We Will Always Be Librarians. The World Is Just Learning to Call Us Something Else.
There's a thoughtful post circulating this week from a school librarian reflecting on how library and records management can feel "invisible" in organizations; systematic work that holds everything together but rarely gets named. It's resonating widely, and for good reason. Every information professional I know has felt some version of it.
I want to build on the conversation, because I think something interesting is happening underneath it.
The "invisible work" feeling is real, but I'd gently offer that the problem is shifting. We've spent a long time trying to prove our value. I don't think that's the battle anymore. The battle now is about identity evolution. And honestly, it's a good problem to have!
Here's what I'm seeing.
AI is making unorganized information catastrophically expensive.
Generative AI doesn't fix messy libraries; it amplifies them. Feed a chatbot a chaotic SharePoint and you get confident, fluent, wrong answers. Train a model on unclassified records and you inherit every retention violation, every privacy gap, every outdated policy as if it were current truth. Organizations are discovering — sometimes painfully — that AI readiness is really library readiness in a trench coat.
The result? Quietly, steadily, the people who understand taxonomy, classification, metadata, retention, and access are being pulled into rooms we used to have to knock on. Not because we finally learned to market ourselves, but because the cost of not having us in the room became too high to ignore. The work didn't change. The stakes did.
And with that shift comes a naming problem.
The world is starting to call us Information Management Specialists, Information Governance Leads, Knowledge Systems Architects, Data Stewards, etc. The titles keep multiplying. Some of us resist the drift…and I understand why. "Librarian" carries generations of professional values:
Service
Access
Intellectual freedom
Careful stewardship of the record.
It's not just a job title; it's a lineage.
But here's the reframe I've been sitting with: we will always be librarians. That's the heart of who we are. The principles don't change when the scope expands.
Classifying an AI training corpus is still classification. Governing a model's access to enterprise data is still access control. Building retention rules for a chatbot's conversation logs is still records management. The craft is ancient; the surfaces are new.
So when an organization looks at us and says, "we need an Information Management Specialist," I don't think they're erasing the librarian. I think they're reaching for a word big enough to describe what librarianship becomes when it has to hold an entire enterprise together. And we can let them. We can wear the new titles without losing the old identity.
One is what we're called. The other is who we are.
The invisibility, I'd argue, isn't disappearing because we got louder. It's disappearing because the systems we steward are becoming too important to overlook. That's worth celebrating! We can evolve the language without forgetting the roots of librarianship.
Librarians built the scaffolding of human knowledge long before anyone called it "information governance." We're still doing the same work. The world is just finally catching up to what to call it.
Cora-Lynn Lynds holds a Master of Information from Dalhousie University and works as an Information Management Specialist at GeoSpectrum Technologies Inc. She writes about information governance, librarianship, and the evolving role of information professionals in an AI-driven world.