Week 1: How to ask questions

on things you know nothing about

Given the number of people who have told me that their moms or aunts or second cousins or next-door neighbors were librarians or went to library school or volunteered in their local libraries, very few people have any clue what it is that one actually learns in library school. An even larger number of people have expressed doubt and confusion that library school even exists at all. The number of times I’ve explained that one needs a specialized degree to become a librarian (though there are paraprofessionals who are crucial to libraries’ function), only to be met with utter bewilderment, is distressing.

Librarianship is a field that specializes in specificity for generality. It’s a recommendation list, customer service, tech support; it’s your 411-information line, your newspaper carrier, local seed bank; it’s your book clubs and art groups, your hosts for speakers and researches, story time for the kid you tutored in math on Tuesday afternoons in high school. Effective librarians interface with and teach all age groups. They’re some of our most trusted professions, and use of public libraries has increased in the last decade.

from Adventure Time. Image: Tenor.

Granted, a lot of the most important parts of being a librarian are things you learn on the job, opportunities for which are somewhat difficult to come by. (Notes on the librarian job market to come.) And Librarian Twitter is notorious for decrying all of the things they don’t teach you in library school. So the question remains: what do you learn about being a librarian in a classroom?  

My classroom is currently the sunroom in my parents’ house in New Jersey, where my mom and I share a space heater and periodically check in on the birds who are bizarrely weathering the winter at one of the five (5!) bird feeders she set up in our backyard over the last 11 months. And from here, for the last four weeks, I have begun my foray into my (remote) Masters of Library Science with Indiana University, Bloomington. As of yesterday, I have now started all three of my courses, the third of which was delayed because of Le Pandemique: Information Institutions and their Management, User Services and Tools, and Reference Sources for Rare Books.

I was kind of waffling about writing this newsletter because the first few weeks of Info Institutions and User Services and Tools were kind of hard to summarize—no one wants to read a beat-by-beat account of the management case study I’m writing, though it goes to show that human interaction is genuinely inescapable, even among introverted book people (This is a joke. Book people are so public-facing it is wild. Librarians don’t just read all day! They work with human beings! As do booksellers! I will emphasize this until the inevitable heat death of the universe).

But my first class meeting of Reference Sources for Rare Books yesterday morning helped synthesize my thoughts on what it is that librarians learn and do. Much of library school is learning how to reverse engineer the question-asking process: how do you find information on subjects about which you don’t even know what questions to ask? How you describe what you don’t know?

I ask questions about what I don’t know all of the time—if not to my professors or peers, then certainly of the books that I work with. An easy example from yesterday morning: my colleague and employer at the bookshop where I work part-time has been considering buying a first edition of an early Alice Walker short story collection. It was a bit pricey ($950) but it has a sweet inscription to Howard and Roz Zinn (Howard Zinn wrote A People’s History of the United States, which posits American history as one of greed and manipulation rather than individual tenacity. “Oh Shira,” you are saying to yourself, “Of course you like that book.” Of course I like that book! It’s an important book). Anyways, how did Zinn and Walker know one another? Zinn taught Walker at Spelman College. And then when Zinn was fired for insubordination (for supporting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which Walker was a member), Walker left Spelman. She went to Sarah Lawrence, where, upon settling in, she wrote first to “Howie and Roz.” This was a trend throughout her writing career: she would dash off drafts of poems and send early copies to the Zinns. She and Zinn became colleagues and close friends, appearing at speaking engagements together, and Walker wrote the forward to one of Zinn’s books. It makes sense that she would inscribe a copy of one of her first publications so familiarly to this duo.

So this pair had a close companionship, but little of this information was in the catalogue note describing the copy my boss was interested in. (This is a habit in the book world wherein booksellers will assume that interested buyers already know all of this information, partially because one wouldn’t want to assume ignorance on the part of the buyer by explaining that which they already know (huge faux pas!), and partially because it’s a chip off our shoulder to just ~know~ things. This is not a good habit because it is more often exclusionary than affirming.) But all it took was me asking, “How do Alice Walker and Howard Zinn know one another?”, one Google search, and 30 minutes to get a sense of their deep, abiding friendship. And all of this information not only enriches our understanding of that inscription, it also makes the book more valuable. (I emailed my boss and encouraged her to buy it. She bought it.)

This was an easy example, though, with all of this information readily available online, and none of it directly pertained to the actual content or container of the book (that is, what the book is actually made of and why that might be important). That kind of information—the gritty stuff like the impression v. issue v. state, the number and order of leaves, misprints—is found in bibliographies.

Bibliographies are reference works that document the various instantiations of books. They help collectors, booksellers, and librarians figure out if the copy of a book in front of them matches or differs from the known copies elsewhere. But bibliographies don’t exist for every book or even every kind of book: the more famous and important a book is, the more likely a bibliography has been written on it (there are tons of bibliographies on Shakespeare’s Folios, for example, because we all like Shakespeare for some reason and we want to know how all of the copies compare to one another. Someone remind me to write about Charlton Hinman sometime). And there are bibliographies on bibliographies—lists of books that contains lists of books related to the subjects that you might need more information about. The information you do not yet know how to find. This Reference Sources for Rare Books course (right, that’s how we got here) is designed to teach us how to find the books that will tell us what we need to know about subjects with which we are wholly uninformed. So when we come across an 18th-century German religious tract, or 19th-century North African political documents, or Historical Americana, all of which I know nothing about, I know where I can find information on the books that will tell me more about the books I already have.

This question-asking process applies to both technical services (the stuff librarians do with actual materials, like acquisitions and cataloguing) and user services (the stuff librarians do with users, like reference). In User Services and Tools tonight, we discussed Information Seeking, or what, how, and why people search for information:

• What are a user’s motivations to begin a search process? (Why do they need this information?)

• How has this user compromised their information need? (How have they obscured what they actually want to know based on what they think the systems we use are? Like asking us to search a phone book to find information about the ice cream parlor, presuming that we still use a phone book. Now we’re wondering what is so special about the phone book, when actually they just want the street address, which I can Google.)

• What are the psychological associations with each step of the search process? (Is this first-year college student super overwhelmed with their history assignment? Maybe I…shouldn’t hand them a stack of 9 books and tell them to go read)

• What information must librarians ascertain to assist with the search process?(This is called a reference interview and it’s basically all those probing questions librarians ask when you go to them with extraordinarily vague inquiries so they know what kinds of answers you might accept.)

This information search process is studied pretty extensively because it is the heart of reference work, or helping people find information, whether through direct interaction with a human librarian or through search systems. Astonishingly, even in 1968, the conclusion of one of these articles was “We need more user-centered approaches,” which is exactly what the 2014 article concluded regarding human-centered design. We still feel like we could center the user better in [database design, Website functionality, ease of browsing, whatever may have you]. Libraries are always improving, and we’re always anticipating how people are going to ask questions about the things they don’t know how to ask questions about so that we can better translate those inquiries into a database.

Which brings me back to my management case study, funnily enough: I’ve been struggling all day to find the right sources to support my argument about how a manager should approach xyz issues in her library, and it’s because I don’t know which questions to ask about management. I’ve never had to research management before, so I do not have the vocabulary to plug into a search engine. I asked my professor for help with this, and she suggested that I reframe the “problem definition,” which is basically the question you ask of the case study: “How can Manager B build trust among her staff to improve organizational culture?” Search: trust-building, organizational trust. It’s all about questions.

TL;DR: Week 1 (of this newsletter)/Week 4 of library school. What do you learn in library school? How to ask questions about things you don’t know how to ask questions about. Like I said, approximate knowledge of many things.

This’ll be shorter next week. You can double check by subscribing on Substack.