Myron

I took an online multimedia class – I’ll never take an online class again. The professor got his PhD in TX studying.. Second Life. I actually that kiss of death art degree, so I took the class as an easy A. It was. Because the professor didn’t actually show up to comment or lecture. One week he went to a tech conference and couldn’t get online to give us our assignment. AT A TECH CONFERENCE THERE WAS NO INTERNET. He told us everyone gets an A for trying. I made the worst crap I’ve ever made on purpose, no feedback and an A. No one knew any better, I’d secretly email people when they mispronounced a word in their presentation videos that was specific to multimedia to save them future embarrassment. He made 3 “lectures” of 20 min each and that was it. For $2000 in state tuition. And he kept telling everyone to use Fireworks. My friend and I started thinking he got a commission. Who uses Fireworks when you have Photoshop and Illustrator? Fireworks is for web graphics, not print!

I have a lot more complaints including projects that utilized statistics that libraries don’t keep so we all had to make it up, sexist professors (toward women)- one laughed in my face at a serious question. I had to email someone in the Princeton Library to get an answer. However, I could go on and on.

Students can’t demand more. What are we going to do? Complain to the dean? They know it’s going on, it will only come back to bite us in the ass in our grades. We’re there for 2 years and then out.

There’s nothing we can do, but keep our mouths shut, take it, get our degree, and get out of there.

Jack may or may not be an expert on how to find all kinds of information, but few others are. He may or may not be able to write a good, professional research paper, but few others can. Even if he can, he does not have a breadth of knowledge in every specific domain, is not going to spend all of his time giving other people guidance and instruction on how to find the specific kinds of information they need, and is not going to catalog, store, and maintain millions of books and journals a year and provide facilities and services so that people like him can conveniently access them.

“Well I find the “accurate” information”. Well congrats!

I easily do the same searching that sheep-skinned librarians do. Why? Because I got some simple training and practice. I also find the “accurate” information as well. I just dont get paid an over-inflated salary and moan about being scammed because I wasnt smart enough to read up on the job prospects of a degree path before I blew money on it.

So yes, you indeed need better PR people if you are going to keep duping the public or whomever into thinking that you are these amazing intellectuals and indispensable “information ninjas”, because the public is quickly catching on that what you do is not rocket science.

FYI, I have made that same observation when the annual list of the top 10 most challenged books comes out. They don’t give the numbers. The reality is the numbers are so low the list would not be newsworthy in the slightest. In 2010 the top book was challenged, all year, all across the USA, a whopping 4 times. Oh the text said dozens of times, but that was fluff; it was just 4. Top of the list of 10 books was challenged only 4 times. Big deal. People challenge anything these days, like law schools with misleading job placement statistics. That doesn’t make it newsworthy.

And the ALA doesn’t even count crimes in libraries, or numbers of librarians filing sexual harassment suits, etc. If you don’t count them, they don’t exist. Isn’t that a Six Sigma standard? “Measure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data.” Not measuring key aspects means you’re not interested in collecting data — that’s way we all hear the total number of challenges each year and nothing about library crimes affecting librarians–or about library jobs–they reveal what they care about and what they could care less about. Us librarians (I’m a volunteer one), they could care less about us being harmed on the job, but they need us to submit book “banning” incidents. Those books, every last one has to be counted, and in the aggregate, but not revealed in the annual top 10 list.

So if ALA is not providing job placement statistics, it simply means they don’t care.