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[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
I was going to title this one "How To Make It Look Like You Know Everything About Things You've Only Just Met", but library school is utterly fantastic at teaching that. The things you learn in library school allow you to examine unknown systems, software, problems, collections, and plenty of other things and seem to gain mastery over them instantly or shortly, sometimes with a few questions and sometimes without.
To the people that come into the library, I appear to work magic on a daily basis for them. They've been trying to wrestle a document into shape for hours, are running out of computer time, and they need this thing to happen. They can describe it, they know what they want, but they can't get the thing to work. And then, I come over, point them at the right menu, have them click a button and type a couple numbers, and the document jumps into alignment exactly the way they want it. It's magic! (No, it isn't. It's lots of experience in learning how to use office software, a subsequent grasp of the very very basics of publishing terminology, despite never having worked in any publishing anything, and remembering what kind of category is most likely to contain the options they're looking for.)
A grownup comes in with a child that they can't seem to find good books for. They talk about grade level, possibly AR level, and lament about how difficult it is to get them to read anything. Within a couple questions, I'm walking among the stacks, plucking out materials from the shelves and sending the grownup home with five books and a request to tell me if any of them were liked or not. It's magic! (No, it isn't. It's knowing the collection, asking about what they already like to get an idea of what would be good suggestions, and then walking the stacks to see if they're checked in and to see if something else triggers my memory of being a good book, and occasionally taking a peek inside some dust jackets to see if an intriguing looking title will match the profile we're looking for.)
Someone has a new device they've been given as a gift, or they've gotten a new cell phone, and there's something they want to do, or undo, and they can'y figure out how to get that accomplished. I direct them to a couple places, have them perform a few taps, and they've got things straightened out and can use their device for what they want to do again. It's magic! (No, no, no. That's having an understanding of the major operating systems for portable devices, through experience and study and knowing, generally, what the task is a person is trying to accomplish and finding them a free application in their app store that can do that thing, at least in some way.)
The library profession has occasionally cultivated an air of being the keepers of esoteric knowledge, the people who can get answers on any question you can think of (where the knowledge is contained in a colleague or a system that a colleague has access to). I watched a movie recently called Desk Set, about a group of four (women) librarians who fear they are going to be replaced with a computer to do reference work. As it turn out, the computer is supposed to help them get even better at their work, but there's a lot of "this newfangled machine cannot compare to the abilities of a trained librarian" which has a demonstration built into the movie. Considering it was created before the widespread adoption of computers and the use of networked union catalogues and subscription databases, there's a little bit of "oh, if ony you knew, ladies" that comes with it, but thte truth is that you cannot just throw everything together in a loose confederation of hyperlinks and expect someone to be able to find everything that they are looking for, even with the assistance of highly-tuned algorithms that can parse language and that have access to massive stores of data of search queries to refine their algorithms. Because human does not translate well to computer, and computer does not translate back to human particularly well - in both cases, you need an intermediary, and the librarian is one of the best you can get on your side for that matter, because librarians have the skillset to understand systems and to ask good questions of humans to get the useful information that the system will want from them.
Anyway, librarians get a mystic aura about them because of the ways that they take queries and return information, even the esoteric sort. Bookworms are wielders of great magical power in popular culture - Willow is magic, because bookworm, but so is Giles. The monks and nuns of the medieval period of Latin Christendom were often the most educated people outside the nobility, and they might have been more educated than many of the nobles. The illiterate portion of the population would have to rely on those monks and nobles for interpretation of things, and might have done the same anyway on matters of religion, spirituality, and the supernatural because those people were the most educated about those matters. Knowledge becomes entangled with mystic powers. Those who can provide knowledge become associated with magic powers, because they appear to do things that "ordinary" humans can't do in the ways they navigate their storehouses of information.
