Thomas Mann
Reference Librarian, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress
… it’s just really satisfying work to be able to connect people to stuff that is really of interest to them in ways that they would just never find on their own.
Educational Background:
I grew up in Chicago. I did undergraduate at St. Louis University in St. Louis. I was an English major. Graduate school, I got a PhD in English from Loyola University in Chicago. And then I eventually got my library degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
What is it that you do now?
I’m a reference librarian in the Main Reading Room with the Library of Congress.
How did you get here?
Oooh. I wasn’t planning to be a librarian at all. I only became one when my two other careers went belly up. I was originally hoping to be an English professor; that’s what my PhD is in. But by the time I finished, which was 1975, the job market for English professors was just as bad then as it is now. And I was only getting offers to teach freshman writing in community colleges in the Chicago area. I didn’t even have a car so I couldn’t do that.
So, I was gonna to try something entirely different-I was gonna be a question document examiner. Do you know what that is? I usually have to explain that. It’s forensic sciences, but this was way before it was so popular on television. It’s somebody who testifies in court about forgeries and handwriting identification and typewriter identification and that type of thing. And at the time, back in the mid-70s, there weren’t any degrees that you could get in that. But there were some professional societies of question document examiners that basically said that you had to be somebody’s apprentice for two years.
So I wrote all around the country to see if I could find a guy I could study with, and I eventually found someone down in Baton Rouge. He had retired from the Louisiana State Police, and he was in private practice, and he was looking for an assistant. And it took me a year just to find this guy, just writing around-this was before the Internet, back when the Earth was still cooling-and I got in contact with him and he wanted me to go down there and study with him. And he said he could set me up as a private investigator with one of the detective agencies that he was a consultant for, so I could be doing that and earning some money while I was studying with him. So, that’s what I did. I just moved from Chicago to Baton Rouge-I didn’t know anybody-and worked with him. Unfortunately, about three months after I got there, he died, which kinda threw a wrench in the works ‘cause it had taken me a long time to find him. And the situation hadn’t changed in terms of the availability of any other opportunities in the country. So, I continued with the detective agency for about a year.
But that’s indirectly how I became a librarian because one of the things I had to do was-I was looking at old or current telephone books to locate people. And the best collection of telephone books in the whole mid-South region was right in the Main Library at LSU, so I was always going to the library. And, at the time, I was working on a book on handwriting identification, which fortunately never got off the ground beyond a manuscript somewhere. But I got to know all of the librarians in the LSU library because I was in there a lot and I lived right near the campus.
And I got to be friends with the Associate Director of the library there ‘cause one afternoon I went in there and I wanted to see if I could get interlibrary loan privileges for the book I was working on because I wasn’t affiliated with the university; I wasn’t a student or anything. And ordinarily, if you join the friends of the library, you could use the library but you still couldn’t get interlibrary loan privileges. So, I wanted to see if I could talk to somebody. And the woman who was in charge of interlibrary loan wasn’t in her office but this other guy right next door who was Associate Director of the library called me and said, “Can I help you?” ‘Cause of that, we got to be really good friends. And I would cat-sit for his family when they went out of town. And they thought it was interesting that there was a guy working as a private investigator and writing a book on Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper’s handwriting.
Anyway, after the guy I was studying with died, my friend-his name was D.W. Schnieder-eventually said there’s an opening, a couple of openings at the LSU library. And I had been thinking in the back of my mind of maybe getting a library degree, not because I wanted to be a librarian at that point but just ‘cause I liked to do research. I figured if I knew how libraries worked from the inside out, I’d just be a better researcher. But when this document examiner died, that sort of closed off that route in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. And D.W. said, “Well, why don’t you take one of these library jobs?” And so I did. And he said, “If you take one, we can set you up so that you could start library school. You’d work part-time, go to library school.” So, it was being handed to me on a silver platter, and it sounded interesting. So, I took up the library job-I was in charge of the microform room for about a year.
It was a librarian position?
