I would assume that the person telling me this is coming from a point of view that defines a true profession along the lines of older professions like law and medicine (extended education and specialization, rigorous exams like the bar exam, high probability of malpractice suits, high incomes, etc.) and defines an occupation as requiring only enough practical skills to keep a job down as a means of livelihood.

I would say, yes, librarianship COULD be a "mere" occupation, as all jobs can be including medicine, as in doctors who practice just enough medicine to stay on the payroll of a hospital or of a government health agency, and law, as in the lawyer who is just in for the money. But I would tell my friend here that there is much more to a profession than high status and high incomes and I would then proceed to define the profession of librarianship in terms of Pemberton's and Pendergraft's criteria:

• A body of knowledge - e.g. librarians not only have the skills to search and retrieve information that meets the user's information need, they also have the theoretical knowledge about information retrieval systems and information behavior.
• Specialized education - the first professional degree in librarianship is an MLIS and involves specialization in areas like law or medical librarianship, academic or public librarianship, archival and museum librarianship, etc.
• Client service - librarians are primarily motivated by a need to serve people and only secondarily by a need to have a steady source of income.
• Community endorsement - the mother of all library associations in North America, the American Library Association, has been in existence since 1876 and has a Committee on Accreditation that defines educational standards and curriculum accreditation for schools and/or programs in library science. Many library jobs in the public as well as private sectors require an MLIS degree from an ALA-accredited school.
• Long-term commitment - the library profession is now faced with the problem of a graying population of librarians who will soon retire which only shows you the long-term personal commitment that librarians have for their profession :) No kidding. Most librarians I've met exude some intensity of purpose beneath their stereotypical unflappability.
• Shared, community-based values - although there are many types of librarians as there are many types of libraries, librarians share a culture of service which has its own vocabulary, identity, and a sense of direction.
• Values that relate to greater social values - why are librarians at the forefront of the opposition to the US Patriot Act? They have intense commitments to greater social values such as intellectual freedom, privacy and confidentiality, equitable access to information, etc.
• Code of Ethics - librarianship is guided by a code of ethics that reminds its professionals of the general principles of service and the ideals that they are committed to. A code of ethics of librarianship like the ALA's does not have disciplinary measures in it but its general principles and ideals are inculcated in the education and training of librarians, in library associations at the international, national, regional, and state levels, and interpreted in the policies and procedures of individual libraries that I think there is a high chance that your local librarian pretty much live and breath it.

I think they mean that librarianship can be very broad and winding on extolling the ideals of (or condemning the barriers to) intellectual freedom, free and equitable access, privacy and confidentiality but that librarianship stops short at formulating standards for implementing and regulating the actual practice of these ideals in libraries.

I would respond by explaining that librarianship is a profession that covers a wide range of types of libraries so that a code of ethics, which is broad, is appropriate at a level of membership involving many types of libraries (e.g. ALA code of ethics). The code of ethics has the purpose of articulating the general principles and social values that librarianship is committed to but has no power to sanction or discipline its members. However, there is a lot of room for particular types of libraries and individual libraries to define standards of professional practice that can be tailored to their particular needs (e.g. SLA policies and practices). I think that the standards of professional practice in librarianship can be found in the policies and procedures of individual libraries that do serve to once more remind librarians of the values and ideals that they are committed to but also have disciplinary measures in them. Although there are not many explicit standards of professional practice that set an average or acceptable professional conduct and expertise for librarians, there are performance evaluations by peers and supervisors that libraries employ to keep standards of professional practice high in their libraries. There are also all kinds of library associations and continuing education programs that help keep librarians up to date on their professional skills and knowledge.

Also, the profession of librarianship is evolving and there maybe areas of librarianship that will evolve into the kind of professional that Harris and Hahn (1998) are talking about when they defined a professional as "a person that has the responsibility for prescribing authoritative solutions to client-centered problems" and which will fit in Sutton's Type 4 library or a hybrid of it. Maybe then, a standard of professional practice will be more appropriate to this kind of consultative library service.

Sutton (1996) defines "library as opinion piece" as an "aggregation of works representing someone's point of view of what is needed by the library's users" (p. 134-135). That someone's point of view is the librarian's who has to exercise discretion when acting on information - "selecting, distinguishing, referring to, and otherwise privileging individual information units, in order to enhance the user's ability (a) to locate those units and (b) to decide which of those units is worth time to retrieve and absorb" (Atkinson, 1993, cited by Sutton).

Here we see that the librarian's opinion or point of view is not left to his/her arbitrary, personal whim but is always connected to the users (clients or customers) whose information needs require certain criteria (e.g. ease of use, cost in time, relevance, etc.) to be satisfactorily met. However, putting the user as the number one consideration does not mean leaving all judgment to the subjective, personal whims of users either. We would expect that the librarian's sense of discretion or judgment when it comes to evaluating information resources and users' information needs is defined and refined by certain criteria that define the profession of librarianship - a body of theoretical as well as practical skills, education and training leading to an MLIS or beyond, community endorsement, long-term personal commitment to the field, broader social values, and code of ethics. In this context, we can hardly describe the "opinions" expressed in "libraries as opinion pieces" as value-neutral. They clearly reflect the particular values that users bring to information service transactions and the broader values that underpin the profession of librarianship.