Comment on Almost 38 & This Is Where I'm At Now

• funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Because it’s meant to be the case that a librarian can help me if I need to join a correlation between etchings of revolutionary France and the poetry of William Blake

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• Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Because most people who work at the library aren’t librarians. Librarians maintain and manage a collection, set up the database, etc etc.

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  • Syltti@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You certainly don’t need a masters just to do that.

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    • Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Managing a collection is not a data-entry job, it requires you to know about stuff. Which book on, say, the middle-saharan 17th century tribes do you get, and which ones don’t you get? Is the new one better than the old one? Which old works are to be digitized and which ones aren’t?

      Also included is actually running the library itself, helping people use it (from little bobby who wants that book about a mole who wants to know who pooped on its head, to a PhD student researching said 17th century tribes and what art they produced). It includes copyright law, information ethics, conservation, etc etc etc.

      It’s really much more broad than “Someone who works at the local library”

      Source: me, someone who once worked at the local library, and seriously considered doing it for a living… untill I saw the effort required and the pay.

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      • VAK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        How would you choose which book to get on middle-saharan 17th century tribes anyway? You can’t know about everything. You’d just have to ask a bunch of experts in the field, right?

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      • Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Your library experience was very different from mine. We mostly just told people how to sign up for the wait list for 50 Shades of gray, what programs we did for the kids, and putting away the books everyone left everywhere.

        The pay is what scared me away. Branch Manager, highest position I interacted with, couldn’t afford their own transportation, and was going through their second green card marriage for money because they were desperate. Had 2 Masters.

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    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’ve been lobbying my office for a person with a Library Sciences degree to help manage our massive archive of Sharepoint files.

      “Haha, how hard could it be?” is the sort of thing that gets you stuck with a multi-year long stint in Library Hell. I can say this from personal experience.

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    • teslekova@lemmy.ml ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Think museum curator, not book warehouse owner. They have to make complex decisions involving knowledge about knowledge.

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    • Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You don’t but it does gatekeep the position. Helps your job security…

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