You make some fair points. At the same time, who is more haughty and disrepesctful than someone who brands all librarians as people who have “failed at everything in life?”

Again, unless AL is willing to lump herself into that category of people who have failed at everything in life, she needs to keep in mind that whining endlessly about one’s job does not count as an actual achievement.

And if you have a PhD in English, congratulations. You might not have a very marketable resume, but earning a PhD is nonethless a much bigger achievement than creating a blog so you can call people names and bitch about your job.

I happen to agree. While it may take some training to be a librarian, it does not take an over amount of intelligence to be one. That is why this field is full of people that are Liberal Arts majors that cannot find real jobs. In fact, a Bachelors in the Liberal Arts is nothing more than a glorified high school diploma. If these haughty people were so brilliant, why are they not engineers or doctors?

Now that you have insulted everyone in the field, perhaps you can enlighten us about what it is that YOU have achieved that separates you from the rest of us who have “failed at everything in life.”

As far as I can tell, your signal achievement is that you are really good at bitching about your job.

Meanwhile, smaller and small budgeted libraries cannot afford to send anyone to the conferences so their needs and concerns are rarely addressed, and if they are it is with a pat on the head and piece of candy in the hand so they will disappear and won’t bother the grown ups anymore.

Well, kids grow up around small time libraries and that is where they get their basic ideas formed. If what they see are a couple of terminals hooked up to the internet and a wii there for gaming night, guess what?

By the time they hit college, they won’t need the high and haughty librarians. They will avoid the ivory towers with a vengeance and find what they need elsewhere.

Luckily for you, you will be sitting on your boat in Florida looking forward to the Blue Plate Dinner special.

@Rev Ike… I agree… conferences, to a degree, are ra-ra sessions. I really hate going to the “yes we can!” presentations, or theory “this will be so great in the future!” sessions. I want stuff that’s worked, and I want the nuts and bolts of both the circumstance that your solution solved, and how it solved it. I haven’t been a librarian long by most standards, but I’m acutely aware of the PR and BS that goes on at those things. I find I learn more sitting in the lobby talking to people anyway.

I think I’m not entirely jaded, just jaded enough to realize there’s a place where potential and reality meet and that people go on and on about the potential of projects, but are just doing it because “that would be awesome!” instead of there being a real need to fill. I’m seeking style over substance from both the “for lifers” who’re just marking time until retirement, and the “wouldn’t it be awesome if”-ers who see the library as a playground like some media lab in their university. There *has* to be some place in between, right? Where people actually contribute to the profession in a meaningful way, right??? RIGHT!? *crosses fingers*

I look forward to conference time. Then, the deadwood is out of the library gone off to rub elbows with celebs like AL.

Once they are gone, we can get work done without them coming around with half-baked lame ideas.

Sadly, they return from these conferences full of themselves, full of martinis, full of importance, and full of more even lamer quarter-baked ideas that they don’t understand and think that they can be implemented in a system that they really don’t understand.

Basically, they come back full of shit.

And we are here with lysol and paper ready for them.