What do librarians do?
LOTS of things.
- Traditionally, librarians collect, protect, curate, evaluate, and circulate.
- Today, librarians do many things, in addition to those listed above.
- Tara Lavier is an archivist. She collects and curates items of historical significance.
- Sigrid Kelsey is a subject librarian. Her subjects of expertise include religious studies.
- All librarians are geeks. Technical literacy is a requirement and a part of a librarian's training.
- All librarians are human. Some wear tattoos, some participate in roller derby, others have spouses and families with children, cats and dogs.
- Librarians can make our academic lives a WHOLE lot easier by directing us towards the information resources we need to complete our assigned out-of-class tasks and research projects.
- Academic librarians specialize in academic research. They collect, curate and circulate academic and research materials that have been subject to academic scrutiny and peer review.
- Librarians have a way of directing you toward real, credible, verifiable, and reliable information resources, instead of the useless, consumer-oriented info-mation so often found on the open Internet and at supermarket check-stands.
- When you enter into an academic and research university library such as ours, you are guaranteed access to real, creditable, verifiable, and reliable information resources in our collections, and in our academic and scholarly databases. That's something the open Internet doesn't do.
- Unlike commercial Internet, libraries and librarians don't make it a point to aggregate and disseminate personal information about library patrons to marketers and other 3rd party entities.
- State libraries such is ours are also subject to state law, which has a clear and explicit set of privacy laws. regarding students and library patrons. Privacy is the law. Period. End of sentence.
- So if you check out a book on a certain religious studies topic, no one else will know you have checked out that book, unless you tell them so.
- Librarians and library staff routinely make it a point go beyond state and institutional policies to respect and protect patrons' right to privacy.
- Among other things, you won't likely be contacted by the Perfidious Poobah of the Benevolent Brothers of Bokonon regarding that religious studies book you checked out from an academic and research university library.
- Most scholarly and academic works in religious studies exist in print. There some academic and scholarly journal articles available online from our academic databases, but most works are in print.
- In academic libraries, print materials on religious studies will be classified with the Library of Congress call letter, "B" along with philosophy and psychology.
- These you'll find on the 2nd floor of the Middleton Library Building, in room 241. The stacks are massive, so you'll need a title, call number, and location before you set about looking for an item.
- A number of religious studies professors have done the kindness of putting print materials for their classes on reserve behind the circulation desk in order that all students enrolled in her or his class will have timely and fair access to them in order to complete a required out-of-class assignment.
- On the open Internet you'll find a quantity of information resources, most of it quite useless for academic work. Even Google Scholar is useless.
- In an academic and research library you'll find a quality of information resources, almost all of it with a guarantee that it is useful for academic work.
- While librarians curate collections for non-profit libraries and institutions in the best interests of library patrons and the public at largel, Google.com curates searches -- towards Internet items that will generate them a profit and not necessarily in your best interests.
- Works found online on the open Internet are not required to have been subjected to academic scrutiny and peer review. They are academically useless.
- Academic and scholarly works found in academic and research university libraries collections ARE verified by such scrutiny and criteria. These works are verified, credible, and reliable.
- Librarians and library staff enjoy finding things and organizing them.
- We also love to show-off what we found and organized, and we love to help our patrons.
Subject Guides to Manuscripts in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections
Thanks Robert! Very helpful!
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