this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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Because most people who work at the library aren't librarians. Librarians maintain and manage a collection, set up the database, etc etc.
You certainly don't need a masters just to do that.
Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don't you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren't?
Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.
It's really much more broad than "Someone who works at the local library"
Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living... untill I saw the effort required and the pay.
Your library experience was very different from mine. We mostly just told people how to sign up for the wait list for 50 Shades of gray, what programs we did for the kids, and putting away the books everyone left everywhere.
The pay is what scared me away. Branch Manager, highest position I interacted with, couldn't afford their own transportation, and was going through their second green card marriage for money because they were desperate. Had 2 Masters.
A lot of jobs are easy on a day-to-day basis, but get hard every once in a while when some edge case comes up and you've gotta have a breadth of background knowledge of the field to handle it effectively. It's why AI seems so useful to middle managers who don't realize that edge cases exist; their employees can handle them without issue, but AI spits out total garbage and calls it done. I'd imagine librarians are indeed dealing with people looking for the latest fad book more often than not, but they still have to be prepared for the person coming in wanting to know all about insect phylogeny.
How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can't know about everything. You'd just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?
Edit: Everyone chill, I wasn't dissing the previous comment, I was just curious. I know that running a library needs a degree. But I didn't know the responsibility of expanding collection fell on the one maintaining the library (excluding requests from users). I thought maybe they at most subscribe to a list of award winners or top cited books or something.
Research skills that you acquire during your master's (incl. but not limited to, talking to other experts)
You can talk with other experts without having master's
You seem to be pointing out that formal education isn't needed to learn something. That's obviously true. The person you're responding to seems to be saying that being a librarian is a job that requires a nontrivial amount of learning. That learning is on the level of something like a masters degree. This is also true
And we both are intrigued by what exactly in librarian work warrants a masters degree.
Let me chime in with a simple question: what temperature and humidity should books be stored at? How many copies of one book do we need to have in a university library to last for ten years? Do we rotate books on the shelves with ones in a storing room elsewhere and if yes, then on what schedule? How do we keep track of what books are where and need what? How do we arrange everything that needs to be done? How is keeping a library of 1k books different from 100k books? How to get prepared for expansion of library? Etc. etc. etc. None of those is a trivial matter
I wholeheartedly agree. But which one demands a master's degree?
Each of them
I think we disagree. But thank you anyway.
part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they're worth acquiring for the collection. So, you'd look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there's anything they'd suggest. You research the author, find out if they're involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.
Yes, that sounds trivial, but there's a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.
Sure, you can ask 10 experts, and get 11 opinions.
Researching books, authors, subjects, and determining which ones are appropriate and which ones aren't is complex stuff.
You would, for example, research the authors prior publishing history of books and journal articles, read peer reviews of their articles, check their references, research the history of the authors of their references ECT to build an idea of what sort of author you're dealing with. Do they know their stuff, or are they just a book mill? Is any of the subject matter contradictory, controversial, out of date, or incomplete. Repeat for 30 books on the same subject to find the most comprehensive work for your collection.
Just to check - do you know that they do this, or do you think that's the way it's best done? - Because that is a lot of work and you'd need a lot of librarians
That's how it ought to be done in academic libraries. It does take a lot of librarians. You have a librarian for each subject area, which can be pretty granular depending on the size/budget of the library. My academic library has a business librarian who focuses on acquiring and weeding the business section. She has an undergrad degree in something businessy and an MSLis.
Now, my academic library has been subject to funding cuts and so we don't do everything we ought to do, especially in areas that aren't major majors at our school, which is frustrating AF. We rely more on professors suggesting acquisitions.
Public libraries have a broader remit, so often can go with purchasing what's requested by their patrons and what's on lists of good new books. They still have to know their subject matter to weed properly, especially in the nonfiction areas. Fiction tends to be weeded based on condition and circulation stats, especially in public libraries. (weeding is getting rid of books that no longer suit the collection. Easy examples: children's book that was dropped in the mud. children's book that still lists Pluto as a planet).
Oh! As a librarian, you can also get pre-release versions of books to evaluate for your library. It's a nice perk to read things months before it comes out. (you have to request them from the publisher, but publishers like sending these to librarians because librarians buy lots of books and talk to other people that buy lots of books)
Wow, I feel that's something we should bring back. Professors many a times get too specialized. A librarian taking care of a broad category would bring balance. Though I suppose having more than 100~200 such libraries in an economy the size of US or EU feels excessive too.
I've been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.
"Haha, how hard could it be?" is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.
Think museum curator, not book warehouse owner. They have to make complex decisions involving knowledge about knowledge.
You don't but it does gatekeep the position. Helps your job security..