I just spent almost an hour crafting a response for my first Practice Question as a student librarian at the Internet Public Library. I say Practice Question because I guess at one point, my question came from a real patron, but it’s been repurposed by the administrators to serve as a testing point for new librarians.
The question was concerning how many U.S. Presidents have been recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, and people, let me tell you: three. Theodore Roosevelt, in 1906, Woodrow Wilson, in 1919, and The Man from Plains, Jimmy Carter (2002, and widely held to be a giant fuck you to the Bush administration from Sweden).
So the answering process at IPL is designed to be comprehensive for a reason; it’s part of their mission to educate their patrons how to most effectively and authoritatively find information on the Web. But that means that answering this question like I just did to you degenerates? Totally unacceptable. Instead, I first provided immediate links to three different sources consulted to find the answer (the Nobel Foundation site, the New York Times, and the Columbia Encyclopedia online to check each POTUS’s bio for verification). Then I listed the pathways, somewhat simplified, I took to reach each source and why they could be considered authoritative on the subject. Then I said goodbye, politely, and invited the patron to respond with any follow-up questions.
Of course, I said all this to a poor IPL admin who now has to review my almost Urkel-ian answer to a very simple question. And then, when I saved the link-littered Word document I used to craft this mighty response, Word asked me if I wanted to save Hello from the Internet.doc. And I laughed. Hello from the Internet, indeed. It also says word to your mother.
The whole experience sort of made me feel like someone asked me to walk across a room but cut off my feet first. Maybe that’s dramatic but if you were sitting on my couch and asked me the same question posed in the Practice Question, I’d just wikipedia that shit. Should I really be a librarian if I routinely Wikipedia that Shit? Will I ever STOP Wikipedia-ing that Shit? It was simultaneously harder to look the Right Way, and also easier; like some muscle memory from eighth grade where you had this really rigid sense of Where Information Comes From and the answer was never The People On The Internet. Bring me the Times! Bring me Brittanica! It was all so beautiful then.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that Library School has been about re-learning some things, including how little I know. I got home from my first back-to-back Tuesday classes and told Stuart I wasn’t sure I understood Librarianese. I mean, what’s an bibliography versus a catalog? What’s a bibliography? What’s a catalog? What’s OPAC? What’s OCLC? What’s Mansell? WHAT’S A NORMATIVE STRUCTURE? What’s a library?
I answered myself, really, well, and so did Stuart, by basically reminding me to just read everything I’m assigned until it makes sense. Which I’ve been doing. And then the other day I was standing on the platform of the Brooklyn-bound D at West 4th and realized, hey! I know what the difference between a bibliography and a catalog! A catalog is basically a bibliography that tells you where things are located!
Look, bear with me. It was late at night after six hours of class and I’m taking my tiny, humble victories where I find them. Like when my computer reminds me, hey, hello from the internet!
Normative Structures can fuck right off, though. I still don’t know what those are.
I have always wondered what one learns at Library School, besides shushing people and the Dewey Decimal System. It sounds really interesting!
It’s so fun to follow your back-to-school adventures! Keep ‘em coming!!!! But yes, I want to know the shushing methods, too. And if there is a scientific reason as to why almost every librarian has really cool glasses.
My sister just finished library school. She’s working as a children’s librarian at a NY Public Library. She loves it, even though she hated school. SO, hang tough! It will all be over before you know it!
i’m a corporate research librarian (one of the many kinds of librarians), and i don’t shush or use the dewey decimal system. most librarians outside of an elementary school don’t shush or dewey either.
I’m laughing out loud at the timing of my reading your posting.
I was just lamenting the dewey this week, and trying to exercise my muscle memory on a trip to the public library.
I find, as you said, ‘wikipedia-ing that shit’ (or a trip to B&N) much more fun most of the time!
But I did leave the library with the information that I could download an audiobook from the library website. Love that digital media, on loan! How fabulous is that…
I really do want to re-learn the whole library code, as I’m just too excited about my library card to let it go to waste. After reading your post, I see it actually can be an adventure!
Elementary librarian here. I don’t shush. I also use google and wikipedia and I don’t know what a normative structure is.
I’ll just go ahead and point this out three weeks after I posted this; nothing gets a librarian’s ire up like mentioning SHUSHING. Seriously, people. The shushing thing is anathema to librarians.
Nonsense, when I was a librarian I shushed people ALL THE TIME. Of course, when I was a librarian, Dewey had just started playing around with decimal points.
This was interesting to me for other reasons, though. When I received my MSLS, we were drilled in something called full-service librarianship. In other words, we would have supplied the answers to the question, period. Oh, maybe if we were in the mood, a source or two — but it was stressed that our job was not to teach, but to supply information. Has there been a revolution in the dusty halls of knowledge?
I was also startled to realize that Nixon didn’t share the Peace Prize with Kissinger (no wonder he hated him), and that Jimmy Carter didn’t get a co-share because of the Camp David accord. This is why research is actually better than actually, y’know, living through the history. You blink, and you miss EVERYTHING.