Your Humble Blogger works in a library, but is not a librarian. I am a clerk. I like being a clerk. It’s fairly likely that I will become an actual librarian, just because of the money and the job security, but for the moment, the job I have is the one I want.\n
As an example of the difference between what I do and what a librarian does, imagine a college student who comes to the desk and says Where are books about the Civil War?<\/i> My job is not to tell the student where books about the Civil War can be found; my job is to tell that student where the reference desk is. The librarian’s job is to explain to that student why that is the wrong question, and help that student figure out what the right questions are.\n
I mean, I could find books about the Civil War. I could find probably find them in fifteen different parts of the library. There’s American History, of course, and World History (not irrelevant), and then there’s Military Science downstairs (divided, actually, into Army and Navy, both helpful), there’s Art, there’s Photography, there’s Literature, there’s Economics, Law or Medicine (and Nursing, nearby), probably Education, likely Agriculture, probably Science and Technology as well. And it turns out that shipwrecks (and salvage) are a subset of Geography. There’s probably books all over that at least touch on the Civil War, and I would guess most of those sections would have at least one book that focuses on it.\n
(The American Civil War of the 1860s, of course; not Civil War more generally, but it turns out that the student in question was, in fact, referring to that conflict, as I figured.)\n