What I do for a living

I confess, I'm pretty excited to have the day off tomorrow. Contrary to popular belief, librarians don't really sit around all day reading books. Especially when they aren't really librarians, they are reference archivists.

So what do I do all day, you ask? I answer questions. (Moms everywhere can sympathize). All day, day in and day out, my job is to answer all the questions that people can come up with. If I'm lucky, 1 in 10 of them can be answered with Google. But in most cases, if they could google the answer, they wouldn't be asking me. Information Professionals: Smarter than Google.* I also can't answer them by looking in a book. (Books. Those are for libraries). I have to check in 3 or 4 different collections - non-indexed, not word searchable, and sometimes handwritten. On paper, or even crazier, microfilm.

It has gotten to the point that I've developed a mental twitch every time someone walks into the Reference Room or I get a new email. Deep inside my brain, I have this tiny moment of panic as I ponder what it is I'm going to have to know the answer to in the next 5 minutes.

Actually, the in person interactions aren't too bad. Essentially, I show them the catalog, give them some pointers on how to search, and get them searching on their own. (Unless they don't know how to use computers. That's a whole different ball game). The tricky part is that there's no time to figure out an answer. You really do have about 30 seconds to come up with something, and in archival research, you don't get answers in 30 seconds. Usually, you don't even get them in 30 minutes.

Online questions, on the other hand, give you some time to figure out an answer. The drawback is, you also have to do all the research. And when most questions are going to take a couple hours of research, and you get about 20 a week, it doesn't leave much time for anything else. And some of these questions! Honestly, they astound me sometimes. The longer I do this job, the more I realize that of the 7.347 billion people on earth, I think I understand where about 50 of them are coming from. We get some very strange questions. And we answer them as best we can. It's what we do.

Like I say, I don't hate what I do. There is something really satisfying about unraveling an information mystery: you dig a little here, then follow a lead there, which sends you to another place with a tiny bit of information, and after checking a dozen different places, you finally put the whole puzzle together. And the whole time you are picking up random little tidbits that you never would have found out otherwise.** But sometimes, you just need a break, even from the fun world of archives.

*I'm trying to sell people on this as a motto. So far, no luck.
**Most of which you'll never use again, but occasionally they do come in handy. Like the time someone wondered why spring break was in February and I actually knew the answer.