Stereotypes Regarding Libraries and Librarians: An Approach of Romanian School and Academic Libraries

The stereotypes on librarians in Romania generally imply the following features: women, glass-wearers, suspicious, mostly grumpy, etc. These labels are still strong because many libraries, particularly school libraries, are not digitised and, therefore, supply traditional services. To this, we should add the reservations about the library space which most potential users avoid because of its communist image: a boring, cold, dusty space with old books. Positive attributes are equally used, in contradiction with negative ones: librarians are communicative, kind, good readers, supportive in finding information–all of which show that the interactions between librarians, the public and the way information is conveyed in documentary services have diversified thanks to the development of new communication and information technologies thus allowing the re-invention of library identity through information culture, management policies, spaces, access to collections and services. To analyse the measure in which traditional stereotypes about libraries still act or have changed in the mind of the Romanian public and librarians on library trade, we used as research methods the group-focus, the interview, thus attempting to extract from the data we collected representational models by overlapping common points in the respondents views. We also found stereotypes on blogs, in anecdotes, and fiction.