Oct 20

Most of the readings this week dealt with what I always thought was central to a librarian’s role. Reference and helping users find information. The articles all dealt with this in different ways.

Elmborg’s article talks about the reference librarian being a teacher. Instead of jealously guarding information to keep the job mysterious and necessary, reference librarians should teach people how to do their own searches and research. One of my favorite authors, Diana Gabaldon ,speaks well to this point in her blog from Jan 24, 2008. She points out why doing your own research can lead to better search results.

“My favorite analogy regarding research is what I call "Hot dogs and beans." Consider that you're planning dinner for your family. You decide to have hot dogs and beans; tasty and cheap and everybody likes them. You have a busy life, and thus an assistant—you tell the assistant to go to the store and get hot dogs and beans for you. The assistant does, and you have a nice supper.

OK. If you go to the store yourself, you're intending to get hot dogs and beans. But on your way to the sausage-and-cheese section, you pass the fresh meat section—where you observe that there's a sale on organic chicken breasts. "Ooh," you think. "I could make chicken curry!" So you get the chicken breasts, go back through the aisles to get spices, vegetable juice, mango-peach applesauce, mango chutney, jasmine rice…and coming back toward the front of the store with this, you pass through the fresh produce section and see the water droplets gleaming among the fresh lettuces and long green onions—and it occurs to you that a shrimp salad would be Really Good with the curry—so you go back to Meats and get half a pound of fresh baby shrimp, then to the condiments aisle for dressing—and thence to the chilled wine cabinet near the checkout, for a lovely dry Riesling, which will just top this meal off….

Well, if you write historical novels and you depend heavily on research assistants, you get hot dogs and beans.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

I liked the Mom and Me article by Wiegand. It very clearly points out the differences in the way different people value different information. What seems like the best, most knowledgeable source to one person might seem superfluous to another. When the author talks about his mom asking the salesperson if they’ll throw in 4 free floor mats I had visions of my Grandmother in my head.  Wiegand’s article supports Elmborg’s article. If people know how to do their own searches, they can find the sources most important to THEM, not the sources the librarian THINKS are the best.

The Morris article was very heavy, and she lost me somewhere in between constructivism, Belkin, Taylor and Kuhlthau. Between all the theories and terms I had to look up, and all the reference to other authors and articles I found this very, very hard to read and follow. Hopefully we can talk about the main points of this article in slightly clearer language in class so I can figure out what this article is about!

The Enola Gay article was a bit different from the rest, as it talked more about the lessons to be learned from a very controversial exhibit. The author points out many mistakes that were made, but I want to focus on this “For the defense of its intellectual independence, a museum needs a base that can withstand attack and that is professional, not political” (302).This statement applies to libraries, archives and museums. A library should present a neutral tone (unless it is a very specialized library) and sometimes the neutral voice is not the popular voice.

In the Enola Gay example, many people objected to even showing pictures of Japan after the bomb was dropped, never mind suggesting that there might have been a different option available. Yet, without being able to present different sides of a story, all the museum would be doing is propagandizing. Clearly, it wasn’t popular to show what the exhibit did, but it is right to not be one sided.

The trick is being able to present all the evidence, without major repercussions. Funding being cut, support being withdrawn, even the loss of a job.  If a library can have a base that can withstand political pressure, and be as objective as possible would be the ideal. But creating that base would be very tricky.