I was going to say you were like a much younger version of myself, if I’d followed my initial career thoughts, but this comment really made me go “Whoa.” Nine is and always has been my number. It’s very special to me.
I started as a library page in our local branch of the L.A. County Public Library. I moved on to Library Aide when I was at college and planned to get my MLS. I took a year off, and the year turned into …well, not more academia. I ended up as a computer programmer/systems analyst. Some of my favorite early memories are of the old library where I got my first card. I worked in my elementary school library, too. When I started as a page, one of the older guys introduced me to the game of finding books whose titles and author names werre good matches. Did you ever do this? A classic is Modern Chemistry by Dull. I remember How to Swim by Stroke, and there was one book that had been “defaced” with punctuation – it was Parents Ask and the author’s name was Ilg. Some used a ballpoint pen to change the spine on that book to read: Parents Ask, “Ilg?” It always made me laugh.
I volunteer at one of the library branches here in Nashville. I volunteer specifically to help out with Storytime. Both my kids did Storytime at this library and it’s a fun way for me to give back. My librarian friends are trying to get me to apply for a page position at one of the other branches, but my life is far too hectic right now.
I’m glad you have this information. My eldest is considering going the library science route after HS. Their first choice is musical performance but they know how iffy that can be, so library science is there choice for “something practical”. I’m going to slow them not only this info on the advanced degree but the thread so they have a better idea of what’s what.
Aw heck yeah! Always awesome to see young folk excited about the profession. That said, librarianship is a super saturated field right now. There are way more MLIS grads than there are Librarian jobs. If it’s something they want to do, they should start volunteering and find part-time library jobs now - the vast majority of my fellow students are graduating with no practical library experience at all.
If they have any questions please feel free to pass them along - I’d also be perfectly happy to give you my email or do a Zoom chat!
(Gonna answer you over here, since I already made a thread for librarian questions!)
The technical term for weeding is “deselection.” It’s basically just removing unwanted items from the shelves! Libraries have limited physical space for print books and limited resources for online collections, so items that are not serving a purpose must be removed - we’re libraries, not archives! Most libraries will have a deselection policy that dictates when, why, and how materials are removed.
Most public libraries have a standard that 20% of the collection be 5 years old or newer. So as we add new materials, old ones need to go. We use a few different metrics to determine what gets discarded - a common one is no circulations (checkouts) in the last two years. Other libraries set that at one, three, or five years. Items that are damaged or worn past usability are likely to be discarded as well, though if they are in-demand they will of course be replaced. Deselected items might be sold at a used book sale, repurposed for crafts in library programs, or simply recycled.
Other kinds of libraries, like academic libraries, might weed for other reasons as well. My current Tribal academic library was mostly stocked with community-sourced donations… So there were lots of things on the shelves that did not meet academic standards of rigor and needed to be discarded. Diet books, muckracking pop journalism, new-age garbage by white folks pretending to be Native, evangelical religious tracts… Yeah, it was a mess.
Thank you for the AMA. I have two questions! At first I thought they were two separate issues, but having written them down, I see maybe they’re related.
First, I honestly have no idea what a “user” would ask a librarian for, that would take up their time. What kind of searches or projects take time, and why would they need a Librarian over, say, a Google search, or Lit review, or other?
Second, I’m interested in the transition in information sources that accompanied the rise of the internet. I still remember, back in about the year 2000, when the internet started becoming a major place to go to get information. But back then, the content level was relatively sparse and lower quality. Books, magazines, and other sources of information such as TV or tapes still held a lot of better information. Now, 20 years later, one might be forgiven for forgetting that other sources of information exist. But they do, in spades. It feels like a lot of stuff hasn’t been added to the internet yet, that there are big blind spots in knowledge that did not make the transition. Thus, a delta or gap between the internet’s current information content and pre-internet content. It’s narrower today than in Y2K, but not gone. I was going to ask your opinion on this.
And, maybe the deal is, that a librarian can help to fill in this gap?!
What you are describing is what we call “reference services” - all the things that a patron might ask the librarian for help with. What exactly reference service entails varies widely depending on the library!
At a public library, a large percentage of reference service is either general IT (helping folks with the public computers, printers, etc) or reader’s advisory (helping people find fiction to read for entertainment that fits their preferences.) Reader’s advisory in particular is an art form and often entails building a relationship and a close understanding of a patron’s tastes. You can’t get that with a Google search!
At an academic or special (medical, law) library (and sometimes at a public libraries too) we are asked for more specialized, scholarly research assistance. Without getting into too much detail, search engines like Google return results based on what’s popular, not what’s true or valuable. Part of our training as information scientists is locating the authoritative information that exactly suits the patron’s needs. It’s not nearly as simple as typing a query into Google. It might involve accessing academic or specialized databases, the contents of which are not just available to anyone online.
Finally, a startling number of students in higher education have no idea how to do research. “Do a lit review” is not a skill many of them posses. In academic librarianship, it’s as much a teaching position as anything else - teaching students how to do research.
