Librarians make it possible to navigate [the infoverse] wilderness. They do the brute-force work of organization: bar-coding new acquisitions; putting books back on the right shelves; scanning and digitizing paper holdings; entering items into databases, where a search can reveal them. Handed a difficult question, a good librarian happily hacks through the data jungle, sorting the good info from the bad, and procuring exactly the answer you wanted. But great librarians do something even better: They help you ask a sharper question, then find the answer you didn't know you needed.
Sadly, these days there are fewer and fewer people considering library work. Like teaching, it is a graying profession afforded less respect than it deserves. I tend often toward skepticism with a bent toward pessimism. Occasionally people around me have to warn me when I stray too far across the line into cynicism. This is probably one of those areas. As a society, we have become too detached from what made us great and what allowed us to build a great nation. Plain and simple education and access to the accumulated wisdom of billions of people who came before us. [Grump, grump, grouse, stomps back to troll cave.]
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