I’m going to school to be a librarian. Librarians are trained to be experts in the organization and management of information. This doesn’t make librarians experts in every subject contained within their libraries. The public library is often called the university for the common man, but librarians are not its professors.
In Adler and Doren’s “How to read a book”, the book’s author is described as an absent teacher, doing their best to impart knowledge on a topic but unavailable for answering questions or engaging in dialogue with the reader/student (Adler & Doren, 2011). A library is likely to have multiple books on topics of common interest written by different authors. Thus, someone interested in learning about a topic within a library has multiple teachers to choose from, and often benefits from engaging with more than one.
Another point to consider is that librarians may receive some training in educational topics, and often serve in roles that are education-adjacent such as embedded class librarians, but our primary training and role doesn’t centre teaching. Just like we are not the subject matter experts writing the books, we are not the subject matter experts teaching classes directly.
If we cannot be the subject matter expert for every topic someone wishes to learn about, what then is the role of the librarian in this context? Librarians are trained in the skills of information resource location, evaluation, research, and curation. While we may not be able to apply the same level of topic-specific knowledge to the evaluation of such resources, we have many tools in our toolbox that would position us to effectively design courses.
Libraries as a learning environment necessarily have some differences from a university lecture hall. But the skills involved in designing a self-taught curriculum have many similarities with those of librarianship. We create LibGuides and pathfinders as introductions to topics. Our skillset also overlaps largely with those needed to create Open Educational Resources. The aspects of subject matter expertise, assignment design and evaluation, and educational dialogue would be absent in a self-taught course regardless. So, while not a replacement for university professors, I think that librarians can play a role in facilitating the learning objectives of patrons, for many of whom the white tower of the academe remains out of reach.