So, call me stupid, but do people actually expect to ask a librarian a question about how to send pictures to their cell phone, and actually get an answer? I thought a librarian just, y’know, managed the library. Maybe directed people to the stacks. Are you a general information booth?
Joe
So…like…I’m looking for this one book, right? Do you know the one?
It’s got some red on the cover. Or maybe it’s pink or purple or something. And it’s about these people, in this one place. C’mon, you gotta know what I’m talking about, right? Fuck, you’re paid to know these things, aren’t you? Are you fucking incompetent, or just stupid?
Damnit, it’s this book, which might be blue or red or something, and it’s about these motherfucking people doing shit. TELL ME THE NAME OF THE GODDAMNED BOOK ALREADY!
Fuck you, you incompetent piece of shit. Get your manager. Someone here has to know the name of the book I’m thinking of!
Worst library I’ve ever been in. You people aren’t helping me. I’m going to call the County and have you people fired.
Our mission, to quote the professor who gave my masters’ degree orientation, is to get the information 2 the people FROM the cradle 2 the grave. (There was a whiteboard diagram.)
Seriously, we’re information purveyors, at heart. We’re also many people’s only access to computers and the internet. Put that together and I spend a lot of time helping people with their cell phones and internet dating profiles.
Officially, no. Telling her “I can’t help you with your cell phone” is totally within the rules for my position. But if she wasn’t a raging psycho, I could have looked up the manufacturer’s directions on how to send pictures from her phone to her email and printed it out for her. But that would have involved effort on her part, so she probably would have yelled at me again.
As Zsofia said, being a librarian is all about finding information. And thanks to the Internet, the amount of information we have to look at is huge now.
And sadly, Chimera’s one man play is often how these things turn out. The barest thread of information and then calls of incompetence when it turns out that librarians aren’t fucking mind readers.
Hijack – he is, basically, right… While most of the OT was around well before that, it was probably codified (“canonized” or “sealed”) sometime in the first century… 
Doesn’t make him less of an idiot, though.
I volunteer at a small charity bookshop. We have no catalogue of stock because it would be completely impractical, if you come in requesting something really obscure we will try our best to advise you (your chances are dramatically improved if you know the title the author, or even the subject), and probably have a pretty impressive success rate considering we are staffed by random volunteers.
Clearly, not having a computerised stock database is a deep, personal, and deliberate, affront to you, as is an inability to leave the till to go wondering round the shop to help you, or the removal of the photocopiers that your fellow customers chiefly utilised to try and avoid buying our books.
It would also be nice if you could stop trying to use us as a lending library.
Oh, you know that isn’t what he meant.
Why is that completely impractical?
All it would take is:
Then all you do is a one-time effort to pull all the books and scan the barcode on them (almost all of your books are likely new enough to have barcodes) - the cataloging software will look up all the information online and download it into your database. (Including original pricing, which might be helpful in setting prices in the shop.) Then you can print lists from the database, or just have it available for lookups. Each time you get new books coming in, you just scan the barcodes and they are added to the database.
Seems like this would be quite feasible for your shop, both financially and effortwise. And I think it would eventually save a lot of work in the shop.