Before Google, there was the reference librarian

I bought my first house three years ago and have been sharing notes with my dad about home ownership. This is a big thing that came up.

He went to the library and borrowed books about how to do various handyman stuff. They typically had pencil drawings and instructions. I go on YouTube and watch, in HD, ten different people actually do the task. One constant though: chatting up the employees at the hardware store.

My grandfather once told a story of when he was 14 or 15 one summer, stopping by a construction site and asking a guy if he could come in and just watch people work. As the story went, the foreman decided he can watch in the morning but he has to work in the afternoon. And he did just that. He said he watched a lot of framing and then carried lumber and fetched tools for four hours. They offered to pay him something like $2 a day to come back so he did for a few weeks until my great grandmother learned of it. He always liked to comment on two things: 1) how they just trusted him to show up after lunch that first day. 2) that you can curry an incredible amount of favour by doing the crappy jobs with energy.

I like that story because it imbued in me a characteristic that I further developed in university: the comfort to go up to someone and say, “would you teach me about that?” (seriously, do not underestimate how much anyone loves talking about their job.)

Reference Librarians still exist, and google is not going to do a reference interview and help you access licensed resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_interview

My grandmother's best friend was a librarian, so I got a lot of encouragement growing up to make use of library services.

I remember calling the local library dozens of times for school reports. The local library wasn't where my grandmother's friend worked, so I wasn't getting any preferential treatment. To them I was just another random eight-year-old ringing them up to ask questions.

They were always delightfully eager to help with obscure questions about geology and history and science, running off to grab books while I waited, slowly reading me facts and passages while I took notes. They'd set aside books for me to check out later in the week, with bookmarks already placed in the sections where they thought I'd be most interested.

As much as I love the instant access to information we have nowadays, I feel a sense of loss over kids missing out on that shared human sense of enthusiasm and encouragement from working with a person who enjoys feeding childrens' curiosity.

> You could probably answer all of these trivially with a quick query on your favorite search engine. But it hasn’t always been that way. In the old days...

you can get an Amazon link with some counterfeit or fly by night product and a bunch of knucklehead reviewers saying stuff like "the black cable was indeed black!" and "it took long to ship!", or you can go to the local store that sells all the electronics stuff you need in some subcategory, which you would likely already know. also depending on what you want to look up, google will give you an invalid state approved answer (coming soon)

>If you wanted to find out about a particular IC in the old days, the best thing to do was to find the manufacturer’s data book. If you were in a school or a company, there might be what you wanted in the library.

...and today you get some shithead's 3rd party website with a bunch of pdfs from god knows where encoded into web page slide shows with google captchas

I used to spend a lot of nights after work in the reference room of the Boston Public Library in the 1980's. They closed at 9pm, but until then they would get phone calls from guys in bars to settle arguments. I think of them every time I'm out with people and I check my phone to settle a debate.

One time the Boston Globe was running a contest which gave daily clues to the identity of a famous Bostonian. Most were trivially easy, but I happened to be there one night when I would hear them pick up the phone and just say "Melnea Cass" and hang up, over and over again. This was before the street was named after her.

They still exist - going to the public library with my children looks like 'Hi! We're looking for books about x and y and z. What do you suggest?'. The librarian stops, thinks for a minute, and comes back a minute later with a pile of books, and starts explaining why they're great. Google doesn't do this, and I haven't found a good recommendation site for children's books (not in English!).

With the dismal quality of search engines being a relatively common topic on HN, I could definitely see the role of reference librarian seeing a resurgence, with a stronger focus on internet based resources.

My mother is a reference librarian. Morale has fallen at the library in recent years due to lower foot traffic. COVID has exacerbated this. It’s become so boring for the reference staff in 2021 and 2022 that she’s probably retiring early.

Knowing that self-help online services are being used is not enough of a consolation for people whose calling is working with people and information at the same time.

If you live near a library you would probably make them happy by coming in and trying to find something specific.

Before search engines, my childhood was filled with Funk and Wagnall encyclopedia sets. Most family arguments were settled with them, and thus it spurred my love for learning, and to win more household debates I would just sit and read the Funk and Wagnalls.

The library was awesome too, but you had to be there, usually at school, and most of the time you had to do your own index searches.

Once I got my hands on the internet it was a brave new world.

can highly recommend the old movie "desk set", whose protagonists are reference librarians threatened with being replaced by a computer.

Let us not forget those days when Father would come into the drawing room bringing news of recipes, jokes and stories found on The Internet, and all the family would gather around... we had Alta Vista, Lycos, Ask, Excite, InfoSeek (and Google). And before that Grandfather told us stories of Gopher.

Gopher still works, and I believe is ready for an update soon.

wow that thomasnet is a useful website, ive been trying to find what kind of color filters exist and what characteristics they can have and it gets me some nice spectral output graphs

https://abrisatechnologies.com/optical-coatings/color-correc...

i feel like this type of search engine would provide more variety than google which is more of a "the one answer". need more meta articles like this

I'm not eager for the good old days back but what I miss is the structure of these reference works and the curation. With Google et. al. I may get the answer but there is a real risk of missing context.

I'm fortunate enough to know a librarian that also knows me well.

If he says to me "I think you should read it" I pretty much know that I'm up for a really enjoyable read. His recommendation are spot on.

There was Altavista ;-)

Or a good understanding of the Dewy Decimal System