A lot of what we do is helping students to help themselves. We are here to help them find resources. Faculty members will often bring whole classes over for information literacy instruction (formerly call bibliographic instruction). We talk about how to find books, how to search databases. The differences between scholarly and popular resources, primary and secondary resources, etc. How to get your grubby little hands on something we don’t have here at our library. How to evaluate resources, especially internet resources. We also talk about the research process. Why, “I want to write about rap music” isn’t the best topic for a three page into to composition paper. There isn’t anything wrong with writing about rap music, but you are going to have to narrow that topic down or else you will not do very well on your paper. We help students figure out what they want to focus on and go from there.
We also schedule appointments for in-depth research sessions with students, but this is usually after the class session in the library and they can’t find anything on their topic. Then we will sit down one-on-one with a student and try different databases and strategies.
If someone asks me “Where are the books on Geography?”, I most likely won’t tell them, but I will ask them “What do you want to know?” Dropping someone off in the G’s (like most academic libraries, we use the Library of Congress Classification System) isn’t going to help them much. But I will help them to use the catalog to locate books on their specific topic. If they just need to know the capital of Iowa, I will hand them the World Almanac.
Public libraries provide access to many things that large portions of the public don’t otherwise have access to or may just not be able to afford. Yes, this includes books, magazines, DVDs and other physical objects, but importantly in recent years is internet access. I know my local public library offers classes on the basics of internet searching.
To the original question, “How far are librarians supposed to go to help you?” I suppose the farthest that I have gone to help someone is to give them a ride home when they locked their keys in the car. That involved a drive across town.
Not in Sweden. A couple of years ago I took a refresher, mostly to acclimatise myself with the cataloguing client that is used in our system, and I asked my colleague who led the course why we organised it and not one of the library schools we have in the country and got the answer that none of them offered such a course.
ETA I may be mistaken, though, and they do teach it, but not as stand-alone courses for people who already are out working in libraries.
I’ve used the reference desk, or rather the reference desk librarian an the San Diego Central Library a number of times and she is extremely helpful. I’m a proposal and grant writer, and from time to time, I get asked about really obscure subjects outside my realm of expertise in the defense industry.
For example, a few weeks ago, a co-worker asked me how he might raise money for his little league team that is in a very rural area of the county. They do a fund raiser at a local restaurant, but that isn’t doing enough for him to get equipment, uniforms, field work, etc. done. So I called the reference desk to ask about grants, where the librarian made it her personal goal to find ways to get money for this little league team. Since parking is expensive downtown, she didn’t want me to drive down there is their grantmaking books didn’t have anything worthwhile in them, so she offered to look up the information for me.
Not only did she find several that would apply and gave me the websites so I didn’t have to drive down there, but also suggested a number of good out-of-the-box sponsorship ideas I would not have thought of that were well above and beyond what I would have thought a librarian would do for me.
I suspect that librarians are much like the members of this message board, and that they love rising to the challenge of being presented with an obscure question to answer. Before the internet existed, I once called the New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service to answer what a friend thought was an obscure literature question.
I think that’s very true. One thing that really stands out to me is when I meet a librarian who is not intellectually curious…because it’s pretty unusual IMO. In my experience, this is a field populated by people who love to learn.
(Okay, you will always meet people with burnout or people who fell into the job unwillingly, and I personally could never be a reference librarian because I’d burn out in a week and scream that the next person who asks me to do a simple catalog search for them because they were too fucking lazy to type “D-o-g-s” into the search bar themselves would get beaten about the head with the keyboard*, but I’m talking about the field as a whole.)
Beyond helping look things up librarians can be very helpful in figuring out what to look up, and where to look. They may have access to search services that include professional journals and patent filings for example. Even if such are not in the library’s stacks, they may be able to obtain them on loan from another library, or at least tell you where to order a copy from.
Many years ago our local township decided for some unknown reason to use House Style as one of the criteria for determining the assessment for real estate taxes. My house was categorized as being a Tudor. My assessment went up 45%.
Back then (this was ca 1990) assessment information wasn’t online. When I went to the township office to ask WTF and found out about the house style change, they told me that “all those little brick Tudors in Elmhurst have gone way up in value.”
I pointed out that I do not live in a little brick Tudor. They shrugged. I decided to protest the assessment on the basis of the style assignment.
I went to my local library and engaged the help of the Adult Reference Librarian. She quickly found a book that listed different house styles and the relevant design features of each.
I don’t think I could have found that book by myself. My assessment appeal was a moderate success. (Side notes – Once I had meade clear that the basis for my protest was the house style, a County Board of Review member looked at the official picture of my house and said, “That’s not a Tudor!” [And yes, Arnold saying “It’s not a tumah!” comes to mind.] Also, when I told the Township Assessor’s staff that house style was the basis for my appeal and I had a book from the library that defined house styles, they asked me for the name of the book. Turns out when they couldn’t decide on the style for a house, they passed the picture around and everyone voted.)
After that I’ve used the Adult Services Reference Librarian several times, mostly for business-related information. She (or he, but usually the person filling that role that day is a woman) either quickly finds what I need or can refer me to a possible source. The last time I used the service she determined what scientific journal I needed, that the library didn’t have that journal, that it wasn’t available from any library in the network of libraries my library is part of, but that it was available at the local college, and what I needed to do to get access to it there. All this by the way over the phone.