This is exactly correct. There’s a lot of discussion both inside and outside librarianship about the “role” a librarian plays in our current information-saturated environment. I like to think of us as guides and liaisons, helping people sort through the tremendous volume of (often irrelevant) content to find what they actually need. With the rise of AI-generated content that can confidently speak falsehood mingled indistinguishably with fact, I think our skills at evaluating information resources will be ever-more in demand.
I have learned to ignore irrelevant stuff returned as search results, but often feel I might be missing out. It’s especially hard if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. Kind of like working with Microsoft help…if you know the term, you can look it up in help. If you don’t, you won’t be able to. When users find themselves in the situation where they know what they want to do but don’t know what MS calls it, they use Google.
I did a huge number of web searches when I was working on my dissertation. I was able to find pretty much what I needed and wanted. In Engineering, some of the research involves taking an idea from one area and applying it elsewhere. Usually there will have been no prior instance of application anywhere else. So you’re really on your own; even Google shrugs and says good luck. I’m not sure how my research could have been helped by a librarian, but what do I know. I never tried.
ChatGPT has been recently discussed on this forum, even by Cecil himself. I was disappointed to hear that these bots are as you say, confident and false. It feels like, if better programmed, they could be super useful in sorting through information on the internet, for instance, as a personal agent, applying reliability ratings automatically to gleaned info. It feels somehow…doable, but more from a sci-fi sense than any real knowledge of how these things work. So, yes, I think it’s up to humans with finely tuned BS detectors to continue to provide this service to other humans.
This is another great point. Librarians are organizers of information. One way we organize information so it can be retrieved later is through the use of controlled vocabularies. This entails assigning uniform, standardized labels to topis so that all related information can be accessed through the use of universal search terms. When a patron describes the subject they want information on, using a controlled vocabulary term can help get the right results.
I wish I could have asked a year or two ago! I forget the differences between this CAT and M-Cat, etc., but there are video archives at UCLA. They seem to sub-contract to a 3rd party company that makes copies on DVD and sells them. I’ve contacted both recently, and can’t get much information, except that they’ll get back with me… I tried this a few years ago, but I didn’t want to pay up to $100 just to see if copyrights were ‘released’… Basically, I’m trying to get my hands on anything Mort Sahl related. Newspapers.com was great. I contacted so many Universities and managed a few things. But there’s SO much that isn’t available, and it’s too bad Universities let old archive reels go bad; since they only digitize them when they have a job, but there’s been multiple fires; Universal Studios had a few…
Anyway, any info would be appreciated… I have found quite a few things with simple things, like the surname misspelling “Saul”, or googling “Mort Sahl -youtube”, clicking on the Video filter
(just an FYI to anyone reading this… sorry for the long ramble)
Hi there! I can see what I can find - can you be a little more specific about what you’re after? Are you looking for biographies, scholarly info, writing, criticism, etc., about Sahl? Or are you looking for primary source stuff, audio or video recordings of his performances, etc?
So there’s some stuff - mostly audio, but possibly some video on the Internet Archive. There’s also some results where I search this website, but it looks like you’ll need to make an account and likely buy access to them.
Gotcha! I’m not a media librarian or a film archivist, so this is a little out of my wheelhouse. I’ll keep poking around and see if anything turns up! Are there any, like… Specific dates or shows or performances that you would be looking for? I’m afraid I don’t have the vocabulary to direct a search, so the more info the better.
I guess anything from his own show from KLAC or WRC-AM in DC… In the past, I’ve even offered money to those in LA, DC, NYC, for quick little jobs but had no luck, and the professional archivists charge too much who do this for a living going to the National Archives and making copies for others.
I know there’s people out there who recorded shows… One author on comedy told me there was a guy who sold Mort Sahl taped shows on eBay for years… Besides his own shows, he did SO many interviews. Most libraries digitize old reels/tapes for free now I believe, but I can’t muster anyone enthusiastic as me about certain topics.
Chiming in to say thank you so much. I know this means a lot to @MortSahlFan.
I have always maintained that Librarians are rock stars. You are proving this. It’s not enough to just know stuff or how to search for stuff yourself. It’s being able to put all this in words than can help those with a great desire or need to find things. I had a textbook in Journalism School called, Where To Go For What that really opened my eyes to all the resources of information that are available. Taking a mini-class in this ought to be a high-school graduation requirement, IMO.
At my current library it looks like it might be a copy of “Camille” by Alexandre Dumas that was printed in 1856 - but there’s a lot in this library that is not properly catalogued or not catalogued at all, so I can’t be 100% on that. It actually looks like it’s just in the reg’lr collection, so in theory it could be checked out? I’m curious, I’ll have to try and find it on the shelf tomorrow.
Oh gosh! Well thank you for the kind words! I’m really doubtful that I’ll be much help in this particular area, though… I really didn’t focus my education on media librarianship and I don’t have much experience finding materials that aren’t text. If the actual archivists that Fan’s talked to haven’t been helpful, I don’t think I’m likely to find anything they didn’t.
I don’t and my copy of that book is currently unreachable in a storage locker. The name that sticks in my head is Miller. It would have been published before 1985.