Librarians are Morons

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Not sure if this should be pitted or not, but here we go.

I’m in library school. Actually, since librarians are morons, my faculty decided to officially change its name from the Faculty of Information Sciences to drum roll Faculty of Information. Or, like they want us to call it, ischool.

ischool. What? Are we a subsidiary of Apple now? Could they not think of anything more original? Second, Faculty of Information?! Are you kidding? Information. Just information, eh? Not like every other freaking school faculty around the world doesn’t study information. Aren’t we the novel ones.

Ok. Moving on. My program is a professional graduate program. The demographics of it are, roughly, 1/3 fresh out of undergrad 22-24 year olds, 1/3 late 20s, early 30s type people who have worked in the real world for a few years, and 1/3 people who have worked in a library their entire life and have decided they want the degree to actually make some money.

I have a problem with the last 1/3. Actually, not all of them, just the late 20s, early 30s type one think that having worked in a library will somehow help them in a graduate program. Or, better yet, think that the experience they’ve gained working in a library will help them succeed in school. They’re morons, all of them. And the worst part is my ischool puts so much emphasis on team building, I have group projects with these morons every class. I have concluded that none of them did well in undergrad and that is the reason they’ve worked in a library as a fucking shelf stacker for the previous five years. Seriously. What experience does that give you? Why does that qualify you for graduate school?!

Not only that, but in general, librarians are morons. I mean have you ever been to a reference desk? Ask them for help finding some random piece of information - their full-time job - and they’ll spend the next 20 minutes doing stuff you thought of doing two days ago when you started looking for it. And then, even after you say, “I’ve tried that already” they reply “well, lets see what happens when I try it” like they can somehow get different results than you. I’ve twice asked a reference librarian for assistance. I’ve twice walked away shaking my head wondering why they even exist.

This doesn’t even begin to touch upon what I’m learning, or not learning, in ischool.

So lets hear it, what are your experiences with librarians? Anybody agree?

(I apologize in advance to the librarians who I know on this board. I’m sure you are in the small minority of good ones.)

2

Did you mean for this to be in the Pit?

And library school, as I looked at it was, Hoop, jump if I wanted to be a librarian and not a library staff person (I was neither of the two when I started library school).

The ISchool thing is supposed to demonstrate the information science part (my master’s is an MS in Info Science, not library science). What they also found when they started changing their names to Ischools and the like? More men would apply and attend who wouldn’t necessarily go to library school.
Seriously, hoop, jump. Learn what you can outside of class. Network outside of class. But get used to the group & team projects because I can guarantee you that you’ll be doing them working in libraries too.

3

The smartest man I ever met had a masters in library science.

And I’ve met a couple of smart people.

4

I have emailed a copy of your rant to a librarian who used to have something to do with this board. Check your will.

5

Welcome to the fascinating and wonderful world of library science. (My school at least has to date kept the L.) The library students are grade A morons. Seriously, I have rarely met such stupid people who’ve made it through high school, let alone college. It’s just the thing you have to do to get the degree you need to get the job.

The actual real live librarians I work with are, let’s say, 70% smart and interesting, and none of them are anywhere NEAR as stupid as the people I knew in grad school.

My advice: get a GA job and learn from it. Take really specific classes like Cataloging and Serials. Ignore the hell out of those incredibly stupid required classes. Go out there and get the job.

6

Dunno. I’ve met some very smart, helpful librarians. I also teach in a couple of programs with a large number of non-traditional students. I can’t speak for your program or classmates, but my experience as a professor is that the returning students sometimes need some help getting up to speed on the academic skills, but have vastly more practical experience to offer than the traditional students. The traditional students always complain about the non-trads at first. This tends to stop when they realize the non-trads are getting better test scores. YMMV.

7

Are you aware of this thread also alive and kicking even now?