It was a technician position but, at this point, I already had a PhD. And I think D.W. told me the only reason I got hired was because I was a Yankee with a beard, and that qualified as affirmative action in Baton Rouge in 1976 or 77 [laughs]. Anyway, I worked at this sort of technician position and then started library school. And then I worked at the reference desk part-time, and I worked in government documents part-time, and I finished the library degree. And when I finished that in ’79, one of the government documents librarians was going on maternity leave, so I worked full-time in the government documents department for about six months. Which was a regional depository which was great experience to work in a huge government documents collection.
And after that-the first day I started library school, I thought if I’m gonna do this at all-I knew I wanted to be a reference librarian at that point. As soon as I got behind the reference desk in the microform room, I knew I had found my proper niche, that I had to be a reference librarian. The day I started library school, I thought if I’m gonna do this at all, I wanna wind up in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. The day I started library school, I thought if I’m gonna do this at all, I wanna wind up in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress…. So, it took a couple years to get the degree and another six months to work in government documents. But at that point, I just packed up and moved to Washington, DC…
Why?
That’s the place to be. If you’re gonna be a reference librarian, that’s the place to be. So, it took a couple years to get the degree and another six months to work in government documents. But at that point, I just packed up and moved to Washington, DC because, at the time-this was 1980, there was no Internet. The Library of Congress did not advertise its opening level, entry level positions anywhere-in the library journals, in American Library, Chronicle of Higher Education. The only place that it advertised the opening level, the entry level jobs was on its bulletin board in the personnel office, which used to be here in the Jefferson Building. And you had to be physically in Washington to come and look at the board. I didn’t know anybody who could come and look up the board for me, so I had enough money saved up that I figured I could scrape by for a couple of months and hopefully get in the first opening.
Well, the day I arrived in Washington-I’ll never forget this, President Carter announced the federal hiring freeze. So then, oh man, this is just awful! So I was unemployed for a couple of months. But I would spend the mornings going through the Washington Post and looking at the job offers and stuff like that. And I would go to the different academic libraries-Georgetown, Catholic, and American-and joined the different friends of the libraries and see if I could get to know people that way. Well, eventually, I did meet the Director at Catholic University doing that and, a couple of months later, he called me back and said, “Are you still looking for a job?” And I said, “Yeah.” “Well, we’ve got a one year appointment because someone is going on maternity leave. It’s low-paying, but low pay is better than no pay.” So, I took that.
I remember I had an interview with US World & News Report during that time period, too. They were planning to do some kind of a series of books on the Vietnam War. One of the guys I had met in Baton Rouge was a kind of amateur historian, a collector of stuff on the Vietnam War. And I mentioned that during the interview with US World & News Report, and they seemed to be interested in that. And they also asked me, “You’re a private investigator; you’ve done that. You think you could find Abby Hoffman for us?” ‘Cause he was still in hiding at that point. So, after the interview, I went to the Catholic University library and looked in the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature under Abby Hoffman. And there was an article in there, that there was a birthday party for him-I think at Madison Square Garden-in absentia. And it mentioned that his attorney was William Kunstler who defended him in the Chicago 7 trial. So I wrote a nice letter back to the interviewers and said, “By the way, if you want to find Abby Hoffman, talk to his lawyer. Here’s William Kunstler’s phone number and address.” And they offered me the job immediately [laughs]. But I turned them down because I still wanted to be a librarian.
So, I took the job at Catholic. I worked there for a year, and I used that time to get to know the people at the Library of Congress. And, a year later, 13 months later, the hiring freeze was off, and I think I was maybe the first person hired after that. And I’d been in the-it used to be called the General Reading Room’s Division in one way or another ever since then. So, it worked out. I think if you’ve read that book, What Color Is Your Parachute?, are you familiar with that? It works! It’s basically find out who the people are of where you wanna be and get to know them. And that works better than resumes or ads in the newspaper or anything else. It got me my last two or three jobs. So, we’ve been through various reorganizations here, but basically I’ve been in the Main Reading Room ever since.
How long has it been?
