Copyright 2011 Houston Chronicle March 30, 2011, 8:22PM
If librarians seem distracted these days, you can't blame them. They're worried that they'll lose jobs. As cities, counties, public schools and universities all grapple with recessionary budget cuts, libraries look like low-hanging fruit. In this iEverything age, the thinking goes, books are musty relics. And without books, who needs librarians?
The truth is that we've never needed them more. Every day in this city, librarians do important jobs not strictly related to library science.
They teach senior citizens to use e-mail and show job seekers how to fill out on-line forms. They help middle-schoolers with math homework and urge high-schoolers not to trust everything they read on Wikipedia. They reserve rooms for community meetings. They set up displays. They arrange reading series. They keep cranky microfiche readers running. They read aloud to toddlers.
But as valuable as all those things are, what we need most right now is for librarians to do their core jobs: to serve as information professionals, a job that's harder now than ever before....READ MORE
If librarians seem distracted these days, you can't blame them. They're worried that they'll lose jobs. As cities, counties, public schools and universities all grapple with recessionary budget cuts, libraries look like low-hanging fruit. In this iEverything age, the thinking goes, books are musty relics. And without books, who needs librarians?
The truth is that we've never needed them more. Every day in this city, librarians do important jobs not strictly related to library science.
They teach senior citizens to use e-mail and show job seekers how to fill out on-line forms. They help middle-schoolers with math homework and urge high-schoolers not to trust everything they read on Wikipedia. They reserve rooms for community meetings. They set up displays. They arrange reading series. They keep cranky microfiche readers running. They read aloud to toddlers.
But as valuable as all those things are, what we need most right now is for librarians to do their core jobs: to serve as information professionals, a job that's harder now than ever before....READ MORE