thelibrarian

The librarian

by Bob on January 12, 2008

It's of great interest to me to look at the role over time of a librarian.

At most moments in history, a librarian was an exalted figure, erudite and knowledgeable and, most importantly, knowing where knowledge was contained and in what books and where they were.

Especially as we see in Medieval monasteries, the librarian of the monastery held the secret key to religious and profane books and teachings. No one else but the librarian knew where they were.

And there were no electronic catalogues then. It was in the head of the librarian himself. That was a huge responsibility. For, if the librarian didn't think it appropriate for someone particular to be reading a book, he might just say the book wasn't in the library, and no one would know the difference. There were no open book stacks then, and even most books were in locked chests or chained down.

Even on software engineering projects in the 1960s and 1970s where large computer programs and systems are written by a programming team, there was at one time a structure and theory of project management which included a librarian for the team and project. This librarian was not in charge of books, but in charge of computer programs and libraries or collections of pre-coded computer programs to be used by the team. This was equally an important function as in the Medieval monasteries. Later this function was perhaps unfortunately mechanised and made into a computer program itself.

In some very vague sense, electronic media newspeople and reporters are odd kinds of librarians these days. They seem to hold the key, not to real knowledge, but to kinds of information which are presented on TV, radio and the like. The problem is that the audience think it's true knowledge and not just simply an outpouring of reels of videotape somewhat edited down for a TV or radio program segment.

This has now exteneded to the internet, this kind of false certainty, in using search engines to answer questions and get the information, since we dare not objectively say true candle-lighting knowledge, from anywhere on the internet, whether it's true or false. The search engine can make no such judgement as to its veracity. But people forget that and think if it comes out of the computer then it's true. Not so as many a university graduate student has found out the hard way.

Scientific revolutions have taught us that it's hard to turn the clock back and temper the scientific or technological too to be more precise especially with large amounts of data coming out at us.

We see this in Alvin Toffler's 1970 opus "Future Shock" and pre-dating that was Thomas Kuhn's brilliant 1962 work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". We also have Marshall McLuhan's warnings about media being the message rather than the message getting through to the listeners.

A good human reference librarian can out-distance any search engine easily for their depth of true knowledge and alacrity of credible response is apparent. Hopefully society will still learn to use this resource.

A broadcaster for the BBC once said that putting a question out on the airwaves to all the listeners and waiting for an answer to come in to the station was a far more accurate way than any search engine could ever be. This was a wise observation. And a true one.

Let's hope the important role of a wise and erudite librarian never disappears. Umberto Eco knew all about it when he wrote his 1983 novel "The Name of the Rose" and made the library in the monastery central to the plot. We should be so lucky these days. It's all about the organisation of knowledge and how to access it. For chaos does not serve mankind well usually in a library topical search.