Ode to the Reference Librarian

I hope the librarian from Ghostbusters doesn't show up.

This week, instead of my usual diatribe about patrons and their lack or sense or decorum, I have decided to spotlight my favorite kind of librarian: the Reference Librarian. For those of you unfamiliar with reference librarians, these folks have gone through an Amerian Library Association accredited school to get a master's in library science. Now, get in the time machine with me so we can visit the Reference Librarian of Days of Yore. Before Microsoft and Apple products were in every home and Al Gore invented the Internet, library patrons around the world use card catalogs to look up books. That's right, you had to flip through a drawer by author or subject or title to find it. Reference librarians also served as founts of knowledge when you needed to know about certain subjects or needed help narrowing down a topic to study. Need to know the population of the Republic of Chad? They knew where to find it. Need to find out about daVinci? They knew which books art anthologies had chapters about him. They were human Google.

Reference librarians today are still crucial to any library. "But what about the Internet?", I hear you cry. For the answer, I give a quote from Neil Gaiman, creator of the Sandman graphic novel series: "Google can bring back a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one." Go open Google, or another search engine of equal or greater value, and type in "the history of golf". You will get tons of hits (over 30,000,000 when searched), including two Wiki articles, a video of comic Robin Williams talking about golf, and some guy in Canada who wrote a brief history of golf and then tried to make the website more legit by adding an animated gif to the end. Now, you can spend the next two hours either tracking down a somewhat reputable source and probably watching that Robin Williams video or you can go to your library and ask a reference librarian for help and spend the next two hours actually writing a paper that doesn't use eHow as a source.

The moral of the story: The Internet, as wonderful as it is, cannot replace the brain of human being who actually knows his/her stuff. Hail to thee, Reference Librarian!

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.