We Need Librarians Today More Than Ever

How an ancient profession stays on top of the digital age.

Information overload might feel like a modern issue, as it coincides with the cultural integration of social media information sources like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat — not to mention seemingly ancient sources like email and blogs. While it might feel like a new phenomenon, concern about information overload is as old as humanity. Centuries before the internet became part of our daily routine, people complained about dealing with too much information to manage efficiently. The human brain can only remember a finite amount of material, and we can only manage a handful of information sources at a time. Therefore, it’s only natural that we need systems for labelling, storing, and retrieving almost everything that we create or consume.

For centuries, librarians fulfilled this function, at least for materials that were made available for common use. Public and academic librarians built labels for describing books, installed shelves for holding those books, and constructed catalogs for locating which book was on which shelf. These activities were intended to ensure that visitors to the library could easily locate and manage information.

No one was expected to know where each item of information was located. Rather, the crucial knowledge for a library user lay in understanding how to use the library’s retrieval system, whereas the crucial obligation for the librarian was to explain how these systems worked and to improve them over time. This was an effort to alleviate information overload — people needed the skill set to find information, but they did not need to retain unnecessary details in their already overloaded brains.

As long as information exists, information overload will be a concern. So, for a librarian in today’s digital culture, the unique challenge is not solving information overload, but managing it. There are three vital ways that librarians are engaged in improving our digital culture: seeking to increase access to popular e-books as well as the results of scientific research that are published online; determining reliable information in an era of “alternative facts”; and ensuring that online data and web sites are available in the future, in as stable and reliable a manner as books on a shelf are today. Just as they addressed information overload by building an organized collection of printed books, modern librarians are leading efforts on all these digital fronts.

Increasing Access

Libraries have always been at the forefront of the effort to democratize information, as their entire purpose is to provide everyone with access to free, unbiased, quality information whether they can afford it or not. The underlying rationale is that enabling an informed community allows people to make thoughtful decisions about everything from personal finance to political affairs. Ability to pay should not determine who enjoys this privilege. In the librarian’s world view access to authoritative information is a right and not a luxury.

In everyday practice this means that a librarian purchases resources on behalf of a community whose members can then access them for free. For example, a librarian might purchase 20 copies of a popular book to serve a community of several thousand patrons. Systems of defined check-out periods and waiting lists ensure that the book circulates to everyone who wishes to read it, as long as some people are willing to wait.

From a publisher’s perspective, this means only 20 books are sold, as opposed to the hundreds more that could have been sold if everyone bought it individually. To mitigate these losses the library acts as an advertising vehicle for these books, often through author readings at the library and other promotional events. In some cases, these efforts drive publisher sales, and always increase awareness of the availability of new books.