8

PS- On behalf of my fellow general morons, when I worked as a reference librarian at the same research library where I’d attended grad school, we were actually instructed to NOT assist students enrolled in the Library/Information Science/Information Studies to be a Reference Librarian/Patron Service Representative/Information Specialist/whatever they’re called this week*. We were of course allowed to tell them that we could not help them (and the ones I liked I would help at least with hints if 1) I thought it was a bullshit assignment to begin with 2) I thought the student was bright enough to get on the right track anyway [I’m just expediting karma] 3) sometimes I’d just drop a mercy hint (“the answer you seek lies within you… and by you I mean that enormous green book marked Arkansas Union Catalog 1981”) if it was clear they were about to have a mental collapse.
Anyway, I have to say that while I generally detested most of my colleagues at the research university where I worked (and of all the places I’ve worked that is the only place where I can say that), I respected them all in their reference abilities. Sorry your experience is different. (Of course- and I’m sure you know this, but just in case- not all of the people who work the reference desk in libraries are actually reference librarians, and this isn’t always obvious [especially with non-trad student workers]; sometimes you need to ask for one- sad but true.)
*There was actually a contest for “come up with a new innovative name for someone who does the duties of a traditional reference librarian” a few years back. My suggestions- there were many- included Patron Educational Needs & Information Specialist [PENIS], Library Educator Specialist on Books and Other Media Materials [LESBO EMINEM], the Priests of Thoth, and others, but none were accepted. I did [true story] get the most conservative and obnoxious librarians at the most Fundie-centric university I ever worked with to briefly mount an online tutorial named for Satan; when it was pointed out that IBLIS could conceivably have meanings other than as an acronym for Introduction to Bibliographic & LIbrary Services, even when prefaced by our state’s postal abbreviation, they dismounted it and I was spoken to, whereupon I pointed out that everybody else thought the name sounded good and had no idea of its meaning, so why would they think I would know that, for as they l0ved to point out I lacked their educational backgrounds (i.e. no second masters or doctorate at the time). But I digress.

9

Heh, I work at a large public library quite near a university with a big library school program. I sometimes get library students coming to my library, not because they need public stuff, but because they’re “scared of the university library”. You know you’ve been a public servant too long when you get to really enjoy saying “No”, as in “No, you can’t”, “No, we don’t have that,” and, my favorite, “No, you’ll have to go to the university.”

We also get a lot of college students for the same reason; with them I am far more compassionate. :slight_smile: I’ve had some of them come back and thank me - I guess nobody else bothers to explain how the university library works, precisely where it is, where you park to go to it, where the subject libraries are and why, why the university has stuff in databases that we don’t at the public library and why you really need them, what a journal is and how it’s different from just a magazine, how the LC system works and why it’s not scary, etc. They ought to get that in University 101 but I guess a lot of them don’t. It’s surprising how many of them just need a little “This is why LC call numbers look different” lesson and then they’re ready to go.

ETA - get a load of this! I had a nursing student come in with instructions to spend some time with the Big Red Books (LC Subject Headings.) Blew my fragile little mind. I mean, sure, subject heading education is fantastic, but did this poor nursing student need to see the books? I use them often, but most librarians never touch them! When I wheeled the cart out of the workroom her eyes got as big as saucers!

10

Congratulations on your choice of a profession. How nice it will be for you, towering above your moronic colleagues, alone but never lonely in your intellectual splendor.

The fools. All truly intelligent people know what counts most in life is doing well in school.

Obviously anybody who actually works in a library for a while is a flaming cretin. Only the best and brightest go straight to grad school since academia is the overriding game in life.

No wonder you want to be a librarian yourself! You alone will know how to do it intelligently and thereby justify the profession! BTW, have a blast working an actual reference desk. If you think moronic librarians are bad, real patrons will horrify your tender sensibilities no end. You’ll be amazed how many snotty clueless twerps insist they’ve already looked for answers–and missed what was right in front of them.

Now this I can believe. At least half of my lib school classes were excruciatingly pointless. A small cadre of kindred souls developed a rather sophisticated analysis system for contentless lectures–which we shared with faculty at the end of each term. Our other group activity, self-assigned, was to share copies of crossword puzzles from various sources.

Really? You’re sure of that…why? Because you ‘know’ us from a message board?

My library school was mostly a drag, Spezza. (And yes, I have a subject masters as well so have a basis of comparison for the grad school game.) Some fellow attendees were pretty dismal academically. There was also a suprising number of smart navel-gazers. They went well beyond mere geekiness (a common librarianly trait) into near social retardation, nearly blind and tone deaf to other people, and rather proud of it. Neither subgroup prospered in the long run.

