What does Librarianship mean to A&SL Conference attendees? A summary of thoughts

Guest post Stephanie Chen, Learning and Teaching Librarian, Academic Services, UCC Library

For the A&SL 2026 conference, I facilitated a session titled: “What does Librarianship mean to you? Putting your values into practice.” This was neither a presentation nor a case study and could easily have been a dud so I do want to extend a massive thank you to the conference organisers for being open to including this in the programme and to all the attendees for participating. 

My aim for this session was to give attendees an opportunity to reflect on themes from previous sessions and, importantly, to give them a space to reflect on their own values and personal understanding of librarianship through participation in online polls, Padlet, and individual reflections.  

This blog post brings together the responses shared from attendees during the session. I have also included the questions and activities used, along with some context, for those who were unable to attend. If you would like to work through the questions and activities yourself, please know there are no right or wrong answers. 

Professional Values 

I began the session by introducing values. Values can exist at multiple levels: societal, values of the community and users libraries serve, our own personal values, and professional values. For the purposes of the exercises, I asked attendees to try and focus specifically on their professional values. Examples of professional values include Gorman’s enduring values (stewardship, service, intellectual freedom, rationalism, literacy and learning, equity of access to recorded knowledge and information, privacy, democracy) and Lankes’ new librarianship (service, learning, openness, intellectual freedom and safety, intellectual honesty). 

To help attendees get into a reflective mindset and identify a professional value, I asked them to complete the following exercise: 

Think of a time when you felt proud of your work or a sense of achievement in work. What was the situation, what did you do? What was the underlying value.

Attendees were asked to share this underlying value in an online poll. 

Here is a word cloud of what was submitted: 

 Broadly speaking, responses could be categorised into the following themes: 

• Service
• Connection and collaboration
• EDI (Equity, Diversity, and inclusion)
• Access and openness 
• Learning and development 

The next exercise explored how strongly attendees related to professional codes of ethics from various library associations. While some associations do have explicit statements of professional values, most do not and instead have professional codes relating to ethics or conduct. An analysis of 60 code of ethics sourced from the IFLA website revealed the following broad values:

• user service & quality
• objectivity & impartiality
• privacy & confidentiality
• intellectual freedom & anti-censorship
• professional integrity & ethics
• access to information
• social responsibility
• cultural & heritage preservation
• equity & non-discrimination
• professional development

 

Values from Library Associations

The majority of attendees did relate to these values, although for a number of attendees, there does appear to be a disconnect. 

To try and explore this further, I asked attendees to engage in a sorting exercise in Padlet. From the list of values from library associations, attendees could sort these into four columns: non-negotiable values, important but flexible, aspirational values, and not important to me at all. 

Access to information and user service appeared most often as a non-negotiable value while professional development was typically viewed as being important but flexible. 

Some values, like social responsibility and cultural and heritage preservation, appeared in multiple columns. This demonstrates values do not always align between individuals and other values will take priority. 

While code of ethics can help articulate shared expectations, they can also fail to address any tensions in values, especially when our own values do not align with what these codes might say. When such conflicts arise, there is rarely an easy solution. However, I would suggest understanding our own values and reflecting on where we place importance and priority can act as a useful guide. 

Values into practice 

To give attendees something practical to take away from the session, I asked attendees to consciously foreground one value they wanted to put into practice. With this one value in mind, I asked them to consider the following: 

• One tiny action I can take next week 
• One medium-scale change I can influence this year (project, service, policy)
• One big/aspirational change I’d love to see 

Attendees were invited to share their actions on a Padlet if they were comfortable doing so. Some of the smaller actions that emerged included checking in with fellow colleagues, prioritising staff wellbeing, and approaching work with more intentional positivity. Medium-term actions focused on increasing open access, improving practices, advocacy for librarianship, and professional development. Finally, some aspirational changes from attendees centred around achieving 100% open access, starting new initiatives, and the development of new library spaces or even a new library building (a hope many of us can probably relate to!)  

Defining librarianship

To conclude the session, I asked attendees to reflect on a final question: What does it mean to be a librarian today?

I asked attendees to complete the sentence: Librarianship is…

While many responses were positive, framing librarianship as essential and even “badass”, it’s important to also acknowledge the complexity involved in the profession, as highlighted by some attendees: “Being a Jack of all trades,” “hard work,” and “tiring.” Overall, responses showed librarianship as being a collaborative, people-focused profession centred on sharing knowledge and helping others.

To finish, I’d like to highlight some definitions that personally resonated with me, but I would encourage everyone to view all the responses: 

“Advocating and enabling for social justice and lifelong learning for everyone through collections, spaces, and research”

“Fostering a love of learning new things, while also learning new things yourself”

“A great career – be a contributor not an extractor” 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the A&SL committee for giving me the opportunity to facilitate this session and thank you to my fellow UCC Library colleagues Ronan Madden, Learning & Teaching Team Lead, and Martin O’Connor, Communications Coordinator, for supporting me in developing the session.