January 27, 2005

• I hold a master's of library science. The problem addressed here is the main reason I left the profession. The job I managed to land fresh out of grad school (the first time) was a staff position (paraprofessional) that paid just under $24K. So while I worked, I scoured the job market. The "real" librarian jobs wanted at least 5 years professional experience or, if an entry level position, experience with technical services and reference, and maybe collection development, too. That's a lot to ask for a job that pays in the mid to upper $20Ks. The pattern I have noticed (and especially since I have returned to school) is that a librarian will retire/quit/move to another department. Instead of being filled by another professional librarian, that position will then be divided up into separate sets of tasks that will then be added to the duties of the paraprofessional staff (which is, I guess, what they're calling library assistants now). At the time I was on the job market, there was a bit of an outcry in the ALA against this practice because library schools are turning out degree holders in huge numbers, but many of us were taking these "staff" positions for peanut wages because that's all there was. Plus, we were competing with non-degree holders who would work for even less. My job description required 2 years of college education, that was it. I walked into the interview with 2 master's degrees under my belt and two areas of specialization and I had to compete with 20-year olds who had no qualifications, but they would work for less and were, therefore, competition. Ridiculous. I was at this institution for 2 years and while I was there, none of us got raises (except the administrators), but we all had more duties added to our descriptions. In the end, though, what can you do? There aren't a lot of professional positions out there (though some people manage to land great jobs out of school), so you shut up and take what you can get and hope to find something better (or change course altogether and go back to school). Got to pay off those student loans somehow. And I know from my students that they don't need the library: they have the internet.
• bibliochick: sounds like a tough situation. Is there any hope for internet librarians in the future? Right now, what we seem to have is, largely, specific sites for specific things, and search engines where you can look for the specific-thing site you want. The pleasure of libraries for me, though, is the ability to browse. If you weren't in the market for a specialty, you could find something you'd never thought of, or an author you'd never heard of. Though, not being able to pick up an actual book and read a bit of it while deciding what I want would be a bummer. I also can't read an on-line book while sitting on the couch or lying in bed. Sad that your students think reading is a sensual pleasure.
• bibliochick: sounds like a tough situation. Is there any hope for internet librarians in the future? Right now, what we seem to have is, largely, specific sites for specific things, and search engines where you can look for the specific-thing site you want. The pleasure of libraries for me, though, is the ability to browse. If you weren't in the market for a specialty, you could find something you'd never thought of, or an author you'd never heard of. Though, not being able to pick up an actual book and read a bit of it while deciding what I want would be a bummer. I also can't read an on-line book while sitting on the couch or lying in bed. Sad that your students think reading isn"t a sensual pleasure.
• This is so sad. I recently read (here or Mefi?) that a city in California is eliminating libraries all together. When I was nine my maternal grandmother’s half brother, whom I had never met, died and left me $500. I spent $400 on a 3-year-old set of Encyclopedia Britannica. At that age I would have loved to have a resource like the Internet. But, that said, the web tends to be quite shallow and to dig deep you still need hardcopy. If you need to get into professional papers and journals then you need not just a library but also a professional librarian. The virtual world has not yet replaced the real.
• I had to use a library the other day. Indexes..that you have to look up? You have to turn pages? And information so outdated! For sure books are amazingly good resources, and beautiful objects, but the internet will catch up. They are simply not suited to the research process.
• I worked my way through a degree by working in the University's libraries, used that experience to land a nice job in a government library after jobs relating to my field petered-out, and seriously worked on getting an MLS briefly. I think I would be a very, very good librarian, but the job prospects and salaries for an MLS just seem to be withering away. If I'm going to get a masters, I'd like to at least be able to afford to pay the loan payments on the damn degree! It's sad. I know a college professor who is getting increasingly frustrated and worried about students who think that using google is "research" but doesn't have the time to teach his students about this in addition to the required curriculum. I think librarians will be phased out rather soon in many locations, and sorely missed soon after that.
• Please nobody take this the wrong way, but what do librarians do? I remember hearing that you had to have a masters degree to be one, and figured that there must be more to it than I had witnessed at the library I used to go to. More to it than stamping books and shushing people, I mean.
• Librarians organize, provide access to, and educate about, information and information technology. Of all sorts, not just paper or digital. There should be no confict. It's all about information. Librarians are information professionals. Distinct from, but overlapping with, database professionals. In addition to stereotypical duties of managing a public library branch, librarians study the philosophy and application of data, information, and organization and the technology which helps to manage it all. Google employs librarians. In this age of information explosion, should there not be professionals who are trained to make sense of it and be ready to help you do the same? In the modern world, librarians are expected to be jack-of-all-trades reference people, database technicians, archival historians, computer search technology experts, research educators, and defenders of the archival faith. A fully trained librarian should be able to narrow your google search, and enable you to find information about the vast universe of information not accessable via the internet. And moreso, a librarian will be able to guide you into that vast area of information which has not been digitalized, but which is VITAL to most serious research. No one will take you seriously if you only quote internet sources. If it's at all available, please watch the program History Detectives on PBS.