Don’t let library school get you down too much, Spezza, but its idiocies pale beside actual work places, library or not.

11

I just want to say that the librarians at my local branch library are intelligent, helpful, and make visiting the library a pleasure.

12

Library… Library… Library? Sounds kind of familiar…

Oh yeah, wasn’t that some kind of place Neatherthals went to eat stone tablets or something before the internet?

:wink:

13

I’d bet that this has more to do with the stupidity of the average person who visits the reference desk than the stupidity of the people staffing it. When you call tech support for your computer, and the first thing they ask you is if you plugged it in, it’s not because they can’t fix the harder problems, its that they usually don’t have to.

14

People think kids today are such great searchers. They’re not. Yes, you spend some time at the reference desk asking the equivalent of “Is the computer on?” because man are you gonna feel dumb when you’ve done some really sophisticated database searching just to find that it didn’t occur to them to try “film” instead of “movie”, for example.

15

A-f&cking-men.

Spezza, I’m guessing you’re at an early stage in library school, because you obviously haven’t learned the most important lesson any librarian can learn: never let a patron tell you how to search. If they say they’ve already looked somewhere, and you think the information might be there: you look there. Why? To piss the patron off? No. Because you’re a professional doing a professional job. You look for horses, not zebras. The chances that you, a trained librarian, will see something that they, not a trained librarian, didn’t is very, very, very goddamn high.

Damn straight. I actually had a patron march over the the desk one day because the copier kept spitting out blank pages instead of what he was copying. Did I start with troubleshooting the toner level or the brightness settings? No. I opened the top. He had placed his original at the diametrically opposed corner from where it was supposed to be. Copier never saw it. Did I risk insulting his intelligence? Yes. Did I solve his problem? Yes.

16

I put these quotes alongside each other, because I’ve been reminded of a humbling experience, on tech support to, if I remember correctly, my ISP. I’d been messing around with router settings, or something, and couldn’t get connected. I couldn’t believe that the guy politely, very professionally, wouldn’t discuss the problem until I turned the computer off, complete shutdown and actually unplug/replug the thing. Of course, as soon as I was logged back on I was connected. :smack:

17

All the TIME. Additionally, “Where’s the photocopier?” “It’s under that big sign that says Photocopier.” I’m not being insulting - the copier is kind of hidden behind a little wall, and the best landmark is, uh, the big sign. Also, when you come to me and say, “The copier’s not working!” my first question is, “Did you put your money in?” (The copier will tell to to please enable the external control device. That means put your money in.) These three “insulting” answers solve 90% of copying issues - the other 10% is “I need this whole newspaper page” and jams. Well, that, and “I don’t know how to work these things you have to show me.” from people who just will not do things for themselves.

18

I actually made a little label once for a previous copier that said in exactly these words

The main question we got after that? “What does ‘insert card’ mean?”

19

What, you think people read? Whaddaya think this is, a library or somethin’?

Other common questions:
Upon coming in and riding an escalator up, “This the third floor?”
“You got a bathroom in here?”
Upon reading that their computer is on the third floor, “Where the third floor at?”
Standing in front of a giant wall of display shelves containing more than a thousand magazines, “Where y’all’s magazines?”
Thirty seconds after being told that they can leave the “PIN” space blank when signing on to the computer, “What’s the PIN?”
In a library with probably a million volumes of nonfiction on two floors, “Where’s the nonfiction books?” “What kind?” “Just the ones that aren’t made up.”
“Can I help you find something?” “Where are the art books?” “Are you looking for something specific?” “No, just the general area.” “They’re over there in the 700’s.” Ten minutes later, “The title of the book is…”
And a favorite, “I can use your phone?” “No, there’s a pay phone at the back door, you may not use staff phones.” Then you see them going over to the other desk… going upstairs to that desk… look, nobody is going to let you use the phone!

20

Surely it’s not hard to ask these questions in another way, which still help the 90% but doesn’t come across as so patronising to the 10%. “It’s hidden behind that wall” and “Is there a message about an external control device?” seem simple enough.

Actually, “it’s under that big sign that says Photocopier” surely sounds insulting to everyone? And imagine how it comes across to somebody with sight problems…