Things people think about librarians

The head of our Friends of the Library (for our branch library) has said many weird things to us.  

1) Why do you have three expensive librarians with college degrees here at the Information desk. (we actually had three desks side by side) He insisted he could hire some high school Honor students to sit there and look things up on the computer and answer questions. (luckily the branch manager pulled him aside to talk to him.)

2) When I brought one of my picture books that I had written in to share with the staff, He picked it up, casually flipped through it, and said, "It must not have taken you long to write this. An hour? What is it? a few hundred words?" (it took3-4 years or more to write, get it bought by a publisher, go through the revision process, wait for the illustrator to finish the illustrations, and wait for the printing of it.) 

3) "I love Librarians! I wish you were open on Friday nights and Sundays too, to make getting here more convenient for us to get books." The branch manager looked at him. After a minute she said, "I don't think you love librarians if you want us to work those hours.

Ask a Librarian -- you know they can help

An older gentleman came into the library where I worked and asked for directions. He was trying to find his niece's place. From his vague description, I finally found it on a map, but when I tried to show him how to get there, his conversation kept wandering so much that I asked him if he had his son's phone number so that his son could help him get to his niece's place. The old man searched his pockets and came up with a piece of paper with his son's phone number, so I called it. The son was shocked that his dad, who has Alzheimers, actually was able to drive so far away by himself and had actually had the sense that librarians could help and had stopped at a library. 

Just a reminder

GOOGLE will give you thousands of results --

most of them wrong.

A trained librarian will give you the one right information that you need.

Writer's Quotes

Neil Gaiman quote:

"Google can bring you back 100,000 answers.
A librarian can bring you back the RIGHT ONE!"

Nonfiction Monday - garbled library searches

Today's Google doodle is all about Komodo dragons. It's a quiz. (which I failed. How did you do?)
It reminded me of one library I worked at in the 1990s. A library where parents did the homework for their kids because their kids were "too busy to do it." A mom came in and demanded books on dragons. I took her to the Fairy tale section and showed her some dragon books.
"No, not that one. No not that one. Dragons! Can't you understand?"
So I dragged out some picture books about dragons. She was furious. Tongue lashed me up one side and down the other.
(Did I tell you that these homework-doing parents treated the library staff like very dumb servants? The men were often even worse because they thought they had the power to fire us.)
Eventually, through much discussion, I figured out that the lady was 1) doing a child's homework assignment that she herself didn't quite understand. And 2) that what she actually wanted was a nonfiction book on Komodo dragons. At that point the library didn't own any books all about that particular reptile but you can be sure that I immediately requested that we purchase some.
She was 'barely' satisfied when I found her subject in a general book about types of lizards.

Do you remember the Card Catalogue?

This was me in the 1960s, complete with the long hair.

The only way we underclassmen could access the ten story tall college library was to use the card catalog, write a request slip, and send a page to find the book.  No browsing allowed.
But when I took some library science courses I was allowed in the inner domain -- and could browse.
As a grad student I was allowed in, no question.
And then I took a part-time job at the archives. What fun, spending all day working with Civil War Documents and running up and down the different levels of the stacks.

When I finally graduated with a masters in library science, Baltimore County public library was on the cutting edge --they had Book Catalogs. (but they kept the card catalogue as back-up.) What a pain. It was out of date the minute it was printed and we ended up searching through the main book and three supplements before the next year's catalogue was printed.

Then Microfische catalogues -- in a long strip a foot wide, instead of individual microfiche cards. Suddenly there was this huge machine between us and the person needing help. We turned a huge handle and they could see that we were working hard to find what they wanted.
That quickly morphed into reel to reel microfiche. To move the microfiche to find the catalog information, all we needed to do was press a little button. Less work than the larger machine, but the patrons couldn't see that we were searching and complained that we were sitting there doing nothing to help them.
 (and the teens would sit at the public catalogs, racing each other to see who could get to the end of the reel faster -- making it jump off the reel and we had to call for repairs.

Then the original first computer was placed in the library (300 baud)  It was meant only to be a check out system, but we librarians grabbed it, pointed out that it was perfect to help us find books and library material, and computers as search tools in the library was born.  The year later we got a faster computer catalog -- 900 baud. That was when we discovered that 300 baud was slow. (it had seem so speedy to us, compared to the microfiche.) Every year or two the computers became faster and faster.

Somewhere along in here the catalogue department decided that it would finally be okay to get rid of the card catalogue, which had been used as back up all this time.  Each library branch then used all those old cards as scrap cards -- to write the computer information down and carry with us to the shelves to help patrons find the material they needed.
What a shock 10 years later when we finally ran out of old catalogue cards and had to (oh no) cut sheets of paper into catalogue card size pieces for our scrap cards.

S0 -- do YOU remember the card catalogue?