I Love Being a Librarian

Presumably I chose the career of "librarian" because I saw it as a good fit for my personality on some level. And I totally did. But I am only just now realizing how utterly perfect it is, for me, to be a librarian.

Either that or the combination of reading mountains of scholarly LIS research and YA dystopian novels and science fiction has warped my brain.

I had some vague hope that as a doctoral student I would be able to put together my divergent interests, which in competing for my limited time were causing me to be hopelessly overbooked. (I still struggle with overbooking, but I'm working on it. Old habits...)

Specifically, I wanted to merge my librarianing and storytelling worlds, because I love storytelling and I'm kind of going to keep doing it whether I have time for it or not. This is playing out. I'm immersed in a storytelling research project right now and I've cleverly managed to combine finding a new story to tell with a class assignment.

I remember a time when I was a young child and I wanted to be all the things. I was going to be a ballerina and a clown and an astronaut and a mom. I maybe never really outgrew that. I still want to do a lot.

And then I was going to be an astronaut for a long time. That is still a big part of who I am. There is a reason I have a growing body of personal stories that start, "Both my parents are scientists..." (Well-liked stories, by the way. Apparently people can relate.)

This is where the unlikely intersection of ALL my interests in library science gets almost eery. I am seeing science fiction come true. I didn't even realize how much that would mean to me.

Okay, now stick with me. I read an article about how search engines treat yes-no questions. The findings of the article suggest that search engines tend to rank websites that will answer "yes" higher than those that will answer "no." And, people tend to show a preference for the "yes" results. AND if people look at more than one website, it is to confirm, not challenge, what they learned from the first one they looked at. All of this put together adds up to people actually getting a lot of wrong answers. [White, R. (2013.) Beliefs and biases in web search. SIGIR '13. 3-13]

One of the ways search engines know how they are doing is by paying attention to what people click on. Basically, because of our search behaviors, we have told the search engines to lie to us.

And then, all of the sudden, I realized I read about this. This past summer I read I Robot and in one of the chapters a robot with an anomaly that allows him to read minds tells people what they want to hear instead of the truth. He can read their minds, so he knows the answer they want. And the first law of robotics says that he must not harm humans. He views making them unhappy as harming them. In the end he is confronted by two people at once, and unable to please them both, goes crazy.

Asimov says, in the intro to the book I used to share my with 3rd grade classes when we talked about science fiction, that if scifi authors get it wrong it is not because they go too far, but because they don't go far enough. Who knew the robots would live in the cloud?

On our latest drive to Georgia (To surprise my mom for her birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom!) I listened to the BBC radio version of Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. One character is obsessed with both computers and music. He sees patterns in all data, in the whole universe, and sees music as this beautiful representation of the patterns.

The library world can be divided into systems and users. I have a definite user bias, but I can get my science fix from the systems side. And Adams has reminded me that there really is no difference. Both sides make beautiful music.