Ray "Shifting Sands"

Ray (2001) “Shifting Sands: the jurisdiction of librarians in scholarly communication” Proceedings of the 10^th National Conference of the ACRL, Denver, Colorado, March 2001. [Online]: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlevents/mray.pdf

This article discuses how the role and jurisdiction of librarianship are coming under pressure from other occupations, and how advances in technology have created opportunities for librarianship to move into new jurisdictions.

Ray uses Abbott The System of Professions (1988) to explain the process of jurisdictional shift: larger cultural changes, other professional changes and new models of expertise provision all drive this shift.

This diagram shows a concept map that Ray uses to demonstrate the 4 quadrants that he sees library work as falling into:

As library work moves into Quadrant 2 and 4, the higher profile roles in Qu 1 remain high profile, but there is increasing pressure on this jurisdiction area from a variety of sources: HE teachers, students who think they don't need to be instructed in www use etc.

Whats really interesting about this paper is idea that what a given profession does is not only dependent upon themselves. These are a range of other forces which have a profound impact upon the jurisdictional limits of a profession, and this idea seems particularly relevant to librarianship.