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silveradept[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.]
The librarian is in the business of providing timely and accurate information to those who ask us questions. Most of the time, people are looking for the answers to things that the Internet has made much easier to find, such as telephone numbers of businesses, names of movies and books, and the actors therein, the various statistical achievements of sports figures, an so forth. Although the prevalence of cellular phones has made it harder to find people by addresses and telephone numbers, as the directories of municipalities have fewer people in them. Instead, you can find their social media profiles and try to contact them that way.
Things not in the facts department are usually library procedures about how long things are checked out for, getting new library cards, signing on to the electronic resources, getting information about programs, and the like. This is the sort of thing that gets people to grumble about why high-paid public librarians are working the customer service desk, when it seems like nobody is asking questions that can't be handled by automated query-bots or otherwise much less-paid and less-degreed persons.
Considering programming and collection development are not usually on the minds of those people, because they don't usually see those things happening, or understand what's happening when they do see it. Outside of the academic and specialist libraries, it doesn't seem like people are asking in-depth questions that need research and professional touches of the public librarian, even through the website interfaces. More than a few people attribute this to the idea that people are looking for whatever can satisfy their information itch at the time, and that the Internet, as a vast collection of poorly-organized web pages of varying levels of authenticity and rigor, will generally do for most people's inquiries, because they're looking for something that vaguely looks like what they expect to see, and as soon as they find it, they're done.
You may draw however many inferences that you want about the current climate of "fake news" accusations as you like there. Just remember to add on the horrifying realization that algorithms have gotten good enough that they can surround us with our opinions in an echo chamber and get us to believe that everyone on the Internet agrees with us on everything and no difference of opinion exists. And that satisfaction research indicates that people really do look for the first thing they can find that will satisfy their information needs, and they will stop after that.
Now, the public library contains a giant section of opinions, with the conceit, at least, that these people's opinions are generally well-researched and insightful. (Needless to say, they are not the opinions of the International House of Radio, its member stations or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight.) We stick them in non-fiction, along with the more dry and prosaic works that claim to have less opinionated content. Even if the person themselves turns out to be a horrible person, with multiple allegations and settlements of horrible sexual behavior, or it is exceedingly clear that they have an agenda to characterize history, law, or any other subject according to a partisan political ideology, we still stash them in non-fiction because they don't write a work that clearly lands in the realm of fiction. Even if you're convinced that effective supply-side trickle-down economics belongs in the Land of Make-Believe, a person who writes a book about how supply-side trickle-down economics will totally work this time around, unlike all the other times that it attempted to work and failed...we still file them in non-fiction.
So people can still get their fill of echo-chambers and sycophantic opinions, even at the public library. And we will feed people as many of those books and resources that we have access to if that's what requested of us. (We might recommend a few other voices to broaden perspective, but it's a delicate operation.) So long as someone has written material about it, we can find it. It may take longer than usual if it's not widespread things, but generally, we can find it, even if you start getting multiple chains of librarians involved looking for it. It's totally doable. The only time we run into issues is if the thing itself doesn't actually have anything published on it.
Which sometimes means you get the most interesting of questions - ideas about whether a universe connected to ours through a wormhole would be able to engage in cross-universe financial shenanigans, whether it would be possible for someone to be cured of an STD through the timely intervention of angels (who may or may not have given the STD in the first place), which records to spin backward so as to decipher their satanic messages, or information written about how the twelfth tribe of Israel eventually fathered a line of holy people in Africa. Sometimes there's a mention or two of these things in encyclopedic materials or other spaces, so that, at the very least, you can confirm that what the person is saying has had other people saying the same thing, and if you get lucky, you can even find where someone has written a book or other material on it, and point the person at it. Because it's always possible that the person is asking for this information to analyze it and determine what kind of conspiracy theory it is and figure out how to debunk it.