I started in November of ’81 and there was a separate telephone answering section that used to be in Alcove 6 back then. And I was in there for six months. And then there was some internal reorganization again, and there was an opening in the regular reading room, so I moved over at that point from the telephone answering section. Since then, I’ve been in the Main Reading Room.
What was it about being a reference librarian?
It was interesting being an investigator, but you have to spend your life in your car. You’re forever driving around, interviewing people, trying to catch them when they’re home, and knocking on doors and seeing if somebody witnessed something-a lot of it was accident reconstruction. Isaiah Berlin said, there are basically two kinds of people-everybody says there’s two kinds of people-you’re either foxes or hedgehogs. And foxes run around and do all sorts of things. And hedgehogs basically stay in one place and get really good at one thing. I think I’m basically a hedgehog person, but I’m a better hedgehog for having had a lot of fox experiences. I much prefer to be at one place and have the people come to me, instead of having to drive around to find out what their question is.
I think I’m basically a hedgehog person, but I’m a better hedgehog for having had a lot of fox experiences.
The variety-you know yourself, you’ve worked here, you know what the variety of questions is. It’s just astonishing to me, that people ask stuff that I didn’t even know there were subjects that existed, that they ask stuff about that. And good Lord, there is an enormous body of literature on that. So, it’s just really satisfying work to be able to connect people to stuff that is really of interest to them in ways that they would just never find on their own. No matter if they’re full professors, if they’re full professors who’ve written biographies and histories already, you can routinely show them stuff that they just don’t know anything about. It’s not that they’re bad researchers or anything; it’s just nobody’s ever told them. And there’s still, I think, kind of a bias in grad schools, that a lot of students are taught that you’re no scholar if you can’t find it on your own. You shouldn’t have to bother people; you shouldn’t have to ask questions. So, people don’t ask questions.
A lot of the stuff we do at the reference desk, when people ask about filling out a call slip or how to get to this room, I like to ask them, “What are you working on?” They won’t volunteer that but, if you ask them, there’s no pressure. It doesn’t sound funny; it doesn’t sound like they’re helpless or anything. And they’ll tell you. And, once you know what they’re doing, then you can say, “Oh, by the way, we’ve got a full set of doctoral dissertations here. And that might be good.” Or, “We’ve got this database and that database and this database and a couple of bibliographies.” They’re always so happy to be shown stuff that they didn’t know that they could ask for because they just didn’t know it existed. And it’s just a lot of fun. It’s very satisfying work.
So you’ve never wanted to work anywhere else?
Not after the Library of Congress [laughs], no, no, no, no. I like Washington, too. It’s a nice city; it’s very walkable. The museums are free. If you’re bored here, it’s your own fault. I’ve become planted and rooted inside the beltway. I know there are places outside the beltway, but I don’t go there too much.
Briefly, how would you describe what you do as a librarian?
It’s to connect people with resources of interest to them that they had no idea existed in some kind of a systematic way. I always think of researchers coming into the reading room-there’s a distinction between reference questions where there’s a right answer and open-ended research questions, and most of the questions we get are research questions, where it’s more like, “What have you got on this?” rather than some particular fact. But I always think of researchers as-I wrote this in one of these papers on the Guild website-I always think of researchers as being in the situation of the six blind men of India who had to describe the elephant. One guy grabbed a leg and said the elephant is like a tree. One touched the side and said the elephant is like a wall. Everybody touched a different part of the elephant, and they got completely different impressions of what the animal was like because they all just relied on the first thing they found and nobody saw the extent of the other parts or how they fit together. And that’s a real challenge, I think, in reference work. I think that’s the hardest thing, but it’s also the most satisfying thing if you pull it off, is to get people to an overview of what is available on their subject in a way that gives them some assurance that they’re not missing something important.
