Lowrider Librarian

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Star_Trek_uniforms.jpg Kael Moffat Information Literacy Librarian, Saint Martin’s University As librarians, one of our many hats could be expressed as “identity formers.”  At first glance, this may seem like a grandiose claim, but if we look at aspects of our profession in light of Georg Simmel’s concept of the web of group-affiliations, we can see that we do play such an important role.  Simmel was a late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century German sociologist and philosopher who wrote on such broad topics as the history of philosophy, philosophy of money, and social structure.  One of his influential shorter works, “The Web of Group-Affiliations,” published in 1922, can be used as lens through which we can look at how librarianship affects identity formation. Simmel points out that an individual’s identity is initially imposed on them through the “web of circumstances” of family and oth...