INTERVIEW Archive Positive disruption culture
Take another look at our interview with Masud Khokhar from 2022 where he discusses how we navigate a low-risk way out of the risk-averse world of librarianship? Click on the link at the end of the story to read the full version.
YOUR workforce has been divided by Covid. Some have been exhausted by it, while others have been exhil arated by the opportunities the crisis has given them. Leaders need to help both groups.
Your technology is always behind the curve. Could you, or should you, encourage your low-risk institution to move into technology development processes like those of start-ups that often come with 80 per cent failure rates?
These are just a couple of the knotty issues that Masud Khokhar, University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, has on his radar.
Accidental librarians
The problems facing library leaders are complex but the tools at their disposal don’t always work as expected – as witnessed by Masud during his early introduction to the profession: “I was born in the library world. My father was the National Librarian of Pakistan. When I was 13 he took me to the National Library and he showed me everything. I thought: ‘What? This is really boring, I would never want to work in a library.’ So it was a rebellion against libraries to begin with. I never wanted to work in a library.” What later helped him into the library career his father had shown him, was a trend he has identified in the UK and Australasia towards accidental librarianship. “When you didn’t really want it, or had never thought of being a librarian. But when you recognise what the profession is about, you start seeing more paths into it. My own path is a good example of that. I was going to be a computer science academic. But then falling into the world of libraries and realising their beauty and their potential was, it was a remarkable revelation.”
Confidence through diversity
He doesn’t believe his experience of a serendipitous route into the profession is the norm because, he says,
December 2023
Masud Khokhar is a University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection at University of Leeds.
the tool for protecting the profession – the high bar for entry – may not be having the desired effect. Masud says: “I noted how sometimes we hinder the routes into the profession at the expense of professionalisation of the profession. As with so many things happening now – government cuts, cuts to libraries, the cuts to information profession, the casualisation of staff – we’ve lost confidence in ourselves, in the value we bring as a profession, so we try to add value by saying you must be a qualified librarian. IP
This article first appeared in the October/November 2022 issue of Information Professional. You can read the full version at:
https://tinyurl.com/54kspcs8. INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL 27
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