Evolving practices and professional identity: How the new ways we work can reshape us as professionals and a profession

Abstract

Professional identities provide a lens through which to understand ourselves and our professional community. Individual practitioners may find that shifts in their own professional identities lead them to redefine their profession and those moving into new types of roles or engaging in new tasks may strive to alter the direction of the profession at large. This paper’s first objective is to provide insights into how professional identity development occurs and how the emergence of a new or unusual take on the library and information science profession based on professional experiences working in non-traditional roles can be seen as both an opportunity and a threat to the library and information science profession, using the experience of library and information science graduates working in non-library roles as a lens. The second objective is to translate the experiences of library and information science graduates working in non-traditional roles into recommendations for promoting diversity in the definition of the profession.