So, I'm getting my MLS. Yeah! In about a year and a half, I will be a full member of the librarian club, which means that I get to talk to other librarians about what they think.

This is the problem: librarians, especially academic librarians, are annoyed by how late students come to them. Students have these amazing research projects and then, one night before its due, they 'stroll in' and expect the librarians to pull off some kind of miracle.

So, I just so happened to be talking to a friend of mine about libraries and librarians. I think she mentioned a project she was doing and I said, "Well, if you start out by asking the librarians, they can give you a ton of resources to get started on your research". "I don't know" she replied, "my parents always taught me that it was lazy to not do my own research."

I gaped. It was not as if my parents taught me something different. I always knew I had to do my own work, it was just that... getting a ton of resources on a certain topic was never part of that equation. If you want to know more about paleontology, you ask a paleontologist, if you want to know more about getting a job, you ask an employer, if you want to know about anything else, you ask a librarian and she will look it up. In fact, looking it up is hardly even giving away the answer, you still have to read the resources and decide if they are what you're looking for.

But it did give me pause to think: do people librarians avoid librarians because they don't want to look lazy?

I tend to avoid asking librarians more because I have an aversion to asking for help. I will probably keep this entry in mind though if I have a big research project I'm not finding helpful resources for...
» randomjunk on 2013-05-04 10:30:27

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