It's not so much a cost saving, more an indication that this particular librarian is underemployed. With those skills, he shouldn't be stamping books and clearing print jams.
The people you see stamping books are probably clerks or pages. "Librarian" is a professional job that requires at least a master's degree. Librarians these days increasingly have degrees in "information science" which includes a wide variety of technologies from books to the internet.
The librarian in this news story "handles technical support for the library." Apparently this isn't just clearing print jams, either: "I had done some Web-application development for the library..."
My mistake - I must have made a wrongful assumption based on practice in the UK. While public librarians in Britain are also expected to have a postgraduate qualification, that doesn't mean very much here and librarians aren't particularly well paid unless they are heads of service. An experienced librarian would expect to earn about half what an experienced software developer or systems administrator would - indeed, they would be fortunate to earn more than a junior developer on their first year in the job.
As an indication of their status here, a study published by the British Psychological Society in 2006 suggested that librarians are amongst the most stressed and frustrated workers. In the study, librarians themselves described feelings of severe boredom, a lack of control over their careers and insufficient opportunities to exercise their skills. As a heavy library user myself, this news story gelled strongly with the perception I have of librarians - intelligent people with very little to do, shuffling about the place with the demeanour of a lackadaisical hound, looking for something to puncture their tedious routine.
Yeah, maybe it's different here in the U.S. Last month, Librarian ranked #46 in a "Best Jobs" list at the Wall Street Journal - with "stress" as one of the criteria. (Software Engineer was #2!)
You do make a good distinction between public libraries and others (school libraries, medical/law/corporate libraries). But even there, you might not have the full picture. The people who spend most of their time at the circulation desk in most libraries are not librarians. Meanwhile, librarians may spend most of their time doing jobs you don't see, like collection development (finding, selecting, and acquiring new which books or other resources).
