{"id":97,"date":"2010-11-05T11:50:22","date_gmt":"2010-11-05T16:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/melodydworak.com\/?p=97"},"modified":"2010-11-06T13:43:17","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T18:43:17","slug":"professional-ties-editing-librarianship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/melodydworak.com\/?p=97","title":{"rendered":"Professional Ties: Editing and Librarianship"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Movable type revolutionized publishing. Content management systems revolutionized electronic publishing. <\/p><\/div>\n

At the Iowa Library Association conference a few weeks ago, I ran into a colleague I went to journalism school with. She and I took a class on international media systems and traveled to Canada with our professor to study Canadian broadcasting networks. She, like me, is in a Library and Information Science program and was attending the conference for the same professional development reason I was. ILA is a networking opportunity in addition to being a PD experience, and moments after I started chatting with my former classmate, a small group of people she knew came up to join our two-point circle. Among them was another journalist.<\/p>\n

I have a professor who regularly contributes to a magazine and has written two books, as well as a supervisor who was a journalist and editor in the newspaper industry for over 10 years and two fellow students who also came to the graduate program from journalism. And then there’s me.<\/p>\n

That was a long introduction to the brief point I wanted to make with this post: Editors act as collection developers but on a more refined scope. Beyond sharing the ideals of honoring multiple perspectives and protecting against censorship–which I’ve discussed in previous posts<\/a>–both editors and librarians share the specific tasks of producing content for an audience. That’s editor-speak. Librarian-speak would be “developing collections for patrons.”<\/p>\n

It’s another parallel I wanted to note because of the number of colleagues I’m discovering with some kind of journalism background. It’s not just the economy or a dying industry coercing us journalists into a new or revised role of information professional, it’s all these parallels. We don’t have to do a 180 to adapt to new ideas and responsibilities. It just makes sense.<\/p>\n

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Edit: I had a request to add a little more context about the parallels I’m seeing, which I had elaborated on in a paper that I wrote. Here are those three arguments in bullet form:<\/p>\n