That said, policy-wise, I'm generally not permitted to say "That's the sort of thing that comes from cult-like entities or professional conspiracy-theorists without a connection to our plane of reality." I can, however, say that the thing they are asking after isn't likely to have a lot of material on it. And that I've taken a look around our interlibrary loan and our electronic resources for articles and journal issues and they didn't come back with anything. Perhaps the local academic outlet, if their libraries are open to the public, could provide them with something on the subject. It's not that it isn't there, of course, because saying that would be a statement of fact that would mean the library isn't being neutral and just providing data to people because they asked for it. (Libraries aren't neutral, if they're taking their missions and ideals seriously. It requires libraries to be actively trying to bring equity to their communities, and it also requires libraries to make statements about the accuracy and factual nature of the things that they're researching or being asked to research.)
Library school assumed that the people that you were going to encounter had rational, reasonably well-formed information requests. Even in the things that were beyond the artificial examples. Reality is far, far more strange than that, and it can be a struggle to convince people that the thing they are adamant about has almost no basis in reality or fact. As many of us found out, and continue to be reminded of every day. It would be nice to be able to tell them, and have them understand, when they've delved into conspiracy theory territory.
The librarian is in the business of providing timely and accurate information to those who ask us questions. Most of the time, people are looking for the answers to things that the Internet has made much easier to find, such as telephone numbers of businesses, names of movies and books, and the actors therein, the various statistical achievements of sports figures, an so forth. Although the prevalence of cellular phones has made it harder to find people by addresses and telephone numbers, as the directories of municipalities have fewer people in them. Instead, you can find their social media profiles and try to contact them that way.
Things not in the facts department are usually library procedures about how long things are checked out for, getting new library cards, signing on to the electronic resources, getting information about programs, and the like. This is the sort of thing that gets people to grumble about why high-paid public librarians are working the customer service desk, when it seems like nobody is asking questions that can't be handled by automated query-bots or otherwise much less-paid and less-degreed persons.
Considering programming and collection development are not usually on the minds of those people, because they don't usually see those things happening, or understand what's happening when they do see it. Outside of the academic and specialist libraries, it doesn't seem like people are asking in-depth questions that need research and professional touches of the public librarian, even through the website interfaces. More than a few people attribute this to the idea that people are looking for whatever can satisfy their information itch at the time, and that the Internet, as a vast collection of poorly-organized web pages of varying levels of authenticity and rigor, will generally do for most people's inquiries, because they're looking for something that vaguely looks like what they expect to see, and as soon as they find it, they're done.
You may draw however many inferences that you want about the current climate of "fake news" accusations as you like there. Just remember to add on the horrifying realization that algorithms have gotten good enough that they can surround us with our opinions in an echo chamber and get us to believe that everyone on the Internet agrees with us on everything and no difference of opinion exists. And that satisfaction research indicates that people really do look for the first thing they can find that will satisfy their information needs, and they will stop after that.
Now, the public library contains a giant section of opinions, with the conceit, at least, that these people's opinions are generally well-researched and insightful. (Needless to say, they are not the opinions of the International House of Radio, its member stations or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight.) We stick them in non-fiction, along with the more dry and prosaic works that claim to have less opinionated content. Even if the person themselves turns out to be a horrible person, with multiple allegations and settlements of horrible sexual behavior, or it is exceedingly clear that they have an agenda to characterize history, law, or any other subject according to a partisan political ideology, we still stash them in non-fiction because they don't write a work that clearly lands in the realm of fiction. Even if you're convinced that effective supply-side trickle-down economics belongs in the Land of Make-Believe, a person who writes a book about how supply-side trickle-down economics will totally work this time around, unlike all the other times that it attempted to work and failed...we still file them in non-fiction.
So people can still get their fill of echo-chambers and sycophantic opinions, even at the public library. And we will feed people as many of those books and resources that we have access to if that's what requested of us. (We might recommend a few other voices to broaden perspective, but it's a delicate operation.) So long as someone has written material about it, we can find it. It may take longer than usual if it's not widespread things, but generally, we can find it, even if you start getting multiple chains of librarians involved looking for it. It's totally doable. The only time we run into issues is if the thing itself doesn't actually have anything published on it.
