Ask a Librarian | Hacker News Reader

Ask a Librarian

ask.loc.gov

176 pointsTomte34 comments

I've been married to a qualified Librarian for 20 years and I can say first hand that it's not about the information, but the skills required to find it. You and I can spend hours trying to hunt down a worthy well cited resource on a topic, whereas a good Librarian can find it in minutes. Then there's the cross referencing skills, the cataloguing skills, the ability to digest information and produce an accurate summary... It's a whole heap of data and information management skills not just confined to books.

Being a Librarian is one of the world's oldest professions, and technology is a long way off replacing them.

Also, support your local library!

> it's not about the information, but the skills required to find it

Absolutely, and I'll add that it's about finding high-quality information. Anyone can find stuff of unknown provenance and accuracy in a moment, but finding accurate, valuable (expert) knowledge often is impossible or exceptionally time-consuming, and often I lack the expertise to evaluate what I'm reading.

I'll just throw an idea out here: I'd love a search engine built by librarians, only of credible, valuable sources. I don't mean recreating a curated listing of links, like old Yahoo, but a curated search index built of only credible sites: For example, Nature, Science, the NY Times Science section, and the like (other journals, etc.), not influencers blogging and YouTubing their opinions (that includes excluding Hacker News), or even casual blogs of experts. Yes, you'd miss some things, but I usually don't need to see everything, just something - imagine doing a search and knowing everything you find will be credible, expert information. (It could also be a big help with the disinformation curse.)

Is it feasible? I think yes: The curators would only have to make decisions site-by-site, not article-by-article, and only once for each site. Most high-credibility sites in any field are well-known, at least to practitioners, and there aren't that many of them.

I think the main problem with this approach is the UX: that all the things we want useful information to be are pretty hard to do in a text search phrase: What makes librarians so great is that you don't walk up and just say "Byzantine empire tax rates" to them, you have a conversation about what you're trying to do, with tons of context, and all their amazing experience.

Google Scholar? https://scholar.google.com

Good point and I do use it, but it's not a good match for these purposes and especially for the general public:

It's limited to scholarly papers and those have limited domains (in topics and in currency of information - limited current events, for example). Also, GS omits much that is high quality, even the news sections of Nature and Science (and other journals, I expect), the NY Times news, the BBC news (not the opinion sections), Consumer Reports, online exhibitions from credible institutions (e.g., Smithsonian), research from credible think tanks, etc. Finally, availability, accessibility and quality are poor: GS requires much more effort than standard search engines to obtain applicable search results and then to obtain the papers, many scholarly papers can be difficult to read for general audiences, and without expertise it is difficult for people to distinguish fringe papers from one person from consensus from laws of nature.

In my vision, scholarly papers would be listed in a separate box in the UI, for people who want to read them and to remind everyone else that they are available. I'm afraid if the general public got search results that had some papers at the top, it would turn them off.

I can easily say that my life was changed by the reference librarian at the public library branch near my home in Camp Springs Maryland. She was the first person I had met in my young life who seemed to actively enjoy finding out new things like I did and I could never bring a topic to her where she could not overload me with material to check out and take home and read or listen too. She even arranged to have a NASA training film on robotics screened in their multipurpose room because at that time I seriously felt that being an astronaut was my dream job and I was looking for information on what I could study/learn/do to become an astronaut.

The internet is great and all, but nothing beats talking with a librarian for finding solid information on a subject.

> You and I can spend hours trying to hunt down a worthy well cited resource on a topic, whereas a good Librarian can find it in minutes.

This is kind of a silly question, but do just say to a librarian something like, "I'm looking for a book on implementing compilers." And they'll give you some? And when you finish those, can you say "Wow, I really liked so-and-so book, and I'm especially interested in so-and-so optimization. Do you know any books on that?" I've basically always worked out what I needed on my own, so I'm not sure how to talk to librarians.

Yes, and they'll find the authoritative books. Of course a general reference librarian is most helpful to a general audience. If you are a professional developer, you want a specialist reference librarian, for example, one in computer science.

IME the specialist librarians are generally at university libraries, but they will answer respectful questions from the public up to a point (they aren't going to do a research project for you), especially those in public universities. For example, I was looking for a history of a specific time period of a certain country. There were books available, but I couldn't discern the credible from the nonsense, the fringe from the consensus from the advocate for a specific theory or cause, etc. I emailed the specialist librarian for that region of the world at an Ivy League school; they had a PhD from Yale in the field, and of course could immediately tell me everything I wanted to know, and even generously shared more recommendations.

I think their skill lies in being able to filter the entire library's contents down to a handful of best guesses. If you ask them "give me all the books whose main topic is compilers", you might have too large of a result set, and maybe they would prompt you for a more specialized keyword that they can use to further narrow down the results.

I suppose it is better than brute-forcing an entire shelf of books :)

it would work about as well as asking the old Radio Shack staff for help.

I’ve thought that it’s a mistake for me to try to learn information management from programmers. They seem to mostly have a bunch of code-solutions to those problems but don’t really have much insight into the workflows and mindset that is needed to truly handle information in a good and principled way (it seems that they often just want to manage their personal notes).

Maybe that doesn’t make sense. So here’s an analogy: if you wanted to type really fast, who would you ask: a programmer or a stenographer? Sure, the programmer might have the income and idle inclination to invest in fancy keyboards and to spend some time on text/code snippet management, but the stenographer is the only one of the two who really has to be able to type fast in order to be able to do their job.

