many were asking for more general skills from the applicants.
I decided to tally the different requirements for each job – all job descriptions tend to list essential and, sometimes, desirable criteria required for the post being advertised – to see which criteria are most commonly sought by prospective employers. I would then consider which of those criteria only professional librarians would likely be able to match, and which criteria were more general in nature, and so wouldn’t require professional librarians to meet them.
I chose to only consider job adverts for more senior positions since I was mostly interested in professional roles. So, I set a minimum salary of £30,000, and I also discounted any roles entitled ‘library assistant’ or ‘information assistant’.
I took job adverts from the weekly CILIP jobs email, from jobs.ac.uk and from two recruitment consultants that specialise in law library jobs: CB Resourcing and Glen Recruitment.
Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to capture all the jobs that were advertised through these means. I happen to be in a very nice role at BPP, so, unlike other times in my career when job alerts couldn’t come soon enough, I was in no hurry to check for job adverts. As a result, there were a reasonable number of jobs that had already expired by the time I got round to looking at the details. But, in total, I was able to analyse 99 job adverts.
Most of the law librarian job adverts came from the two recruitment consultants. These adverts tended to have substantially fewer stipulated criteria for the roles than did the other two categories of adverts. This means that there was a higher likelihood in the other two categories to have the most popular criteria appearing within most job adverts, since it is more likely for any criterion to be included in a list of 15 criteria (roughly the amount in the university and non-law, non-university adverts) than if the total list of criteria in any advert is only six (roughly the amount of criteria in the law job adverts). As a result, to maintain a consistency of how I analysed the three categories of job adverts, I was less interested in comparing the percentages of adverts that certain criteria appeared within. Rather, I mostly wanted to focus on the order in which the criteria were ranked for popularity in each category of advert.
RESULTS
I divided the 99 job adverts into three categories. There were 45 university jobs and 36 law jobs, and I put the remaining 18 jobs into a non-law/non-university category.
SOME INITIAL GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
• Only two adverts had any criteria concerning artificial intelligence (AI). One wanted knowledge of AI as an essential criterion, the other had it only as a desirable criterion. This struck me as rather low given the prevalence of discussions of AI in work environments generally and in libraries specifically.
• Overall (i.e. in all three categories combined) there was a high desire (69%) for a library qualification or similar experience, which seemed to be in contrast to my understanding of the situation within public libraries, i.e. that fewer public librarians are qualified librarians these days.
• Again, overall, communication skills were much sought after (over 90% of jobs wanted either good communication skills or good liaison skills or good customer service skills). And all bar one of those criteria were essential, i.e. only in one job was a good customer focus merely a desirable criterion. The idea of the quiet, bookish librarian seems largely to have disappeared (at least from the perspective of employers).
LAW LIBRARIAN ADVERTS
These were the top 10 criteria for all the law job adverts, in order of popularity:Footnote 6
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1) Law library experience
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2) Legal/business research expertise
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3) Communication skills
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4) MA/equivalent experience
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5) Being organised and prioritising workloads
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6) Writing well and accurately
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7) Knowledge management expertise
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8) Initiative
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9) Strong customer focus/liaison skills
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10) IT skills
DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
The top two criteria are both very much criteria that law librarians, and not other candidates, are likely to possess. And when you include the requirement for a library qualification or similar experience at 4 in the list, then three of the top five are quite specialist criteria. This means that employers are expecting candidates to have quite a high level of law-librarian-specific expertise for the roles that they are wanting to fill.
Other criteria in the top five, ‘Communication skills’ (3) and ‘Being organised and prioritising workloads’ (5), whilst understandably being very important for most library jobs, are not skills that are unique to law librarians. And the same could be said for the remaining criteria in the top 10 apart from knowledge management expertise (7).
Importantly, when all the adverts that required either ‘Legal/business research expertise’ (2) or ‘Knowledge management expertise’ (7) were combined, it accounted for 95% of all the adverts. So almost all adverts were asking for some very specific knowledge that law librarians, but usually not other candidates, would possess.
