While finishing my last post, on gaming at ALA, I thought that although this sounds entertaining to me, I bet the Annoyed Librarian hates it.

Which in turn made me think that although I don’t always cheer heartily at her posts, I really liked her thoughts on the ‘generational conflict’ idea that apparently is a hot topic right now. The summary seems to be (I’ve mostly missed this particular discussion, other than the times that generational differences came up in class) that some young librarians are peeved because those darn Boomer librarians have all the good jobs and refuse to retire.

The AL sensibly points out that there’s no reason someone should be expected to retire from a good job that they find satisfying. (Or, perhaps, if they don’t have a fat retirement account and need the income.) If I had a job that I was satisfied with and was capable of continuing to do well in, would I be in a huge hurry to retire because someone else wanted it?

Or, to quote the first post linked, “If you were thirty years older and in a secure, tenured librarian job, would you quit just because someone resented you? I doubt it.”

True enough: I probably wouldn’t. 

I also really liked the point that if library jobs were the kind of jobs where tenured people with necessarily higher salaries were routinely hustled out the door to make way for younger, cheaper people, they wouldn’t really be the kind of jobs that a lot of us were looking for by coming to libraries in the first place. For the AL, she gets practically mushy here, explaining (very well, I think) that this idea is bad for the very concept of libraries.

Librarianship isn’t a field that can easily withstand the market, because its values are not those of the market. Profit is not the motive. In academic libraries the motive is to aid scholarship and to help students learn, in public libraries to provide access to information ideally to help ensure an educated citizenry. These are noble goals and public goods, but noble goals and public goods aren’t easy to justify when profit is your only concern. 

I can only wipe away a tear of restrained professional pride and agree with that.

In conclusion, she notes that “by resenting the tenured, unionized, or secure librarians, you’re resenting the very things that make librarianship a humane, if sometimes impecunious, profession.”

So let’s end the intergenerational warfare, my fellows! That’s if any of us were participating in it, or even knew about it. As I said, I myself seem to have missed most of this conversation.