NYTimes: A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

[vaticanplum]

My friends have hit the big time. For...going to library school. Awesome.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/fa...72000&emc=eta1

[pedro]

hott

[Johnny Footstool]

For the longest time, "hipsters" (my sister included) seemed to work mostly in book stores and/or record stores. Becoming librarians just seems like a logical step along those same lines.

[oneupper]

Librarians are looking for an image makeover. Nice PR Piece.

Accountants used to do this but since Enron/Worldcom/Tyco/Arthur Anderson/etc everyone knows they "live on the edge" in their profession.

[Unassisted]

I rarely see anyone working at the libraries here who looks like they like their job. Mostly they seem like drones who only interact with customers because it's part of the job.

That perception had put me squarely in the camp of the people pooh-poohed in this article for wondering how much longer libraries would be needed.

I'm guessing that anyone who is hip and energetic like these folks quickly rises to a back-office job at the libraries here that involves more decisionmaking than shelving.

[wheels]

Great, now we can all be looked down upon when going to the library.

Snobbery knows no bounds.

[pedro]

Raisor is a librarian IIRC.

[vaticanplum]

I rarely see anyone working at the libraries here who looks like they like their job. Mostly they seem like drones who only interact with customers because it's part of the job.

That perception had put me squarely in the camp of the people pooh-poohed in this article for wondering how much longer libraries would be needed.

I'm guessing that anyone who is hip and energetic like these folks quickly rises to a back-office job at the libraries here that involves more decisionmaking than shelving.

Actually, very few of them will likely be shelving books anyway, simply because the need for that has recently diminished in comarison to the need to fill jobs in the "newer" areas of library science. One of the people who helped convince my former roommate to go to library school is a librarian employed in digital archiving: getting important documents up on the internet. My roommate herself is going to Virginia in about a month for a book preservation course. She goes back and forth on being a school librarian, but she likely won't have to even choose: that can be a part-time gig which she supplements with other book-related work, and she can still run her theater comany too. I don't know what the percentage breakdown is, but a great deal of the ligitimate library-related jobs these days take place outside of libraries. I think those options are part of what has made it so popular: I have another friend starting at the Palmer school in the fall; she'd ultimately like to be an archivist at a historical society or something like that.

On the other hand, while the need for librarians may be falling in comparison to other related fields, all of my friends in library school did work or currently works in a traditional library as part of their internships, and all of them thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a matter of need, I think, but not of disdain.

[OldRightHander]

A few years ago when I didn't have a computer, (seems like a lifetime ago) I would spend hours in the library downtown if I needed to research something. Now with the web at my fingertips, researching something takes far less time, but there was something about using the library, some sense of accomplishment when I pulled the book off the shelf that contained whatever nugget I was searching for. When I find something on the web I will just feel glad that I found it and move on. Finding it in the library often brought about more of a sense of accomplishment. Maybe that's just because it was more time consuming, or maybe it's because the library also has more of an "academic feel" to it and it brings out my natural inquisitiveness and desire to learn things. A computer can find the same information, but there is oftentimes the tendency to get sidetracked more. How do you think I found Redszone?

[Caveat Emperor]

A computer can find the same information, but there is oftentimes the tendency to get sidetracked more.

Not only is the tendency to get sidetracked more, but there is also quite a tendency to get lazy with researching information.

When I was a TA in law school, I read not one but several papers written by law students that cited to the Wikipedia -- which contains content that is almost completely user managed. My mother, an undergrad professor at UC, said she has seen the same thing (and even worse) in papers she has graded.

While I never can say I enjoyed my time spent in libraries doing research, at the very least the methodology was somewhat sound.

[vaticanplum]

I actually always liked doing research in the library in college. There's something very fulfilling about being holed up in dark stacks of books for hours at a time, cramming with your friends at a big table during exam time. Though I found it just as easy to get distracted there as it is on the internet -- all of those old books, 75-year-old dissertations on god knows what, Life magazines from the 40s. Maybe I attach a certain romanticism to books, but the smell of old books, the idea that you're paging through the same thing that a student did during the first world war...you can't get that on the internet.

There is also so much history in books that people simply won't be able to get on the internet. Important, well-known documents will all end up there, yes, but there are a lot of primary sources and older books that will never exist in anything but book form. I once bs'd my way through an entire major research paper about Paul I, worst Tsar in the history of Russia, by relying heavily on a pocket book called "So Dark a Stream: the Life of Paul". This book was so bad, it read like historical fiction. It will NEVER be preserved on the internet, and it shouldn't be. (And on the off-chance that it were to be, I seriously doubt they'd manage to capture the illustrations so movingly.) But it was one of only two books on Paul that I could find anywhere, and actually quite a good lesson for a history student, to see how certain parts of history can just be totally transformed by the way in which they're documented.

[vaticanplum]

Update: my friends have been offered a spot on Vh-1. And possibly a book deal.

Already they've moved into the realm of Adult Contemporary. Hott.

[KronoRed]

Vh-1 = Hot?

[Unassisted]

Vh-1 = Hot?

VH1 was Rosie O'Donnell's first national gig. It worked out for her. If I wasn't posting wirelessly from a single-window browser, I'd go dig out and include in my post a photo of Rosie from those days.

[Johnny Footstool]

Vh-1 = Hot?

No. Hott.