Such a sad comment. Please don’t slam an institution, which you proudly proclaim you know nothing about, just because you don’t like a program.

In a professional realm, however, those results are similar to how a PhD Earth Scientist would react if you have him the Fifth grade level curriculum results on the structure of the earth. Yes, it is similar to the diagram he has on his office wall, but his diagram contains a PhD level of knowledge about the interior of the earth and it’s at the current theorectical level of understanding, not the level of understanding that is sooooo very ten or twenty years ago.

Academic librarians are the “professional” researchers in the profession – and even then, due to the brevity of the research being conducted on many campuses, the general librarians are about as good as public librarians. If your are at a rich university, you might have a librarian assigned to you [oh we researchers wish!!] who is current ont he knowledge int eh field and automatically reads everythign on the subject as it comes in off the wire – and only forwards the good stuff. What’s good? Well, that tells you how well proficient a research librarian must be in the field in order to gain the trust and respect of the respective research fields.

In most cases though, the research technicians/specialists in some labs and those sstudents who are acutally working hard [they're typically fellows, cum laude, honors students, never had an A- in their life sort of people] might as well be called research librarians, as many of them have a better working knowledge of the resources in their subject at the library than the very academic librarians themselves have. Been there, done that. It’s not a bad thing though, for on a truly competant campus where the subjects have real reputable academic acclaim, there really is no need for research lirbarians in the first place. Part of being a researcher is having a solid foundation in research principles in the first place.
Otherwise, librarians are there to keep materials on the shelf [library technician jobs] and keep the building doors manned and open – and solicit money and research grants for library science, of course!!! It’s good for academic libraries to have a couple staff on had to police policies, give directions on how to use the copy machines, fix the computers, put paper in the printers, and give the “once upon a freshman” class on reseach methods.

But even that last part is unnecessary as well – every Freshamn class I took had a “research methods” component within it, usually delivered within the first couple weeks, where we all went to the library and conducted research for a project. And it was very typical that the person teaching us how to use the library was not the librarians, but rather the professor of the class and the grad assistants. It’s surprising how easy it is to gain a relative level of competancy in library science…aha.aha.aha…

As my old boss said, Leave the library OUT of it!!!

I’ve seen cars with “Elon University” stickers on the rear window.

Then again, I’ve also seen cars with “Starfleet Academy” ones too…

Maybe you’re onto something.

Can we blame them? Look at the attention it has gotten them. If you can’t be a great research library, throw a great party.

This year the rave is a planned homecoming event. Last year I surmise it was also planned as pizza was served.

See, the library is fun, boys and girls!

Making sweeping generalizations about academic libraries (like this entire blog entry is full of and I just did deliberately above – as a sarcastic example)is a waste of time here.

I think LJ would do better to have a Blogger who is willing to take the time to be a little more thoughtful and accurate with their comments.

Most Academic librarians have a mission because they are working in a library that is *required* to exist for the purpose of accreditation. Even the tiniest school needs to provide library services. And believe you me, if academic libraries were not required to exist, in many lousy little schools with nearsighted presidents, they would most certainly *not* exist!