Which sometimes means you get the most interesting of questions - ideas about whether a universe connected to ours through a wormhole would be able to engage in cross-universe financial shenanigans, whether it would be possible for someone to be cured of an STD through the timely intervention of angels (who may or may not have given the STD in the first place), which records to spin backward so as to decipher their satanic messages, or information written about how the twelfth tribe of Israel eventually fathered a line of holy people in Africa. Sometimes there's a mention or two of these things in encyclopedic materials or other spaces, so that, at the very least, you can confirm that what the person is saying has had other people saying the same thing, and if you get lucky, you can even find where someone has written a book or other material on it, and point the person at it. Because it's always possible that the person is asking for this information to analyze it and determine what kind of conspiracy theory it is and figure out how to debunk it.
That said, policy-wise, I'm generally not permitted to say "That's the sort of thing that comes from cult-like entities or professional conspiracy-theorists without a connection to our plane of reality." I can, however, say that the thing they are asking after isn't likely to have a lot of material on it. And that I've taken a look around our interlibrary loan and our electronic resources for articles and journal issues and they didn't come back with anything. Perhaps the local academic outlet, if their libraries are open to the public, could provide them with something on the subject. It's not that it isn't there, of course, because saying that would be a statement of fact that would mean the library isn't being neutral and just providing data to people because they asked for it. (Libraries aren't neutral, if they're taking their missions and ideals seriously. It requires libraries to be actively trying to bring equity to their communities, and it also requires libraries to make statements about the accuracy and factual nature of the things that they're researching or being asked to research.)
Library school assumed that the people that you were going to encounter had rational, reasonably well-formed information requests. Even in the things that were beyond the artificial examples. Reality is far, far more strange than that, and it can be a struggle to convince people that the thing they are adamant about has almost no basis in reality or fact. As many of us found out, and continue to be reminded of every day. It would be nice to be able to tell them, and have them understand, when they've delved into conspiracy theory territory.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 09:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 03:30 pm (UTC)And we could also use having more books actually written by those who know making it into the major publishers and distribution systems.
That's awful to have to deal with.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 07:59 pm (UTC)If you're up to dealing with it, many libraries do have ways to either request new titles, or make suggestions. I've had reasonably good luck with "I noticed that the library collection mostly has books from X perspective about Z topic. Could you consider adding some books about Y aspect? Here are a couple of titles I'd suggest [that are well-reviewed/held by other libraries/from people in that community]."
(I have done this for minority religious stuff, mostly Pagan-related.)
It doesn't need to be terribly long, but the inclusion of a few specific titles that other libraries have or that are otherwise noted as good sources often can provoke a library into poking at other sources as well.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 12:17 pm (UTC)Has there been any discussion in the library community regarding this?
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 03:34 pm (UTC)Actual discussion on the topic is likely going to be relegated to the back channels, especially for those places where the discussion might be a little too close to work.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 03:40 pm (UTC)I love this, as much as I don't love that having a commitment to facts requires a lack of neutrality.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 08:06 pm (UTC)(In the case I'm particularly thinking of, it was someone who wanted to get photos off a DVD for a court case. I realised about halfway through the process between the photos and what the person said that it was for an animal neglect case in which the patron was the person charged, and who was trying to get permission to have animals again. There were very clear signs of neglect.)
I of course helped them get the photos off the DVD - that being my job - and then went home and said a number of prayers to Bast that the judge would be sensible, please.
The kind of difficult question I'm more likely to get at work involves people who have a saviour complex about the particular disability issue that my work involves, and who need to be gently yanked out of that so they don't make things worse for people actually dealing with the thing.
And/or they need to be educated gently about the logistical realities of organizational function. Yes, it would be really really great if Nepal had some more options for Complex Thing, but we are probably not going to make that happen any time soon. (To pick a question from last week.)
no subject
Date: 2017-12-12 09:13 pm (UTC)The short version for us, anyway, if that should this happen and you feel like you can't continue in good conscience, go find someone else who can and have them help the person.
As for that other case, one can hope that repeating the part where that's more logistically complex that you can take on (or, in many of our cases, it's outside the scope of our organization) eventually gets through, and if they're still not happy about it or want to talk to someone higher up, there's a dialog firm that we can fill out and ask someone else to talk to them with.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-13 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-13 12:58 am (UTC)