And there are all sorts of little tricks and ways to do that. That’s what my books are about essentially, the Oxford Guide to Library Research particularly. It’s 300 pages. I won’t say little tricks; some of them are rather extensive. But it’s getting people to see the shape of the elephant in an unfamiliar subject area. And, in research libraries, we have all sorts of ways to do that that are just not available on the Internet. Because when people come in, I sort of have a rule of thumb. If a reader is older than I am, then I assume they have not done Google. If they’re younger than I am, then I pretty much assume they’ve already done Google and Internet. But the stuff we have here is not on the Internet. It’s not just the content has not been digitized, but there’s all these ways of searching it that are so different from relevance rank, keyword clouds, and folksonomies, and stuff like that. Not that those aren’t important and useful. There are other things in the toolkit, that in research libraries we have ways to go about it a lot more systematically, that people have never heard of. It’s not terribly difficult to do, but it’s just not obvious. No matter how many people you deal with, it’s always new to them because nobody’s ever explained it to them. So, that’s the fun of it; it’s trying to get people to see the shape of the elephant… it’s getting people to see the shape of the elephant in an unfamiliar subject area.
Do you find that in the years that you’ve been doing this that the tricks have stayed the same?
There are more tools, but the methods of searching haven’t changed a lot, although they sort of refined in some directions. This is kind of what my book is about. I distinguish, I think, nine different ways of going about subject search. One of them would be controlled vocabularies. Well, there are lots of different controlled vocabularies, but the principles of using a controlled vocabulary rather than a keyword database are similar. There’s been a lot of expansion in keyword searching to give us new tools ‘cause now some of them are relevance ranked where they didn’t use to be ranked at all. Now you’ve got word clouds, now you’ve got folksonomies. But, in a sense, they’re all still subdivisions of keyword searching ‘cause they pretty much give you the words that you ask for, although they’ll massage them-the way they’re displayed. And the ways they’re displayed have changed and improved in some respects for many of the databases and certainly the websites. But there’s still a big difference generically between controlled vocabulary searching and keyword searching and all of its different submethods of searching versus citation searching versus related record searching versus browsing in the book stacks. So, it’s more tools but the same categories for the most part. I have to look at that again when I do another edition of the Oxford Guide, to see if some of these new developments count as a different way of searching rather than just a refinement. On some of that stuff, you could go either way at this point.
But I think there is 8, 9, 10 different ways; if you know those, you’re in pretty good shape. Most of the work you do as a reference librarian doesn’t involve subject expertise. At least for me, it’s just knowing what the different search techniques are, no matter what subject ‘cause you can apply different ways of searching on anything.
Is there one that you prefer?
I try to throw in as many as I can, as long as the reader will put up with me. I mean you can always assume that people have done keyword searches of one sort or another on their own. You can pretty much assume they need to have subject headings explained to them, but they’re so happy when you do. Some of us teach the research orientation classes, and I’m not the only one by any means, but the feedback sheets that we get for those every week for like 15 years, the thing that we always get thanked for most explicitly, most frequently, and most emphatically is “Thank you for explaining the subject heading system.” People just aren’t getting that out there, but when you show it to them, it’s like, “Wow! There’s a way to do that. I wish someone would have shown me that.” But it’s like that with citation searching or related record searching. Giving people permission to ask questions is something that’s new to them because they’ve been told they shouldn’t have to bother people. There’s an awful lot of stuff that I wish someone would have told me when I was still a graduate student. That’s the kind of stuff I try to put in my books-stuff that I wish someone would have told me-‘cause I know it all works. And it’s not because of some theoretical construction; it’s because it works out on the reference desk. And if the first way of searching it doesn’t work, then I can try this, I can try that, I can try this. There’s many different ways you can come at the same subject, and one of them is gonna work. At least, that’s my experience.
But now with the Internet, libraries and other places are sort of trying to cater to those who do their searching on the Internet. So, that’s giving them more permission to do it on their own.
Well, there’s a danger in that, that you’re in a sense endorsing the level of understanding that they already have without showing them anything that they don’t already know. And there is so much that they don’t already know. Everybody says, “Well, we don’t need Library of Congress Subject Headings because people don’t use them.” My experience is that they also don’t know how to do keyword searches either; they’re just as bad at that. They have to be shown things like word truncation, phrase searching in quotation marks, Boolean combinations. They assume that they keywords that they type really are category terms that are bringing up everything on that subject, even though they haven’t spelled out all the different keywords. So, no matter what people do, I think all of them need some kind of education if they’re really gonna be information literate these days. It’s not a matter of relying on under the hood programming and federated searching because that can [field?] as much as it shows but in ways that people don’t know, that they can’t see what they’re not getting if they’re working on their own. So, I think that’s one of the things the profession needs to be better at is educating people, to show them more than the stuff they think of on their own.
