Lots and lots of active Corner readers are librarians (draw your own conclusion about what that says about their workload). We welcome and appreciate them. Nonetheless, I do like this email:
Hi Jonah. As a professional librarian, in both the corporate and the
academic world, for over 17 years I think I can provide you with some
insight into why librarians are so sensitive about their image.
The dirty secret that no ones wants to own up to about this profession
is that it really isn’t a profession at all, certainly not in the way
lawyers or doctors or engineers use the term. It’s more like a trade
that any intelligent 20 year old could be trained to do in 6 months.
Sure, there are a lot of things that you pick up from experience but
the idea that you need a masters degree to do this job is just
ridiculous. But they (ALA, etc.) set up barriers, like the requirement
of a Masters, in order to provide the image that there is more to this
job then their really is. Librarians know this deep down, they
basically have a chip on their shoulders about not being taken seriously
as a profession, so they go out of their way to inflate their importance
to society. Thus we have the ALA’s “Banned Book Week” when in fact any
intelligent person knows full well that there are no banned books in
this country at all. Just because a library doesn’t have a book in its
collection doesn’t make that book banned, but apparently the ALA defines
banned as meaning that someone might have to go on Amazon.com and buy it
themselves. The leftists at the ALA just can’t stand that fact that some
right wing tax payer would have the gall to object to his or her tax
dollars being used to purchase books that they object to (Heather Has
Two Daddies, etc.). What they really object to of course is having
someone question their “professional” judgment. So they use a
deliberately provocative term, banned books, to conjure up images of
Nazis burning books. Likewise, the ALA has to treat the Patriot Act as
some monstrosity that we need them to protect us from in order for them
to be able to portray themselves as important to societies future.. It
is true that we keep circulation records confidential and there are good
reasons for that. But to say that because the FBI or some other law
enforcement agency now has the right to take a look at those (with a
court order I might add) that we are now in some sort of police state
only goes to show how desperate the majority of the “leaders” of this
profession are to maintain the fiction that they are important and
needed gate keepers for society.
Better not post my name with this if you put it on the Corner, this is
traitorous hate speech to this crowd.