Oh, is THAT what librarians do?

First full day with Hubby Jim in Montréal. Here for his Joint Statistical Meetings 2013 Conference and my temporary escape from the world of librarianship—I thought.

The most obvious part of this adventure, of course, is that we speak no French.

I had a year of conversational French in high school, back in another century, but it didn't really take.

I'm able to puzzle out written French, since there's enough French in English and enough Latin in both. It surprises my how much I do remember...and how many words and phrases are springing from dusty memory.

But comprend-ing spoken French, let along speaking it? I'll be fine if I ever have the occasion to use the one sentence I remember: "Alors, je vais chercher du bon vin à la cave." Otherwise....

As a linguistics undergraduate I suffered terminal stage fright when it came to speaking German, French, Telugu, Japanese...anything I tried. Sort of like a med student who can't stand the sight of blood. Not a strong résumé point.

On the other hand, as Jim and I were navigating the STM for the first time this morning, I discovered that I have two very powerful tools at hand.

First, I spent sixth through ninth grade in Boston, traveling the whole metropolitan area on buses, trolleys and subways of the MBTA. In other words, I know the underground.

When I returned to Boston for the 2006 Public Library Association Conference, I felt lost in downtown Boston, where I had never hung out as a kid. However, as soon as I went underground, I knew exactly where I was. With no trouble at all I was able to find the apartment where we had lived in the Back Bay area.

Jim is a Google Maps fanatic who spends hours "driving through" different cities around the world. I tease him that we didn't actually need to come to Montréal, since he's already "been on" every street. Underground, though, he was missing the basic navigation cues which I knew despite never having been here before.

It was when we needed the Centre de service à la clientele to replace a faulty e-ticket that I discovered what librarians really do.

Even without signs in English, the layout, the icons and the recognizable words helped me puzzle out the necessary steps: punch this green button, take the waiting line ticket, watch for your number on the display, go to the designated window. It was much like being online.

(It helps that in truly global nations, unlike in the United States, children are raised to be at least bilingual. Almost every service person here speaks English and French with equal fluency.)

So my point is?

Being a librarian is not about books. Being a librarian is about deciphering how people organize and display unfamiliar information. It is about mastery of visual and conceptual cues as much as about verbal knowledge.

We do our best work at a meta-level, discerning how people think, search, find and display through gestures and symbols—even when we are unfamiliar with the language or field of information in which we are doing that work.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be,
Michael

The customer within

Recently, I had one of those moments when reality sneaks past my prejudices, and my petty resentments toward customers transform into wonder.

On this occasion, a man whom my eye stereotyped as a thirty-ish, blue-collar guy approached the Non-Fiction "Ask Here" desk, carrying a library basket of books.

(Had I been paying more attention, the juxtaposition of "blue-collar guy" with "basket of books" would already have been subverting my expectations.)

My customer was seeking a book he said he'd seen before on our shelves, one he thought was called American Christian Heritage, about the “biblical basis” of our nation's founding documents. He thought the author was David Barton, whom he sees frequently on TV pushing the so-called "originalist" doctrine of Constitutional interpretation.

"Oh, great!" I thought, muttering to myself about "ideologically driven revisionist history."

I usually manage to hide my annoyance over certain research topics, though customers can be good at reading the nonverbals. In this case, though, the guy was openly friendly and curious, so I managed to ignore my political biases and do a professional search.

My usual strategy is to narrate to my customer what I'm doing, with my screen turned so that he or she can watch the process. This helps me to teach customers how online searching is done, as well as to explain why computer searches don't always work very well.

"You and I know what we're looking for, but the computer doesn't know what these words mean. It's just trying to match shapes, and we have to guess which shapes (search strings) will trick it into finding what we need."

This method also takes some pressure off of me, since I'm demonstrating my actual efforts to help the customer.

This time, unfortunately, we found no such title in the catalog, with or without that author name. Nor any similar titles, nor titles with variations on the relevant search terms.

I told my customer I believed he had seen a book with something like that title, but that we would have to search in other ways.

Full disclosure: I could not be a reference librarian without Google and Amazon. How else to cast the net wide enough perhaps to catch something, the name of which the customer doesn't know?

Amazon found fifteen titles by David Barton, all in that realm of "Bible-based" reinterpretation of American history and principles…but nothing like the title my customer was seeking.

We went back to our catalog to search David Barton again, but no luck.

"Oh, well," said the blue-collar guy. "How about Josephus?"

I blinked.

"Um, okay…," I said, hunting up the Dewey numbers for several versions of the Complete Works.

As we started walking back to the 930s, my customer explained that he used not to read at all, but that recently he'd gotten rid of his cable.

"It's fascinating," he said. "There's so much to learn!"

I fell over myself making polite affirmations to cover my surprise.

At the shelves, we looked at several editions, until he found one with print large enough for him to read.

"Thanks a lot!" he said.

"Sure. Thank you."

I walked back toward the desk, noticing how my conceptual boundaries and expectations had shifted.

It doesn't matter if I approve of the sort of reading my customer wants to do. He has chosen to put himself on a path of expanding his own awareness through reading.

If I can't trust that process, I probably should quit being a librarian.

So…am I talking about librarianship as a spiritual discipline?

Could be.