Which is all well and good if you want to be the secret guardians of knowledge that supplicants come to or the oracles that don't need hallucinatory gases to make cryptic but ultimately accurate pronunciations. If, however, your trade is to be able to teach people how to find, sift, and evaluate information on their own, the popular conception that librarians are covertly wizards gets in the way. We're trying to pull the curtain back and show the inner workings, but everyone's still cowering before the giant head, which was something we were working on as a display and that is supposed to be a xute accent. Librarians are in the business of teaching people how to find information, use devices, find good books, read those books (or listen to them), answer questions, navigate the Internet, and do scholarship, to name just a few of those things that librarians try to teach people. There's probably someone who feels like librarians doing this are essentially trying to put themselves out of a job, but those people fail to realize how many questions people have, recommendations they need, children they want to get started on a good path toward information literacy, and tasks they want to complete that can be made a lot easier with the assistance of a trained professional in information and technology. A lot of people are banging their heads against search engines or trying to discover what resources and data is available wunder their own abilitieis every day. And we're here, with knowledge and expertise that we can put to use for you for our tax-funded salaries, but so many people keep slogging on by themselves. Maybe it's because they're afraid of us, that we'll call them fools for asking the question. (We won't.) Or they think they can do it all themselves and they know what to look for. (They might, but I wouldn't lay a wager on it.) Or some other reason.
Libraries are busy, don't get me wrong, and we're answering very important questions for everyone. But, really, we should be swamped with requests and information inquiries to the point where we're constantly asking for more funding and trying to hire on more staff so that we can keep up with the demand. Far be it from putting ourselves out of work, what we should be creating more positions for more trained people.
Library school assumed that just by showing someone how a thing is done, they'd be able to pick it up after enough times. It didn't actually teach anything at all about how to pierce the veil of fear that a lot of people have about information, technology, and the things those people need to be able to use to continue liing and working in 21st-century life. I had to learn a lot about making things appear doable by people of their skill and ability, and how to encourage and inspire confidence in others to try and learn and prove that they can succeed at the tasks they have learned how to do from me. I'm not sure I've gotten the hang of it, though - there are still a lot of people, both on the staff and in the public, that think of me as a wizard that does librarian magic.
I was going to title this one "How To Make It Look Like You Know Everything About Things You've Only Just Met", but library school is utterly fantastic at teaching that. The things you learn in library school allow you to examine unknown systems, software, problems, collections, and plenty of other things and seem to gain mastery over them instantly or shortly, sometimes with a few questions and sometimes without.
To the people that come into the library, I appear to work magic on a daily basis for them. They've been trying to wrestle a document into shape for hours, are running out of computer time, and they need this thing to happen. They can describe it, they know what they want, but they can't get the thing to work. And then, I come over, point them at the right menu, have them click a button and type a couple numbers, and the document jumps into alignment exactly the way they want it. It's magic! (No, it isn't. It's lots of experience in learning how to use office software, a subsequent grasp of the very very basics of publishing terminology, despite never having worked in any publishing anything, and remembering what kind of category is most likely to contain the options they're looking for.)
A grownup comes in with a child that they can't seem to find good books for. They talk about grade level, possibly AR level, and lament about how difficult it is to get them to read anything. Within a couple questions, I'm walking among the stacks, plucking out materials from the shelves and sending the grownup home with five books and a request to tell me if any of them were liked or not. It's magic! (No, it isn't. It's knowing the collection, asking about what they already like to get an idea of what would be good suggestions, and then walking the stacks to see if they're checked in and to see if something else triggers my memory of being a good book, and occasionally taking a peek inside some dust jackets to see if an intriguing looking title will match the profile we're looking for.)
Someone has a new device they've been given as a gift, or they've gotten a new cell phone, and there's something they want to do, or undo, and they can'y figure out how to get that accomplished. I direct them to a couple places, have them perform a few taps, and they've got things straightened out and can use their device for what they want to do again. It's magic! (No, no, no. That's having an understanding of the major operating systems for portable devices, through experience and study and knowing, generally, what the task is a person is trying to accomplish and finding them a free application in their app store that can do that thing, at least in some way.)
