When is a librarian not a librarian?

Abstract

When Reg Carr began his career the role of a university librarian was reasonably clear. Admittedly the profession suffered then as it does now from poor public understanding of what a librarian does,but within a universitymanymembers of the academic community held library staff in respect and had clear ideas of what they expected from them. It is very unlikely that the academics who appointed Reg Carr to his first job would have expected his last role as a librarian to be that of a fund-raiser. This was the time of university growth in the 1960s, when taxpayer money was poured into universities in abundance and the task of a librarian was to spend money, not to acquire it. Likewise, in respect of my own career,which began in Manchester University Library around the same time as Regs career, nobody would have expected that my career would end in a role known mysteriously as "scholarly communication".What has scholarly communication to do with libraries? Has a librarian ceased to be a librarian when they become a fund-raiser or a scholarly communication consultant? © 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited.