I got this off of another listserv and thought you all would enjoy.
Miranda Ball
Director
Lawrence County Public Library
Lawrence County, Alabama
mirandaball@hotmail.com
Our librarians, our heroes: From nabbing sex offenders to finding tough
answers, they're on the
>job
>
>By MIKE KILEN <mailto:mkilen@dmreg.com;;?subject=Our librarians, our
heroes>
>REGISTER STAFF WRITER
>
>October 23, 2005
>
>Sex offenders apparently aren't very well read. If they were, they'd know
>not to mess with a librarian.
>
>When a man grabbed a 20-month-old child and dragged her to the men's room
>of the downtown Des Moines Public Library earlier this month, police say
>the library staff conducted a "masterful tactical response," led by 35-year
>library veteran Dorothy Kelley, hereafter called the "field general."
>
>She barked orders, burst into the men's room and grabbed the child while
>other staff members kept the convicted sex offender, James Effler, trapped
>in the john.
>
>Soon after, a plant was delivered to the library's front desk. The attached
>card read: "To: The Hero Librarians. From: The Des Moines mothers who are
>greatful."
>
>A kind gesture, to be sure. But people, people. Greatful?
>
>I'm sure they are grateful, but you don't want to mess with a librarian on
>spelling.
>
>These are tough folks. Forget the shushing, bifocals-and-support-hose
>librarian. They don't like that image. Librarians are people who endure
>fickle budget decisions, the Patriot Act, the ever-changing information age
>and still have time for random arrests.
>
>They may be the most unusual public servant left in our time.
>
>Where else can you pick up a telephone, avoid an enormously lengthy phone
>tree, talk to a live person with a beating heart, ask a question and get an
>answer, all in less than five minutes?
>
>I'm not taken to nostalgia, but this is the equivalent of a home-baked
>meal.
>
>So here's what I wonder: Aren't these heroic reference librarians about to
>be outdated, outsourced, out-Googled?
>
>We live in an information age full of experts. Call up a couple of Web
>sites, write a blog and join a long list of blowhards who just repeat the
>information they found surfing. A person who does the grunt work and finds
>the original, respected source of information is practically a dinosaur.
>
>The reference librarian digs into dusty old magazines that aren't online,
>rolls microfilm of newspapers, flips through out-of-print books and ancient
>city directories and collects tidbits and scraps of a society amazed that
>everything isn't entirely easy.
>
>Here at the Central Library in Des Moines, reference librarians answered
>315,000 reference questions last year.
>
>Every so often, public officials get the idea of cutting budgets. Five
>librarians were cut two years ago at Central. But with good sense, the
>positions have been restored.
>
>Statewide, the number of librarians has increased - from 1,263 in 1990 to
>1,560 in 2004 - and the number of reference questions answered hit at an
>all-time high of 2,001,538 in 2003. The American Library Association
>reports that the number of reference questions to public libraries
>nationally has increased every year from 1990 to 2002.
>
>"As there gets to be more and more information, people need to be smart
>about it," said Mary Wegner, the state librarian. "People have to learn to
>evaluate what they find on the Internet. The librarian does that."
>
>Think you're an expert, Googlehead? The Pew Internet and American Life
>Project did a survey earlier this year and found only one in six users of
>search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and
>paid advertisements.
>
>We can enjoy our fancy bookstores, a new $32.5 million downtown Des Moines
>library opening in April and a complex home computer that promises
>information at our fingertips.
>
>But the reference librarian cuts through all the information overload like
>a skilled surgeon.
>
>If there is a tidbit of information on this planet that begs for the light
>of day, they are there, maybe not wearing a Superman cape, but a cardigan,
>quickly drawing their "snag file" into action. It's a pile of index cards
>with common or hard-to-find answers neatly alphabetized.
>
>To give you an idea, one card says only this: "The correct spelling of
>portobello mushrooms."
>
>Mushroom spellings. The altitude of Des Moines. The corporate address of
>Ford Motor. In the pursuit of accurate information, they never give up,
>never surrender.
>
>"The America I loved," wrote Kurt Vonnegut in his new book, "A Man Without
>a Country," "still exists in the front desks of public libraries."
>
>Say you're sitting there in your pajamas wondering about some names for
>former President Ronald Reagan's dogs.
>
>Type "Reagan's dogs" into Google and five Web sites are listed. The first
>is a leasing company. The second is CNN (bingo!), which after two minutes
>trying to load is a dead end. The next two were personal blogs and the last
>was a message on a bulletin board. Time elapsed: Five minutes.
>
>In the library snag file here it is: Lucky and Rex.
>
>Say you're at a cocktail party wondering how many words end in "gry."
>(Answer forthcoming).
>
>These are all questions to be answered by the heroic Des Moines Public
>Library staff. The 11 staff members with a master's in library science have
>an average of nearly 19 years of experience.
>
>Deborah Kolb has worked at the Central Library since 1972. She says that
>young people seem startled that everything can't be found via Google. One
>student recently had to actually visit the Central Library and be shown a
>relic - the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature - to look up old
>magazine articles on Woodstock for a school report.
>
>Others, she said, don't know that some Internet sites that claim to be
>online encyclopedias are actually information supplied by users.
>
>Kolb won't let questions just drift away with flimsy sourcing. Librarians
>tackle the answer as if they're subduing a sex offender.
>
>"My lifelong dream is to be on 'Jeopardy'," she said.
>
>Kolb loves the old building that has housed the library since 1903. It's in
>her bones.
>
>"You never know who is going to walk in those doors," she said. "Everyone
>from kindergartners to people who sleep under the bridge."
>
>The librarian is really the headmaster of a great social environment, maybe
>one of the few places other than Wal-Mart where all socioeconomic classes
>mix. And it's a rare place for poor people to get information. Librarians
>are enormously proud of that. Maybe it's the humanity oozing from all the
>great books that surround them.
>
>Soon they will all move down a few blocks to the new library on the west
>side of downtown. A modern library must offer more access to computers -
>the number will jump from five to 35 - and a coffeeshop.
>
>The librarians will still be the library's heart.
>
>People such as Pam Deitrick, a librarian who started working here part-time
>in high school in 1969. When a parent dies, she helps the grieving caller
>try to remember the name of the song he wants to play at the funeral. When
>people get a diagnosis from their doctor, they call her to ask what it is
>and how long they have. She'll pull out the medical book, careful not to
>claim an expert status, and help them through it.
>
>Just then the phone rings. A caller wants to find a certain paint and can't
>remember the name of the manufacturer. Don't ask me how, but Deitrick found
>it in Pennsylvania.
>
>The library staff gleefully found the answers to the words that end in
>gry: hungry, angry (OK, those were easy), aggry (a type of ancient,
>variegated glass beads), meagry (having a meager appearance), puggry (a
>light scarf wrapped around a head or helmet for sun protection).
>
>I thought this was a dying profession. I was wrong. Librarians are too
>tough to die out. They have this special force. Information just finds
>them.
>
>Nikki Hayter, 27, was in her third day of training at the Central Library
>the day I visited. The older vets were showing her the ropes. Her
>grandmother had been a librarian there long, long ago. Her dad worked in
>the boiler room. She practically grew up in the place.
>
>She was told to flip through a roll of microfilm just to see how it works.
>She grabbed the first one off the stack. 1949. She zoomed through the roll
>and randomly stopped on a photograph.
>
>It just happened to be the engagement photo of her great aunt.
>
>In the increasingly complex cosmos of information, something tells me she
>has a great future as a reference librarian.
>
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