I often read posts on list serves pertaining to teaching and nontenured librarians' common status as nonteaching faculty. However, we need to keep in mind that regardless of the current status we may be in, we ARE teachers. Whether we instruct information seekers one at a time or in a classroom setting, one-shot session or semester-long course, we ARE teaching. We need to make sure that we are reaching as many as possible and that we are "user friendly."
More than than ever before, librarians are vital. Not everyone lives in or close to a metropolitan area. Therefore, not everyone has exposure to school libraries, school media specialists and/or trained library staff. What happens when these students go to college? There is a growing pool of current research to support the book, How libraries and librarians help: A guide to identifying user-centered outcomes by Joan C. Durrance, http://tinyurl.com/28n6hrh .
We need to step up and prove our existence is a necessity rather than sit back and wait for someone else to do it for us or worse, wait until a Fahrenheit 451 scenario comes to fruition. Come on, let's conduct more observations and publish results to move forward.
-Sharon