The library profession has occasionally cultivated an air of being the keepers of esoteric knowledge, the people who can get answers on any question you can think of (where the knowledge is contained in a colleague or a system that a colleague has access to). I watched a movie recently called Desk Set, about a group of four (women) librarians who fear they are going to be replaced with a computer to do reference work. As it turn out, the computer is supposed to help them get even better at their work, but there's a lot of "this newfangled machine cannot compare to the abilities of a trained librarian" which has a demonstration built into the movie. Considering it was created before the widespread adoption of computers and the use of networked union catalogues and subscription databases, there's a little bit of "oh, if ony you knew, ladies" that comes with it, but thte truth is that you cannot just throw everything together in a loose confederation of hyperlinks and expect someone to be able to find everything that they are looking for, even with the assistance of highly-tuned algorithms that can parse language and that have access to massive stores of data of search queries to refine their algorithms. Because human does not translate well to computer, and computer does not translate back to human particularly well - in both cases, you need an intermediary, and the librarian is one of the best you can get on your side for that matter, because librarians have the skillset to understand systems and to ask good questions of humans to get the useful information that the system will want from them.
Anyway, librarians get a mystic aura about them because of the ways that they take queries and return information, even the esoteric sort. Bookworms are wielders of great magical power in popular culture - Willow is magic, because bookworm, but so is Giles. The monks and nuns of the medieval period of Latin Christendom were often the most educated people outside the nobility, and they might have been more educated than many of the nobles. The illiterate portion of the population would have to rely on those monks and nobles for interpretation of things, and might have done the same anyway on matters of religion, spirituality, and the supernatural because those people were the most educated about those matters. Knowledge becomes entangled with mystic powers. Those who can provide knowledge become associated with magic powers, because they appear to do things that "ordinary" humans can't do in the ways they navigate their storehouses of information.
Which is all well and good if you want to be the secret guardians of knowledge that supplicants come to or the oracles that don't need hallucinatory gases to make cryptic but ultimately accurate pronunciations. If, however, your trade is to be able to teach people how to find, sift, and evaluate information on their own, the popular conception that librarians are covertly wizards gets in the way. We're trying to pull the curtain back and show the inner workings, but everyone's still cowering before the giant head, which was something we were working on as a display and that is supposed to be a xute accent. Librarians are in the business of teaching people how to find information, use devices, find good books, read those books (or listen to them), answer questions, navigate the Internet, and do scholarship, to name just a few of those things that librarians try to teach people. There's probably someone who feels like librarians doing this are essentially trying to put themselves out of a job, but those people fail to realize how many questions people have, recommendations they need, children they want to get started on a good path toward information literacy, and tasks they want to complete that can be made a lot easier with the assistance of a trained professional in information and technology. A lot of people are banging their heads against search engines or trying to discover what resources and data is available wunder their own abilitieis every day. And we're here, with knowledge and expertise that we can put to use for you for our tax-funded salaries, but so many people keep slogging on by themselves. Maybe it's because they're afraid of us, that we'll call them fools for asking the question. (We won't.) Or they think they can do it all themselves and they know what to look for. (They might, but I wouldn't lay a wager on it.) Or some other reason.
Libraries are busy, don't get me wrong, and we're answering very important questions for everyone. But, really, we should be swamped with requests and information inquiries to the point where we're constantly asking for more funding and trying to hire on more staff so that we can keep up with the demand. Far be it from putting ourselves out of work, what we should be creating more positions for more trained people.
Library school assumed that just by showing someone how a thing is done, they'd be able to pick it up after enough times. It didn't actually teach anything at all about how to pierce the veil of fear that a lot of people have about information, technology, and the things those people need to be able to use to continue liing and working in 21st-century life. I had to learn a lot about making things appear doable by people of their skill and ability, and how to encourage and inspire confidence in others to try and learn and prove that they can succeed at the tasks they have learned how to do from me. I'm not sure I've gotten the hang of it, though - there are still a lot of people, both on the staff and in the public, that think of me as a wizard that does librarian magic.
