There are also librarians that work at the companies that make library software, who specialize in: functional support, training, writing software specs, and sales demos. They sometimes have to show other librarians where to find information, and the importance of reading the manual.
This is what librarians do.
Sometimes we bitch about our software companies…
I guess one reason some people are confused about what librarians do is that they have the mistaken impression that anyone who works at a library is a librarian. This is not the case, just as everyone who works at a school isn’t a teacher and everyone who works at a hospital isn’t a doctor. As with any other organization, there are a lot of things that need to be done to keep a library running that do not involve actual “librarianing”. A few examples are accounting, secretarial work, building maintenance, processing new books, re-binding damaged or flimsy books, Web design, tech support, fund-raising, and marketing. Depending on the library then some of these duties may be performed by librarians, but they are often handled by non-librarian staff.
At the library where I work there are 13 full-time people employed by the campus library system. Out of this group of 13, five of us are librarians. We’ve also got something like 30-40 part-time employees, mostly students, plus a team of five people employed by the university’s Housekeeping division. At my last job there were four librarians out of a full-time staff of eight library employees (plus two housekeepers).
None of these people are librarians.
These duties are not normally performed by librarians, not unless it’s a very small library. In academic libraries such as the one where I work then shelving duties are handled primarily by student workers, some of whom are no doubt potheads.
Oh, and this:
Is unfortunately not the case. I was robbed while working at a library. Luckily for me it wasn’t a violent crime, I left my bag in the ladies’ room by accident and it was stolen before I realized what had happened. Police did eventually catch the thief. It turns out that aside from a habit of hanging around campus stealing unattended bags he had a couple of prior convictions for armed robbery, so I wouldn’t have put it past him to take my bag by force if we’d run into each other in the stacks.
It is also not unheard of for some of the creeps and weirdos who hang around libraries to become violent. At my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, there’s an “urban legend” that’s actually true about a psycho who attacked a library patron with an axe:
Just to clarify, I am referring to the actual library building that I work in. The entire campus library system has a lot more than 13 full-time employees. I’m not sure how many, but it’s over 100. This includes about 25 librarians.
In college especially there’s also a lot of Bibliographic Instruction (BI): teaching students (and, Og willing, faculty) how to find information. There’s no way you’re ever going to get all students to remember every button that you push and I really don’t even try (I give them handouts for that), but I use instruction sessions to teach them what a reference librarian does (because many students have no idea that the RL is there to help them find information or that not everybody who works in a library is a librarian) and about services like Interlibrary Loan and the like, and give them a general overview of the databases and the catalog.
Building on what others have said, even within reference librarianship there is often specialization. Currently I work at a very small school where I’m a jack of all trades but my first job was as a librarian in a hospital where, of course, most of our questions were medical, and that’s a specialty, and for a time I was a Government Documents (GovDocs) librarian which is also a specialty (GovDocs are a neither fish nor fowl critter to themselves both print and online- everything from 1942 booklets from the Dept of the Interior on quartz deposits in a particular county in Arkansas to the 2010 Census [which is a WHOLE LOT more than how many people live where]), though no matter how specialized most academic librarians also do the regular Reference and BI work as well.
I have fun with one of the local schoolteachers when she brings field trips to my bookstore. My job is to explain the differences between how books are shelved in a library and how they’re shelved in a store. The differences are dramatic and significant.
Four librarians is not “teeny-tiny.” Four librarians is “small.”
(There are three public libraries in this county, and every one of them has precisely one librarian)
It’s not really a science, and the word science used to have a broader meaning than it does today. From the Oxford English Dictionary:
An early term for the subject of what librarians do was “library economy”, a similarly obsolete usage of the word economy, but one that makes a little more sense when you consider the obsolete school subject “home economics”.
Librarians can conduct experiments, although it’s not an essential part of many librarian jobs. I’m currently working on a research proposal for a study about whether changing the content of a bibliographic instruction session will result in a reduced rate of plagiarism on a related assignment.
I’ll save you the trouble: the answer is “No”.
That’s kind of what I’m expecting, although last year there were at least a few cases where the student did seem genuinely confused as to what constituted plagiarism.
The librarian I putatively worked for at the University of Alaska spent *all *her time as a lobbyist begging for money from university administration and boards of various sorts and politicians.
I get the distinct impression that most folks these days (at least Americans, the ones I’m most familiar with) have no clue what plagiarism, copyrights, or trademarks are.
Yeah, but they’re the same ones not paying attention in all the classes I teach.
I’m going to be doing this in a couple of months, I got me a new job. Send me your survival tips!
Don’t librarians also solve ancient puzzles involving mysterious artifacts in exotic locales?
Absolutely. The Curse of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition sent me into the men’s room once. Exotic in a bad way, of course.
When I was in school, the university library had a hidden collection of books, in the basement, behind a fortified door, which no one ever talked about. I don’t mean just 5 books, more like thousands. Why wasn’t I ever allowed to go in there and look at the books? Is that the real history, the one the government doesn’t want the general population to know about? I don’t think they were a collection of law books, because all the reference books and law books were on the 3rd floor. I caught a glimpse of them once, and they appear to be really old, but otherwise regular books.
Special collections, or gov docs.
Yes, although as Zsofia says, whether I am able to give them a clue on these matters depends largely on whether they’re actually paying attention during my instruction session. Some of them wouldn’t be paying attention even if I were dressed up as Lady Gaga, but I hold out hope that changes in content and presentation style will help me to better reach some of them.
Sounds like it was the rare book collection. Books that are really old also tend to be really fragile, and some are really, REALLY valuable. Preserving these books for future researchers means the library must minimize risk of theft, vandalism, and damage from misuse or even repetitive ordinary handling.
You say you weren’t allowed to see these books, but you don’t say whether you ever actually asked of if you had any reason other than curiosity to want to get at them. Depending on the books and the library then getting to handle the books might just involve agreeing to wear archival gloves and leave your ink pens and Big Gulp outside, or it might require demonstrating that you’re not just curious but have a legitimate research need. The Duke University library’s special collections policy was one of the first that came up on Google, and it seems pretty typical if you want to see an example of rules that might be in place with regard to rare materials.