The high requirements of prospective employers for law-librarian-specific criteria would suggest a certain amount of security in the profession. If people who are not law librarians are unlikely to be able to meet those criteria, then those roles are likely only to be filled by law librarians. Also, the fact that employers are still regularly asking for law-librarian-specific criteria, suggests that the profession is still highly valued by employers.
UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN ADVERTS
These were the top 10 criteria for all the university job adverts, in order of popularity:Footnote 7
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1) Strong customer focus/liaison skills
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2) Communication skills
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3) Being organised and prioritising workloads
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4) MA/equivalent experience
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5) IT skills
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6) Relevant library experience
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7) Team player
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8) HE environment experience
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9) Management/Leadership
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10) Writing well and accurately
And these were some other criteria of note:
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15) Systems/discovery expertise
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16) Collection management expertise
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17) LMS knowledge
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18) Cataloguing and classification expertise
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21) Strong research skills
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25) VLEs/repositories/OA/publishing
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28) Special collections/manuscripts/archives
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29) Metadata/API expertise
DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
As could perhaps be expected in an academic setting (i.e. in a place that awards qualifications), when a library qualification or equivalent experience (4) was listed as a criterion, it was much more likely to be an essential criterion (i.e. 84% of the time), whereas for law jobs, it was more normally only a desirable criterion (60% of the time).
Also, notably, the top criterion was ‘Strong customer focus/liaison skills’. This perhaps reflects changes over recent decades whereby, in many quarters, students are viewed much more like customers than they had been historically.Footnote 8
Unlike the law job adverts, there were substantially fewer librarian-specific criteria in the top 10, i.e. two: ‘MA/equivalent experience’ (4) and ‘Relevant library experience’ (6). And only one in the top five, i.e. having a library qualification. This is markedly lower than for law librarian jobs, and when you take into consideration the commonly-held desire to reduce barriers into the profession by removing the need for a qualification (and the expense that gaining it would incur),Footnote 9 there is a situation in which potentially none of the top five criteria for university jobs are unique to professional librarians.
Does that mean that academic librarians might well follow their public librarian counterparts down a path that might lead to many losing their jobs? Not necessarily. Academic librarianship is substantially more varied than law librarianship, and there are many paths within it that professional librarians can forge. For example, all of the additional criteria listed above that fall outside the top 10 are criteria in which the most appropriate prospective candidates for the roles are likely to be qualified librarians. And because there is so much variety within academic librarianship, none of these particular paths fall within the top five or top 10, but overall there is a high requirement for some expertise that commonly only a professional librarian would have. However, there are certain paths within university librarianship that do not necessarily require a knowledge that is unique to professional librarians – I would think most notably of the work that often falls under the banner of Reader Services. This kind of work often needs very strong customer service skills (which people other than librarians can have) but doesn’t necessarily require any library-specific knowledge.
NON-LAW, NON-UNIVERSITY ADVERTS
The focus of my research was on law librarian and university librarian job adverts, but I am including these results for completeness.
These were the top 10 criteria for all the non-law, non-university job adverts, in order of popularity:Footnote 10
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1) MA/experience
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2) Relevant library experience
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3) Management/leadership experience
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4) Strong customer focus/liaison skills
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5) Communication skills
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6) Writing well and accurately
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7) Being organised and prioritising workloads
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8) IT skills
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9) Project/change management experience
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10) Further qualification – PhD/FHEA/MCLIP etc.
DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
Most of these adverts were for quite senior roles and as a result management expertise comes into the top 10 (at both 3 and 9). As I said above, I chose to exclude any junior roles from my research. So, perhaps these results indicate that in the non-law, non-university category, there is a wider distinction between more junior and more senior roles. My personal experience seems to confirm this, in which I have known qualified librarians who work for councils, but who rarely are located inside library buildings. The staff within the library buildings themselves, on the other hand, are less likely to be library qualified.
