For some reason in the car this AM the question popped into my head, “Why don’t any of us go by the moniker of iBrarian?” I’ve seen cybrarian in many places, and that connotes a certain impression, but with all the iPod, iPhone etc. hype of the past few years, is this not a bandwagon to which we could hitch our cart? UW, Drexel and Syracuse (and others) seem to think so with their iSchools…
There are a couple of domains already registered as of earlier this year at ibrarian.org and ibrarian.net, but a Google search on the term mostly returns poorly OCR’d documents, and a search on LisZen and LibWorm both show that none of the bloggers are flinging the term around.
Is it just dumb or something?
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Comments
5 Responses to “What’s in a name?”
Yes. It is just dumb.
We have to connect with our users — and they at least KNOW what a librarian is. I don’t want to scare anyone away with a name that makes no sense to them. In fact, I had to fight to get Librarian in my title (rather than just “Assistant Professor”). We are having a smililar discuusion about what to call our “information commons” since that is not a user-centered term . . .
In a recent staff survey to come up with a brand for an intranet – one response said – “NO i branding”. There is a sense that the i,e,@ thing is becoming very cliched. Also, it is strongly aligned with a commercial entity – Apple.
In some ways it is a shame, because the i is the international symbol for information.
perhaps ilibrarian is a more meaningful word? (And she already has a blog…
http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/)
Yes Danielle, shortly after I posted my question I realized I should’ve used Ellyssa as another example 🙂