Friday, November 21, 2008

What I Miss About Reference

It's that never ending challenge. When I read things like the Swiss Army Librarian's Reference Question of the Week I remember what I loved about doing reference.

I've been reading his posts for a while but just recently read why he chose this title for his blog. I loved his reasoning for why and think it's an accurate description of what you all do -
If I had to summarize the job responsibilities of a librarian, “swiss army knife” comes pretty close. We’ve got to be ready to handle any request that comes along, from directing someone to the restroom to researching the propulsion physics behind the space shuttle. Not to mention check books in and out, shovel the walks, design websites, change light bulbs, give presentations, tactfully interact with unruly kids (and adults), balance million dollar budgets, and ensure that everyone has unmonitored access to whatever information or resources they need. Like a Swiss Army knife, librarians need to be ready with whatever tool is needed for the job at hand.
I can't say that I miss the unruly folks or changing light bulbs. But the hunt for information is always fun (maybe that's why I enjoy letterboxing?)

1 comment:

Mike Shell said...

Stephanie,

I'm glad to see that you too are following Brian Herzog's blog. I agree with his definition of librarian.

:-)

And your posts reminds me of a story from library school. I was there from Jan '99 - Aug '00, and I had the good fortune to get a grad assistantship at the main library reference department.

At that time we had public PCs with Internet and research databases, but our OPAC was still on a "dumb terminal."

One Sunday night, when I was working together with the head of reference, all our 'Net connections went down. We only had access to the OPAC...and, of course, to our huge, rich academic reference collection...of books!

One desperate student after another with last-minute assignments came rushing to the reference desk for help. We took them each to the OPAC, showed them how to do searches, took them to the REF shelves, showed them the print resources, showed them how to search indexes, etc.

At the end of the evening, my boss said, "That was so great! Now I remember why I wanted to be reference librarian!"

Oh, well....

Mike