How do you think they should do that?
Start by reading my book [laughs]. That’s what they were written for. Unfortunately, I don’t get that much feedback from librarians on that, and I’m not sure that librarians who teach information literacy classes are the ones who are using them. The feedback I get is often from historians and biographers and sociologists and people in religion. It’s like, “Wow! Thanks for explaining this.”
I have two books out there. One of them is Library Research Models, and that’s everything I wish somebody would have told me when I was in library school. It’s a little bit dated now, but I think it’s basically good in terms of explaining how the library profession got to where it is, in terms of methods of subject searching up to the end of the 20th century. And then the other one is Oxford Guide to Library Research. I keep updating that every few years. That’s everything that I wish somebody would have told me before I started working at a reference desk. But it’s not just for librarians; it’s for people who have to do some kind of substantive research. And I get statements from publishers of how many copies are going out, but not where they’re going. But I’ll occasionally get an email from somebody who’s read it. It’s fun though.
When I do the research orientation classes here, it’s pretty much a digest of those books-the way I teach it; I think everybody teaches it a little bit different. But when I’m talking to a class of undergraduates, sometimes it’s frustrating. Nobody takes a note the whole time. They just sit there. When I teach a class for graduate students or professional writers, like Washington Independent Writers-I talk to them every year, they’re scribbling notes, everything I say. And I think, if you haven’t experienced what the problems are in doing research, you don’t recognize what the solutions are when you hear them. You don’t recognize how important something is if you haven’t experienced the problem that it solves. And I wonder if that’s a problem in the way the library profession in general is teaching information literacy-it doesn’t match the problems that people really have. It’s matching the problems that we thing that they have based on user studies that we’ve read that say that they want everything online anywhere for free. It doesn’t work that way. That’s just endorsing the level of ignorance that they start out with, instead of getting them beyond it.
Are you or have you been involved in library or other associations?
I avoid them. I’m not a committee person. I don’t like library conferences. I think the general neglect of books and book collection has passed from simple disregard to open contempt or hostility in an awful lot of the library presentations that are out there. If it’s not on the Internet, we’re not interested. And if you think that a book collection or maintenance of a book collection classified book order is important, Lord you’re a dinosaur; don’t bother. I don’t need that. I get feedback from the people that I work with everyday. I’d rather get feedback from the researchers who tell me whether or not what I’m doing is working.
But who’s gonna say what you think?
I’ve got my stuff out there [laughs]. I’ve got two books. I’ve got the website. So I think my time is better spent writing stuff, getting stuff outside the Main Reading Room than it is library conferences.
Are you involved in special projects?
I try to avoid committees as much as possible, but sometimes I get stuck on them. And I’ve had to be on a couple inside the Library in the last year. I was in a committee last year about getting more people inside the reading rooms. We produced a report, and Lord knows what will happen to that. I’m on some committee now to come up with nominations for the Kluge Prize. But in terms of special projects, I think of those as something, is there something I want to write on my own time and get it published or get it somehow on the Web. All of the writing, or a lot of the writing I do has to be on weekends because, when you’re a federal bureaucrat, you can’t write stuff-if you want it copyrighted-during government time. So, the book projects are always Saturday projects. And if I right something on government time, it’s gotta be copyright-free, but basically that’s journal articles or papers for the Web, but it’s not the kind of stuff you charge money for anyway or get paid for. So, that’s okay.
If you could have done anything in your career differently, what would that be and why?
I have no regrets [laughs].
Tell us from your own experience one leadership lesson that you have learned.
