h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was totally opposed to bothering patrons, honest! Live and let live. If you didn't want to deal with librarians, I would have been happy to let you do your own thing.

I loved it when you wrote "They need more interesting libraries. Bring back the pneumatic tubes! Reinstall those card catalogues!"

I got burned out cataloging items and typing and filing catalog cards, though. I shifted into reference, and got my share of questions like "How many goldfish can you put in a twenty-gallon tank?" Then, around the year 2000, fewer and fewer people asked me *any* questions, except for the ones about enigmatic websites. Reference was now in charge of making patrons not use the library computers for more than 45 minutes.

Not that long ago, 40% of low-income people were totally dependent on libraries for computer use. 2020 has not helped the cause, as most libraries closed for all or part of the year.

In Library School, I took a course called, "The organization of knowledge." Some day I'd like to discuss how we could make the edited Guide better-organized.


Now that three generations are getting their info from computers, we must have a paradise of well-informed people who can tell valid websites from bogus ones, right?







But here in cyberspace, I'm not a librarian.

Before there was Google, there was Compuserve, where online reference questions were answered by actual librarians. (Ask Elektra.) The problem these days is that people expect search engines to be intuitive, and don't have good search strategies.

Also, they are lazy and believe the first answer they get, which any decent reporter will tell you is a bad idea.

I've done my time with cataloguing - I used to be a translator/indexer in multiple languages. Way back in grad school, I spent one summer helping to update the card catalogue at a university law school. Interesting job (to me), and paid as well as you were going to get back then.

I think you probably know a lot more than some librarians do. You have every right to be horrified by ignorance wherever it occurs. A wise library director will hire subject specialists when this will make the library a better place.

The courses I took in Library School in the early 1970s are oddly relevant in 2020.

After I got my library degree, I got another master's degree, an interdisciplinary one. I would love to be able to learn as much as I can absorb about any subjects, period.

If a day goes by when I don't learn something new, that is a wasted day. Trouble is, my eyes keep getting worse, so I do more of my reading online, where I can enlarge the size of the print. I can enlarge the pictures too, much of the time. I will leave tiny everything to the people with flexible enough fingers to use iphones.

Amen to that.

I wished that our director could have hired computer specialists, to take the pressure off librarians who were busy building the collections, lining up people for programs for the public, etc.

Or, I wished that more computer courses could have been offered to the library staff. I took all the ones that were available, but there were only 24 hours in a day, and I had to be careful not to get burned out again.