On 6 December 2022, Cameron M. Pierson, Phd, MLIS, L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany, delivered an invited talk “On Professional Identities Beyond MLIS: Careers in Metadata Industries” to the students in the Fall 2022 LIS9202: “Thesaurus Construction & Metadata” course at FIMS, Western University, London Canada.

Brief Biography: Cameron M. Pierson received his MLIS from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA, and his PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His professional practice and research has brought him to different types of libraries and institutions around the world. He is currently a Senior Researcher and Project Manager at the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Germany for the Future Lab on Artificial Intelligence in Personalised Medicine. His research interests include information ethics, professional education, librarian professional identity, and the LGBTQ+ communities.

Dr. Pierson offered his advice on professional identity building and the importance of librarian skillset that includes subject analysis, thesaurus construction, indexing, and the ability to work with various metadata and encoding (such as XML). He shared his research findings on “librarian professional identity formation and development, understood as process over time,” emphasizing that it is “in part defined by benchmark events, such as critical incidents, as well as highly personal aspects, such as perception of these incidents” (Pierson et al., 2019). He demonstrated that metadata-related jargon in the industry job ads can be interpreted flexibly, and how students could re-frame their skills during job hunting. He encouraged students to continue their life learning and professional growth, warning of the increasing automation in the metadata industry and the need for information professionals to keep up with the new technologies.

Our guest speaker was warmly received by the students. Dr. Rubin and her students are very thankful to Dr. Pierson for the wealth of information during his engaging talk and friendly question and answering period.

Citation:

Pierson, C.M., Goulding, A. and Campbell-Meier, J. (2019), “An integrated understanding of librarian professional identity”, Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. 68 No. 4/5, pp. 413-430. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-01-2019-0008