Well, the guy who got me to be a librarian back at LSU-the late D.W. Schneider, I think I learned more from him than I realized at the time. He was the number two person in the library, but I thought it was wonderful, especially as I look back at it retrospectively, he would spend at least one night a week at the reference desk. And he always told me that was the high point of his week, as it just energized him to work with the students to get a sense of what they were asking and what the library could provide. And I wish that could be an iron-clad rule throughout the library profession-if you’re any type of library administrator, you should spend one evening a week on the reference desk or one afternoon. ‘Cause I think there’s too much of a disjunction between administration and the work that has to be done and also between the academic side of the profession and the work that gets done. They tend to go off in their own realms where they get feedback from people who are in similar situations but none of those people are themselves working in a library. And the over-reliance on the Internet is an example of that. The Internet is wonderful; I use it everyday; it’s indispensable, but it’s not the only thing. We’ve got all this other stuff, too, that it’s outside that box. But if you don’t have experience in working with the researchers, who need that stuff that’s not on the Internet, and they come in because they couldn’t find the stuff they need on the Internet, and you can show them all the stuff that’s not there, you have a more realistic sense of what the whole shape of the library elephant is that you don’t get if you just go to library conferences and get your feedback from people who are in the same situation that you are. I think there’s too much of a disconnect between theory and practice.
I wish that could be an iron-clad rule throughout the library profession-if you’re any type of library administrator, you should spend one evening a week on the reference desk or one afternoon.
That’s one reason that I like the books, but I can’t twist people’s arms and make them read the books [laughs]. One friend of mine told me, when the Oxford Guide to Library Research came out, she said she wanted to get a copy just so she could hit somebody over the head with it in her own library. So, I sent her a hardcover copy [laughs]. I have that feeling myself-that there’s a better way to do this, and it’s just not showing up on your radar screen if it doesn’t appear on the computer. I know there’s no easy solution. I think my part is to write what I think needs to be said and get it out there, but you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.
How do you recognize contributions of others in your library and in your community?
If it makes a difference in what I do, if it shows me something that I didn’t know. Most of what I get out of the library literature is awareness of new databases or new books, new Internet search capabilities in some cases, new websites. That’s sort of my gut criterion-if it actually makes a difference that enables me to show people something that they wouldn’t find on their own or I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to show them. That’s satisfying.
In the federal government, it’s not a reward system that’s based on publish or perish. It’s more like publish and perish. Whether we write stuff or not in the federal government-it’s not like we have to if you’re an academic. For me, it’s if I want to tell people something that I think is important, I’ll just do it. But the federal government is not set up to reward you for writing stuff as it would be if you are an academic. So, I’m not really part of the award system. The awards that I get is seeing if it works with actual researchers. And that’s, I think, a lot more satisfying.
What values do you look for and admire in a leader?
Well, it’s sort of like the criterion I subliminally or explicitly have is what experience are they bringing to what they’re saying. Are they saying it because that’s what everybody’s saying and they saw it on a PowerPoint slide presentation? Or are they saying it because they’ve tried it and they know how it fits in with the alternative and they can see that it does something that the other things don’t do? You get a sense of whether people have some experience in what they’re talking about or whether they’re just repeating what everybody else is saying. And it’s hard to articulate how you spot that, but basically I think I have my own sense, that I can recognize it when I see it.
Have you met a lot of people like that?
Around here, I have. But around here, I’m surrounded by people who are actually doing the kind of work. I haven’t seen a lot of it at library conferences, and that’s one reason why I don’t go a lot. Because for years I did go, and I just wasn’t getting anything out it. I could read accounts of them in the different library journals without having to be there. So, around here, I’d meet a lot of people like that. But you go outside, eh.
What advice would you give to up and coming librarians?
Be willing to think outside the box of the Internet and learn specifically what you’re not getting if the Internet is your only tool. Learn the difference between relevance ranked keywords, which is not the same thing as conceptual categorization that cataloging does. Learn the difference between browse menus that shows subdivisions as opposed to word clouds, which are a lot more haphazard and much less systematic. Again, the trick is to give people the best overview of what’s already out there, and how do you give them an overview if you’re just relying on computer manipulations? You need human thought in ways that computer algorithms can’t duplicate. They do wonderful things, work wonderfully well in some situations, but the whole business of having everything out on the Internet, seamless searching from anywhere at any time by anybody, that’s just not reality. It’s just not reality. But you have to know what you’re not getting. It takes some experience and savvy and practice to get that sense, but it’s doable. And I think it’s incumbent on people coming into this profession to try to cultivate that.
