Week 6: Librarians

I'm going to be honest here.

Before I came to grad school, when people asked me, "You need a graduate degree to help people find where a book is on a shelf?"  I first got annoyed and mad, because of their ignorance.  But I also didn't have a good answer to give them.

Reading this thread, I finally have some answers (as well as some ideas for the video assignment, lest we forget).

The quote at the beginning of the chapter says:

"We cannot have good libraries until we first have good librarians - properly educated, professionally recognized, and fairly rewarded." - Herbert S. White

In other words, you cannot stick any random person into a library and expect the library to run smoothly.  Librarians need to be educated.  Also, as pointed out in the chapter, people automatically think of the skills we do.  When thinking of librarianship as an accumulation of skills, it doesn't really make sense that they go to graduate school for that.  You can just learn skills on a job, right?  Thinking of it in terms of why we do things changes the big picture.

Also, one of the major focuses of our profession is information organization, and as pointed out in the chapter, there are an infinite number of ways to organize and classify the world.  Learning just one system for organization isn't enough.  We need to understand organization at a deeper level than just cataloging.  This is something that one needs to be educated about.  I can't say it any better than how it was said in the book:  "By having a richer understanding of information seeking as a concept and the underlying cognitive function, and not simply as a set of technologies and technique... you will do your job better."

So, to all of you who asked me why I was spending thousands of dollars to help someone find a book on the shelf, sure anyone can find a book on a shelf.  But I'd like you to tell me all about authority control, metadata record provenance, and development of taxonomies and ontologies.  And on top of that, understand and contextualize the deeper concept of information seeking and organization. 

And that's only a part of the job.