More work for librarians

This is one of those personal not-quite-a-rant posts where I just have to get something out of my head so I can stop thinking about it for a bit.  Feel free to stop reading after following this link to an excellent list of state resources regarding bullying and how to deal with it.

[rant]

If only there really were "rant" tags - maybe they would create bolded, all-caps text with too many exclamation points?

Librarians in general need (and perhaps are already receiving) a swift kick in the pants about their role in the world.  Sometimes I feel like the world's information-sharing mechanisms have reverted to a digital version of the Dark Ages.  Important information, collections, etc. are buried or isolated and simply cannot be found.  In the Dark Ages this occurred because of, well, the collapse of western civilization causing the dissemination of knowledge to slow to a trickle.  In the digital age this has occurred because the dissemination, at least, has become so simple there is a flood of knowledge overwhelming us.

A new idea?  No.  But we have to come to grips with it.  Who is the "we"?  Librarians.  Our very purpose as "professionals" is to organize the collected knowledge of humankind and make it available.  There are fantastic tools out there for this purpose.  The ones designed for libraries are, with extremely few exceptions, either clunky, over-simplified, or over-complicated and hard to use.  Why can't we get this right?  From highly involved online catalogs that are intended to simply direct people to the best information in a building to federated search tools supposedly aggregating all the library's resources into one search box; library sites and products are only a few among many options and often not the best choices.

I think that a simple-to-use tool is needed that is backed by the expertise of librarians.  Easy enough to say.  Patently obvious, right?  So, why doesn't it exist?  Or if it does, why hasn't it supplanted the currently dominant tools out there?  Sometimes I wish I were a Jeff Bezos-type.  I thought at one time I was a visionary.  Maybe I am to some extent, but I lack that whatever it is to make the "thing" happen.  Often I feel like I spend too much time looking back to see what's coming and maybe that's the library world's problem.

[/rant]

Back to compiling statistics for the State Library annual report.  Let's see how we did last year...HEY, wait a minute!