4 months away from being a real Librarian, and 10 years in various public libraries.
I also wanted to point out that most librarians are aware of the value of network knowledge.
Example: I’m a branch manager librarian - a super-generalist. I can *fix *most things at my library, and have done so many times. I can *find *just about anything that exists in print, and on the internet if you give me long enough.
I cannot personally give you specific research-level historic information, or in-depth geneology information (just as two examples that come up a LOT). I either don’t know where to look, or I DO know, and just don’t have the time to personally devote to that much in-depth research.
However, for every given question, if I can’t handle it personally, I often know EXACTLY who to direct you to within my own organization, quite a few people from other library systems (both public and academic) and even more people from other (non-library) organizations like archives or research rooms or specific-interest hobby groups. Furthermore, if I don’t know EXACTLY who to send you on to, one of those people above WILL, and we’ll pass you on through the chain until you get what you need.
Generally speaking, the more obscure and specific the information you need, the more people you’ll have to chain through before you get everything you’re wanting. Sometimes you can get bits and pieces from each chain-member, and sometimes you get a whole bunch of “nope, not a clue - but talk to X” until you get to someone who can give you the whole enchilada. And sometimes you ask for something that isn’t collected or studied, and some lucky PhD Library student just got a thesis proposal!
We have a patron (luckily he doesn’t call my department) who’s always asking for things like lists of people who have seen visions of Jesus. We carefully explain which things are discoverable and which things are not.
Depends on the library’s mission in a lot of ways - corporate librarians do research for patrons. Public librarians have a scope within which we help you. For example, I’ll look up obituaries for you on microfilm, scan them, and e-mail them to you, but you gotta give me a certain amount of information first and we only do three at a time because we are not paid researchers.
I expect librarians to go to the ends of the earth to help me with any question I might have. (Take that, Cecil!) And by Og, when I’ve had a librarian-worthy question, they always do! Or at least try, usually successfully.
(Exception: None of this is true in a law library.)
From time to time, I’ll ask a librarian some obscure question, just to mess with them. It doesn’t work. They always know the answer or, more typically, exactly where to find the answer.
Once, when I lived in a city that still had (then) a working Carnegie library, I asked the librarian how many working Carnegie libraries were still in operation in the United States. She said, “Come with me”, and escorted me down an aisle to a place where she pulled a book off the shelf on exactly that subject – a whole book about Carnegie libraries, with pictures and statistics and tables and a list of all such libraries and the status of each.
I have found that reference librarians in public libraries are much like superheroes, their superpower lying in their spectacular ability to find stuff. On several occasions I haven’t even gotten half my question out before they’ve answered it (“I’m looking for a kid’s book from when I was little, it was about a rabbit and I remember there were easter eggs --” “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, author Dubose Heyward, you’ll find it under H”.), or leaped from his/her desk and piled into my arms the appropriate reference books with detailed instructions on what quality of information I might find in them and where.
In my experience asking a challenging and interesting question of them really makes their eyes glow gold, somewhat akin to those of the California Newt, Taricha tarosa.
A professional librarian would love to help you with your topic and show you how to use their tools. It is among the things they are trained to do. Are they going to do it for you? Well, what is “it”? They are not going to read the materials for you. They will find materials for you, including things not in their immediate collection. But most importantly, they are going to teach you what they know about finding things in your field. Oh, and be polite to a librarian, as nobody is going to fire one that finds you too rude to work with. Lots of nuts hang out in libraries, and the local aldermen know this.
Of special interest is a trained law librarian. I know a few. Damn useful people to know, as Westlaw can be very expensive.
No, but when you go to the Reference Desk, you’ll usually find a MLS-degreed librarian sitting behind it. These are the people who can go to great lengths to really research your question. They are research experts. Usually, you cannot check books out or pay overdue fines at the Reference Desk.
When you go to the front desk to check out books or pay fines, that’s where you’ll find the clerk, who may or may not have a degree at all.
Patrons don’t have to distinguish between the two because they are kept at completely separate workstations. You go to one for one function and another for another function.
I worked in the public library in high school, in the children’s section. The librarian would lose her mind if a patron walked up to me (I was a page and my job was to shelve books and that was ALL) and asked me where the Dr. Seuss books were. I could not understand why she required a MLS to point out the Dr. Seuss section, when I – a 16-year-old high school student – had several in my hand that I was about to shelve. I had to shelve them and go get her so she could walk over to where I was shelving, pull 'em off the shelf, and hand them to the patron. Now, when they said, “I’m looking for a third-grade reading level book for a boy,” that’s when her expertise came into relevance. She would ask questions and get more information about what the patrons were after so she could guide them to what they were after. I could only point you to something if you knew the author or title – I just knew where things were, not necessarily what was inside the books.
Public library manager here, and all of the above. But with the addendum that I instructed my staff to limit answers to 3-5 minutes. To give you an idea of volume. 20-40 questions per hour per staff member.
I wonder if the general impression of some of the public, especially the younger generation that has less experience with libraries, is that librarians are there to make sure people don’t steal books. There was an ancedote in my paper about a student saying that when a librarian came over to help a her when she was obviously having trouble finding something.
