What do librarians do, and why does it matter?

Librarians have long had to battle stereotypes about who they are and what they do. Recent years have brought some success. Maybe we don't think of librarians as frowning clerks who check out books to people and tell everyone to be quiet. Maybe we realize that librarians can be fun, sociable, even good looking, and not all of them women. But as long as society thinks of a library first as a warehouse for books and stuff, it will grossly misunderstand what librarians do. It will continue to think of them as some kind of clerk that works somewhere else besides a store and not take them seriously as information professionals.

Librarianship has always been an intellectual and scholarly pursuit. Before the Internet, or for that matter before the printing press, librarians had to know their collection. They had to know what new things to get for it. Besides that, they had to know what other libraries had. The library catalog, in whatever form it takes, describes a library's holdings so that someone reading the description can identify which works they need to look at. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Just to name one example, if an author writes several books, his name may be expressed differently on all of them. At least it's not as bad as it used to be. Suppose I had lived three or four hundred years ago and had written several books. The various title pages might have given my name as David Guion, David M Guyon, David Michael Guionn, D M  Guian, D M G, D G, Gyon, and (since this kind of variation was common centuries ago), a Latin form or two. Suppose further that other books by Daniel Mark Guyenne (with the same variations in full names, initials, spelling, and Latin forms) were also available. 

Librarians had to devise rules to distinguish one person from another regardless of the various forms their names could take. Those rules enabled them to find a single form of a person's name for their catalog that would keep all their works both together and distinct from anyone else's works. Personal names weren't the only puzzles those librarians had to solve, not even necessarily the most difficult. Nowadays, libraries collaborate internationally on devising rules that all libraries use, all so you the patron can go to any library and know to look up the same names, etc. everywhere.  (The authorized form of my name is "Guion, David M., 1948- ")

Besides organizing information in order to describe their collections, librarians have always helped patrons find what they need. That might have been hard enough in a library five hundred years ago that owned fewer than a thousand books. After all, since the beginning of time patrons have not known how to express their questions so librarians can instantly find them just the right book. Even after the question is clear, the librarian must know at least in general which books will have useful information for answering it.

Leaving aside all the things a library collects besides books, not every big collection of books is a library. It could be a bookstore. It could be a warehouse. It could be a hoarder's closet. What makes a library a library is that first, it has librarians who can describe everything in the holdings so others can match the description with what they're looking for. And second, it has librarians who can help people clarify their questions and then help them identify and locate the information they need to find answers. Hmm. A library doesn't even need books at all to be a library, just a staff of these specially educated and highly skilled information professionals.