I started an information management course on Coursera, hoping that I could apply some of that stuff to my own interests. However I aborted it since it didn’t seem relevant to me.

Would have been nice to learn how to properly organize information. Maybe I should start with organizing physical documents.

I've been married to a librarian for 28 years and concur with everything you've said.

She is in charge of digital services and staff training in our public library service, two things that changed pretty rapidly in the last eighteen months with branches being shut, then open, then shut but you can shove loans out the door, to open, then shut again, etc, etc.

From our dining room table she has been single-handedly[1] orchestrating postal deliveries of loans and access to all sorts of digital resources. During our extended lockdowns people said receiving a box of books, DVDs and such in the mail was like Christmas.

Many of us have a passion for technology, but she loves technology because it helps her in her passion for the community.

[1] I say single-handedly in jest because she had a dislocated wrist last year. There was huge coordination of many staff and services to make it all happen. It sounds good, though.

Technology is probably 10 years away from replacing them.

Google has deteriorated over the past 10 years. I think that librarians will remain relevant.

As long as their first 10 suggestions aren’t paid adverts. They could also sell your search history, or track what you read.

Library resources are the best information finding tools that hardly anyone uses. I frequently see even grad students who should know better futility trying to google for relevant academic papers.

Use the subject headings! They are assigned by real humans who actually understand the content! It's night and day vs whatever web search engines are doing these days. If you have never used these kinds tools before to discover new information, give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised.

It's incredibly refreshing for every result to be a long form exploration of the topic instead of mindless clickbait copied from Wikipedia intro sections.

I'm a grad student and I don't know what you are talking about. The local library software is not better than Google Scholar, in fact it's only good when you know what you want to find already and there is a paper version in some of the libraries of the university (top-3 of the country). Otherwise GS and Sci-hub are doing the job very fine.

The parent comment says that, of all the information-finding tools that hardly anyone uses, library resources are the best, not that library resources are the best information-finding tools; there's no contradiction between what the two of you have noticed.

I think you misunderstood one or both of the comments. The original commenter was saying that for certain use cases, the library tools are far superior to typical web search tools. Then the other commenter was saying they disagree, saying that the library tools are only good if you know exactly what you want, and how they prefer Google Scholar.

Maybe there is more to it that you're missing?

I wanted to come and say the same thing

The LoC is great, and so is your local library! Public and Academic libraries all have some kind of "Ask A" service. They are a great resource!

Immediate thought I have after reading through some of the comments:

Sheesh! How many of us (myself included) are partnered to librarians. =)

If your question is history-related, /r/AskHistorians is great too:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

this has to be the most heavily moderated sub I have ever seen. all the comments show as deleted .

It is, but at the same time - when you get an answer, you can be sure it is of a high quality.

Try looking at some older posts that have had time to accumulate high quality responses. The “remind me later” and Weekly Review features work quite well, if you have a Reddit account.

My wife's mother was a head librarian and 'Ask a Librarian' is her motto. Thanks for the link.

Research is an art top libraries are best at.

Many years back, I wanted to write-up an old, long-OOB publisher I was curious about. The internet Schultzed me - "I know nothing, nothing!"

Then I remembered how helpful 'Ask NYPL' (still exists) had once been in the past (when I'd called their 1-800 number with a question about where to find instruction.)

The publisher question took a while. NYPL weren't able to find a lot on the business but what they did find was key pieces - a business address and a clue that led to the author/owner's -real- name. Following up on that, the puzzle was soon (mostly) unlocked as a result. (Time's passage rubs out many details.)

For those interested in Linguistics, there is also Ask a Linguist

https://askaling.linguistlist.org/questions/

I have a question: Librarians are fiercely protective of reading privacy, and don't want to hand the information on who borrowed which book to the police. Yet they still record that information. Why? Wouldn't it be better to, for example, require a cash deposit equal to the value of the borrowed books, possibly in the form of some token? And if some books were too expensive, you'd still have the option of presenting some personally-identifiable ID. But the record of what you borrowed would be destroyed after you returned the book.

Most libraries do not record that information once material is returned. See SFPL:

> 10. The Library does not maintain a history of what a library user has previously checked out once books and materials have been returned on time4.

> 11. When fines accrue on a user's account, the Library does maintain records of items that have been borrowed but returned after the due date, or are still outstanding on the user's record. When overdue materials are returned and all associated fines are paid, the information associated with the library card number is deleted.

> 4 Library users may choose to opt in and enable My Check-out History. By doing so library users choose to give explicit consent to the storage of their Check-out History from the opt-in date. Library personnel will not access or release Check-out History unless required by law to do so. Library users may opt out of this service and delete Check-out History at any time. (Noted - November 30, 2011)

https://sfpl.org/about/privacy-policy#text-40586

A hot-tip: if you live in a town/city with a university, it can be highly worthwhile to subscribe to the faculty library of a topic of your interest. These faculty libraries tend to have far more valuable references.

I pay a paltry 20 euros (!) as a yearly subscription for the local university's Arts&Philosophy faculty library. It gives me access to some outstanding books that are often very expensive. I was delighted when I accidentally discovered the facility to this subscription.

This was a suggestion in the last issue of the Recomendo newsletter (https://www.getrevue.co/profile/Recomendo/issues/ask-a-libra...), which is full of these kind of tips.

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