Who goes to IFLA?
Local and global identity

Librarians tend to have two professional identities, one local, and one global.

The local -- or vertical - identity links the librarian with its library and the community it serves. For public libraries, the community is a physical entity : a county, a city, a borough, a municipality. For academic libraries it is university or a college. Academic librarians serve communities of learning. For special libraries it is a private or a public institution. Special librarians work in public bodies, in commercial firms and in voluntary organizations. Their community consists of the staff, the members or the customers of the institution in question.

The global - or horizontal - identity links the librarian with librarians in other organizations. The horizontal relations start locally, with colleagues that live in the same general area. They continue with librarians in the same state or nation. They end with librarians throughout the world.

Librarians are not, of course, unique. All professional people have double identities. But the relative strength of the vertical versus the horizontal axis differs from profession to profession. Mathematicians and physicists are more horizontal than historians and lawyers.

Librarianship is not a fully academic profession. Formal library education is a recent development - the first library school was started by Dewey in the late 19th century. In Europe, librarians are qualified after 2-3 years of study. As a semi-profession, librarianship may be compared with teaching, nursing, social work and many technical professions. The subject is often taught in vocational colleges rather than in universities proper.