Katherine J. Blackwell

Today's my birthday and I'd like to share a new comic with you, it's called Marginalia. It's a love letter to all the weirdness of medieval manuscripts, and you can read it by unfolding a single sheet of paper!

I ultimately specialized in archive work instead of library work, but they are sister specialties. I took courses in computer coding, sociology, and disaster recovery. Who deals with a collection that has been affected by a flood or other natural disaster? The librarians. Who advocates to the town for yearly funding that is part of local elections? The librarians. Who defends against book challenges when people try to restrict freedom of choice by calling for a ban? The librarians.

What do you do? What information are they actually asking about? How do you search for that information? What sort of resources do you look at? What resources does your library own? If you don't have resources, where do you send the person?

And can you figure all that out in the 30 seconds or so that you have to think before the person gets impatient?

This kind of thing is just *one* class I had in my MLIS studies.

I wish I could find the chart that one of my instructors used to describe library science. Other professionals have great depth of knowledge in their one field, and that's good and important. Librarians need to have shallow knowledge of many, many fields and know how to find the deeper knowledge when needed. That breadth of knowledge and skill in finding more isn't something anyone just knows.

The people who are checking out books to you at the front desk or shelving materials or checking the returned items in are most likely not librarians. I'm sure there are some libraries not getting the funding they need where librarians do have to share in that work, but from my (admittedly limited) experience, in an average library, the people who are checking books in and out and shelving things are circulation staff. I think a lot of people who don't know very much about libraries/library work think that everyone working in a library is a librarian, so I can understand why it would be confusing that librarians need a degree.

Circulation positions, at least in the area I live, are entry-level and mostly part-time positions that do not require a degree of any sort. We don't need degrees for a lot of the work we do. You need some training to learn, like, the procedures for signing people up for library cards, or how to shelve materials, or how to check things in using the library's software, but definitely not a master's degree.

Librarians are not doing circulation work! They're doing a lot more in-depth stuff like answering patron's questions about how to use their laptop or phone, planning any programs that the library holds, managing a budget and deciding what materials to buy for the library's collection, helping you and your kid find the right books for their first research project in school, and taking the time to look up resources with you so they can point you in the right direction when you need a service that the library doesn't provide. Which is why librarians need to go to school to learn skills like collection management, cataloging, research methods, various web skills, and other specialized skills for those who want to be children's/youth librarians and tech librarians.

A big chunk of my friend group have librarian qualifications, and their degree is actually a Master's of Information Studies - among many other things, librarians basically learn how to manage and organize huge quantities of information, both practically and from philosophical/ethical perspectives. (What information is included in a collection/dataset and why? Who should have access to what information and why? How do you ensure that information access protocols are being legally followed?)

See also, the idea of metadata, i.e. data about data. If this sounds complicated, you can understand why you might have to go to school for a while to deal with it! :)