• ActuallySettle, indexes are one resource which benefits greatly from being rendered into soft copy. And you are right, the Internet has caught up in many areas as a source of information. But guess what? 90% of authorative information is locked behind databases that you have to pay through the nose for. And even then, librarians, or similar information specialists have to sift through the thousands of articles, books, treatises, abstracts, surveys, etc... and categorise them, index them, catalogue them, and provide access points so that people can actually find the bloody things. All those nice books, in their neat little shelves. You thought the books were labeled with the correct call number/classmark/shelfmark by themselves? Searched for a resource in the catalogue using keywords? You thought those keywords magically appeared in the system without any human intput? Sorry, but as yet, computers aren't quite up to the task of doing adequate cataloguing yet. When they are, please tell me, I've got an appointment with a bridge and a river then. Libraries are like swans on water; if everything looks serene and placid on the surface, it means there's a whole lot of paddling going on below.
• A great deal of information is on the internets now, to be sure, but as remarked above, much of it is shallow, a lot of it is redundant, material is not coherently presented or organized, some of it is open to question, and much of what you want if you are a serious researcher or scholar is simply not available online, or is prohibitively expensive to acquire. Online resources -- it's a little like comparing a stick figure drawing to a photograph -- most data is just not there yet. And I like the internets. I don't mind reading pages on screen any more than off. But it's no substitute for a real library.
• speaking as someone who has recently left a major state library, i'd like to point out the very important role that libraries have in collecting and collating local history, preserving important historical documents - from political ephemera to theatre programmes, pictures and so forth. librarians are some of the most skilled and underappreciated information professionals anywhere, and i've grown to admire their work greatly - particularly in the face of governments, managements and a public that thinks they're just there to hand you the right book and couldn't it be done better by a machine anyway? without people who understand how information is put together, how it can be sorted and stored and catalogued and preserved - whether that information is online, offline, written, visual, whatever - we will be people without a history, without any of the cultural artefacts we've produced. There will (and should) be librarians until the very last minute of the very last day. and the world's favourite mon... er... ape is a librarian!
• My point (which I did not make clear at all) about the kids using the internet as a research tool was not so much that they use the internet as a research tool, but that they (with exceptions) don't seem to exhibit any sort of knowledge about determining which sites are reliable sources of information. Last year, I kept coming across the same bizarre phrase over and over again while grading a writing assignment about a piece of Egyptian sculpture. We had not discussed this point in class, the phrase was not in the textbook, nor did it occur anywhere on the British Museum's website (owner of the sculpture the kids were writing about and listed as an "approved" source of info). I plugged the phrase into Google- it came from a little homespun site geared at 6-8 year olds, chock full of typos and even a downloadable coloring book! This is where college students turn for their information? My favorite part of my former job was assigning call numbers and subject headings. Catalogers can make a piece of information disappear if they want to. I always tried to imagine who might use a particular piece of info and try to add as many access points as possible. It requires a lot of quick and effective scanning of the material for subject matter and having a broad enough knowledge base to understand the user groups to whom it would appeal. Of course, the trustees holding the purse strings tend to not think about things like this and wonder why people with professional degrees and years of training (and enormous amounts of info stored in their brains)get pissed off when they are offered a salary slightly higher than a burger jockey at McDonalds. yentruoc, you won't see a librarian stamping cards and shushing people. Those are usually circualtion assistants or reference assistants and are generally part-time hourly workers (or holders of the MLS in a perpetual state of professional hell). The librarians are in the back begging the university administration or city government not to cut the library budget any further, and trying to figure out how to keep an institution running that no one seems to want to pay for, but bitches about mightily when its resources are slashed. I'm sorry, did I just go on a bitter rant?
• But this won't affect the secretly hot n' wild librarians, will it? You know, the gorgeous and repressed thirty-somethings who hide behind their spectacles and high-piled hairdos by day, only to corner teenage boys behind the Reference section just and closing time, show their garters, whip off those specks, let down their hair amongst the smell of musty books, and proceed to... Erm, never mind.
• no, carry on...
