Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 1, 2012

The Lady Librarian of Toronto

Filed under: Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 9:00 pm

The Lady Librarian of Toronto

Cynthia Murrell writes:

Ah, the good old days. Canada’s The Globe and Mail profiles a powerhouse of a librarian who recently passed away at the age of 100 in “When Lady Librarians Always Wore Skirts and You didn’t Dare Make Noise.” When Alice Moulton began her career, libraries were very different than they are today. Writer Judy Stoffman describes:

When Alice Moulton went to work at the University of Toronto library in 1942, libraries were forbidding, restricted spaces organized around the near-sacred instrument known as the card catalogue. They were ruled by a chief librarian, always male, whose word was law. Staff usually consisted of prim maiden ladies, dressed in skirts and wearing serious glasses, like the character played by Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life, in the alternate life she would have had without Jimmy Stewart.

The article about Alice Moulton is very much worth reading.

True enough that libraries are different today than they were say forty or more years ago, but not all of that has been for the good.

Libraries in my memory were places where librarians, who are experts at uncovering information, would assist patrons find more information than they thought possible. Often teaching the techniques necessary to use arcane publications to do so.

Make no mistake, librarians still fulfill that role in many places but it is a popular mistake among funders to think that searching the WWW should be good enough for anyone. Why spend extra money for reference services?

True, if you are interested in superficial information, then by all means, use the WWW. Ask your doctor to consult it on your next visit. Or your lawyer. Good enough for anyone else, should be good enough for you.

I read posts about “big data” everyday and post reports of some of them here. It will take technological innovations to master “big data,” but that is only part of the answer.

To find useful information in the universe of “big data,” we are going to need something else.

The something else is going to be librarians like Alice Moulton, who can find resources we never imagined existed.

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