Interestingly, in these often quite senior roles, the need for some sort of additional qualification appeared in the top 10 (at 10), and the need for a library qualification appeared at the top of the list, and its need to be an essential criterion rather than just a desirable one was almost as pronounced as for university job adverts (at 81%). This perhaps suggests that advertisers can be more demanding for these often more senior roles.
WHAT ABOUT THE WIDER PICTURE?
If it was the case that all things in the job market were likely to remain as they have in recent years, then professional law library jobs appear relatively secure when considering the high requirement for law librarian-specific criteria. However, things are very unlikely to remain static. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a big disruptor, and not just in how it might threaten library jobs themselves.
Lawyers and paralegals face quite large threats from AI. Recently the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) approved its first AI law firm,Footnote 11 i.e. one that does not use human lawyers. Much of the work of lawyers has the potential for automation, so the need for human lawyers is likely to diminish. So perhaps lawyers and paralegals will try and incorporate work that was traditionally carried out by law librarians into their own work. This wouldn’t be the first time that they have taken on other responsibilities.
When I first started working in law firms in 1990, there was close to a one-to-one correlation between lawyers and secretaries. Today there are many more lawyers than secretaries. It is often now simpler for lawyers themselves to do much of the work that secretaries once did, due in part to technological advancements (e.g. word processors, email etc.). Perhaps AI will therefore have a consequence in which law librarian jobs will be threatened by other legal workers.
However, because many people are writing about the effect of AI on jobs, and because there is so much uncertainty, I am happy to leave these predictions to others. My research here is then centred on what people are currently expecting from prospective employees. Nevertheless, one thing seems likely in the legal sector: change. And whereas some parts of the legal sector are perhaps less accustomed to change, librarianship is an area in which change has become commonplace.Footnote 12
It could be argued that one reason only two job adverts in the entire set of adverts had any mention of AI, is that AI is just another disruptor to hit the profession. In some senses, we have seen it all before. The Internet and search engines like Google were, at the time, seen as major disruptors.Footnote 13 , Footnote 14 However, both law and academic librarians have adapted to this new age with ease (although I suspect that public libraries have suffered a lot more, because for most of the public the free internet, which Google can easily access, is more than enough for their needs, whereas most high-quality information, used in academic and law libraries, sits behind a pay-wall and so is not accessible through Google searches alone).
Change is very much a part of the librarian’s working experience. Perhaps AI will just be another cause for change in a long history of change, which librarians will take in their stride.
CONCLUSIONS
The expertise of a law librarian is seemingly still very highly valued in the wider legal profession, and as a result it seems that the role of the professional law librarian seems reasonably secure.
The academic librarian’s position is slightly more nuanced, in that there are a range of different paths that can be followed in university libraries. Some require a high degree of expertise unique to librarians, others don’t. It could be then that the profession will be secure, but only in certain roles. Other roles might develop along similar lines to the roles within public libraries, which might bring future job cuts akin to what we have seen over recent years in public libraries.
In order to protect the profession, I would hope that people who write job specifications when hiring new staff will think very seriously about which criteria are important in the roles: if we choose to suggest that only more general expertise (i.e. that non-librarians could easily have) is required to fill the roles, we could be encouraging a similar trajectory to what has taken place in public libraries.
My suggestion is not to insist on skills that are not in fact needed in roles, just to keep the profession going – this seems slightly disingenuous. Rather, we, above all people, should value professional librarianship. According to my data analysis, the wider legal profession, and to a slightly lesser extent, the academic community, seemingly do still value the expertise of professional librarians. We should too. That means that we should keep focussing, within our work, on skills unique to librarians. If, on the other hand, we focus solely on projects, events and engagement that a non-librarian could do, we will be failing to provide our highly valuable unique expertise to the users of our services; and, in the context of this article, we could be doing ourselves out of a profession.