• GO EAGLES!!!! (Sorry I am shameless)
• They [books] are simply not suited to the research process. Actually, I will NEVER Settle for the intarwebs as a complete resource. It COULD NEVER and WILL NEVER replace the libraries. Alnedra is right, real information is and/or will soon be restricted to those who can pay for it. It's a serious problem that much of the world can't access information on the web due to the lack of computers. Once more, the poor are marginalized. It seems every time I find something that is fantastically interesting on a university site, it's "restricted access" and absolutely frustrating. Research, REAL research, demands original sources. The intarwab will always be a secondary source, and as such, the information will be filtered and limited by those that do imput. Sure, you might go to an on-line library and get a scanned copy of a book for your original source, but what you'll miss is those sources shelved NEXT TO that book. Even on a student paper, I've often been led down a very fruitful path by serendipitous finds on a library shelf. And simply as an artifact, the book can speak volumes. we will be people without a history, without any of the cultural artefacts we've produced. EXACTLY!! And we may well be a people in serious trouble if we lose our books. The intarweb, and the information it contains, disappears when I turn off my machine or pull out the plug. Access is totally dependent on the ability to keep our machines up and running. What happens when the electricity is shut off due to our power sources being buggered? What about war destroying our infrastructure? A thousand scenerios can be developed in which we can't access the information stored "out there" in the virtual world. How long before the intarwebs catch up? Given the slashing of funds for libraries, literature and other arts in favor of billions for war and corporate sponsorships, I doubt if it will be soon. Libraries are like swans on water poetic, Alnedra, I like. But I'd change it a bit to say that librarians are the swans, and they're going to be an endangered species soon.
• Dude, I'm at school. My school pays for online subscriptions to fucking every scholarly journal out there. Many of them have the full text, almost all have abstracts. It is better, okay? Way, way better. The free internet will always be shit, but the stuff you pay for will catch up.
• It doesn't matter how many scholarly journals an institution subscribes to if the enitre run of said journals is not indexed and available in electronic form. Many of the pre-1980 resources I use for my research are not available in electronic format. A lot of the core material I need is from the late 19th-early 20th century (and in German)- these texts are only available and indexed in good ol' codex format. Electronic resources more convenient than hard copy? You bet. Are they "better"? No way. The library community has heard the old "end of the book" lament for years and years. It's not going to happen. Books are too valuable a resource and too convenient a format to disappear. And millions of bibliophiles are too attached to them to let this happen.
• The free Internet will always be shit, but the stuff you pay for will catch up. ActuallySettle, free public libraries are vital to those who can't afford to pay for on line resources. I spent many an hour at the library before I graduated from high school and college. I couldn't afford a computer, much less Internet access and on-line subscriptions. I had access to a computer at college in the computer lab, if I wanted to wait in line for hours to use it. Nothing beats the library for finding information IMO. I still visit the public library. I do so for professional reasons and for entertainment reasons. I find librarians very helpful and vital to a good experience at a library. It is a shame, as BlueHorse says, they are an endangered species.
• "Better" is debatable, but the Internet definitely kills fewer trees.
• You can do some pretty handy scientific research on the web, but if you want to do anything in vast tracts of the humanities you want a library. The one dj works in is one of my favourite places.
• Libraries are like swans on water; if everything looks serene and placid on the surface, it means there's a whole lot of paddling going on below. Yes, a very beautiful/picturesque expression :) I worked part-time for a while as a library assistant for a small research unit - I was in charge of fetching articles, and managing a tiny library of said articles and a few books. When I say tiny, I mean miniscule - one bank of filing cabinets and one bookshelf - though it was about 11,000 items (as opposed to millions of volumes). And it was still so stressful I knew I would never be happy as a librarian - I get data overload and go crazy with that much stuff that I have to organise. It would make me insane, in the rocking in a corner mumbling to myself kind of way. So, yeah, I TOTALLY appreciciate librarians (and archivists, and admin assistants and all the organising people of the world). You are all like gods.
• Oh - on the whole research thing - yes, online journal articles are great, though I always print them out. But ever tried to read a 300 page history book online? They are starting to publish a few that way, to save money, but they are so difficult to read and harder to source. And there is NO way that the internet will ever replace books, not until I can safely read my computer in the bath-tub. (Not that I ever do that with library books - just my own novels.) Now can we talk about the special level of hell reserved for people who deface/write in Library books, and all the tortures we would like to subject them to? I suggest being written on with a scratchy ball point pen until their skin is ripped open.
• Dude, I'm at school. My school pays for online subscriptions to fucking every scholarly journal out there What on Earth could possibly make you think that those online journals are not part of the library? Consider that each journal has been selected, indexed, cataloged, and paid for by librarians.
• My school pays for online subscriptions to fucking every scholarly journal out there That'sa nice. Sure as hell hope when you're outta school either you r employer picks up the slack or you can afford the access if you ever need to do any research. Not everyone can.
• Your school doesn't directly pay for the fucking journals. The money comes out of your school library's fucking budget. And do you fucking think you can fucking hell still access those fucking journals when the school cuts the library budget by 20% every year? (don't snort, it's happening to the library I'm working in - and it's a fucking academic library) You seem to conflate the Internet with the electronic resources that the library has to pay to let you gain access to. Many of these resources are on the Web, but you will have to pay to get them - if your library doesn't do it for you. Can you get that through your fucking head?
• Apologies to others for the profanity. I've just come back from London after a five hour journey on a bumpy bus. My waist hurts, my neck hurts, my back hurts and my arms hurt. I am not in a good mood. So I'll refrain from posting any further today.
• *applauds rant*
• Get out the hammer, Alnedra!!!