Is it just practice?
Some people, what counts as experience in some cases is repeating the same mistakes for twenty years. I’m always wondering if I’m doing that myself. But, since I have to revise the book every few years, I do have to systematically look at things again to see what’s changed or what I need to get up to speed at. Revising that book every few years is a wonderful experience for me. It makes me a much better reference librarian. There are different ways of keeping up to date, but again, my criterion would be does it make a difference in practice at the desk with real researchers. And if it does that, then I know I’ve learned something.
What do you think are the top three issues facing librarianship (positive or negative) that could change the course of things?
Again, we’re blinded by the glare of the Internet. And it’s not one thing or the other. It’s both or multiple things, not just two. And I think we’re losing sight of the things that don’t fit in the Internet box. And that’s to the detriment not just to the library profession, but to scholarship in general. And all the people we have to serve in all these subject areas, who if we don’t show them what they can’t get on the Internet, as well as what they can get on the Internet, they’re just not gonna find that stuff on their own. So, too much infatuation with the Internet is the main problem.
I think we’re not teaching classification and cataloging the way that we need to, but that’s sort of related. There’s the sort of assumption that if you just throw in enough keywords in the hopper and have relevance ranking and folksonomy referrals, then that’ll take care of itself, and it won’t, in terms of giving people an overview. In terms of giving them something, yeah fine. But the goal is not to give people something, it’s to give them the shape of the elephant the way I see it. But that’s also connected to blinded by the glare of the Internet.
That’s kinda it.
What is the most valuable thing you’ve learned in your current position?
It’s continually astonishing to me the range and the nature of questions that people ask that just would never occur to me that there could be a subject that you would ask on that, let alone that there would be a lot of stuff. People ask me about cleavage plains and asbestos. I wrote a paper on tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War. And storyboard planning techniques, Sulawesi macaques-some kind of primate in some Southeast island. It’s just amazing.
When I had my English PhD, I thought at that point I was a very good researcher ‘cause I used libraries all the time. In retrospect, I didn’t know beans about what I was doing, but I just didn’t know that I didn’t know beans. Because there are all these other things, even how to find the right subject headings, nobody had ever explained that to me. I had this whole PhD program behind me. I guess one of the most important things I’ve learned is that subject expertise is not necessary for most research questions. What is necessary instead is knowledge of search techniques because you could apply those no matter what the subject is. And if you know what the different techniques are, you can find stuff no matter what the subject is, usually more proficiently than people who are full professors. I guess one of the most important things I’ve learned is that subject expertise is not necessary for most research questions. What is necessary instead is knowledge of search techniques because you could apply those no matter what the subject is.
What are the top three things they don’t teach you in library school that you think are critical?
Seriously, I did write Library Research Models with that question in mind. Sometimes I’ll get emails from students in library schools who thank me for writing Library Research Models. And I was just talking to a woman from one of the local schools about two weeks ago, and it was the same thing. Basically, I guess a lot of the library programs are not showing people how everything fits together, what is the shape of the elephant of library science. And that’s what I tried to put in the book-how things fit together. And what the different models are for relating them and distinguishing what the parts are and how they fit together. And I’ve had a lot of feedback. I won’t say a lot, but the feedback that I’ve had over the years has been very positive, specifically on that point, that until I read your book, I didn’t see how it fit together. And I’m extremely gratified whenever I get an email like that or talk to somebody who comes into the reading room.
The part on the importance of cataloging, which I think is maybe not being emphasized. The importance of different methods of searching, that they all have different strengths and weaknesses, but collectively what doesn’t work for one way of searching does work for another. And that, as wonderful as the Internet is, there’s more to it than just that.
Is there any one thing that every librarian should know?
They should read my book [laughs].