Reputed to be the unhappiest, or more correctly the most severe, professional officers in the world of information management. Often women, librarians are frequently considered to be people who wish that they could have been smart enough, quick enough, cunning enough, strong enough etc. to do something else, but they aren't, so they become librarians. This perception is, in many cases, incorrect, but it remains common nonetheless.

The apparent disappointment most librarians feel with their professional lives stems partly from their hidden desires to do other things, and partly with the simple fact that achieving the goals of the profession they are actually practising is in many cases impossible. Libraries are the institutions over which librarians must by definition preside, and they are institutions fraught with disadvantages, in that they almost never have sufficient collective money or time to collect all the information they need to hold. Librarians, as a result, deal with a lot of fruitless enquiries and complaints from people who want things that libraries are supposed to have. A certain amount of cynicism and a perennial feeling of disappointment around librarians is possibly an inevitable consequence of this problem. In addition to this consideration, however, is the fact that librarians' jobs are often considered extremely boring by the rest of the world's professional class, who are at a loss to understand why librarians consider their jobs so important or difficult. Librarians simply do not have the sex appeal of computer programmers, for example, and they are not paid anywhere near as much. "Conan the librarian" is an idea which is popular with most librarians, but virtually inconceivable to everyone else.

The pay issue is a also big one in the working lives of most professional librarians, whose potential job tasks - which include indexing, abstracting, cataloging, classifying, Internet searching, reference searching, writing, editing, shelving, serving customers and dealing with complaints, and specialist streams within all of these general tasks - demand analytical skills far beyond the apparent effect of the effort they require.