Fishing for Information

"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll feed his family for life," or something to that effect, is a well known saying. I've also heard it as "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.  Teach a man to fish and he'll spend all day in a boat drinking beer."

Be that as it may, the principle is that teaching someone to do for themselves is better in the long run than doing temporary things for people.  I have often thought that it would be better for libraries to spend their resources teaching the great masses of people to do their own searching and making it largely unnecessary to have reference librarians.  I do see, though, that in many ways this is inefficient. Part of the economics of specialization is that it is expensive to maintain a person in training for any length of time.

Each time a system changes, there are retraining costs for users.  If a library has, say, 5 staff members who routinely use databases to search materials for the public, this means every time a major change takes place, 5 people from that organization will need to be apprised. However, if three thousand nearby patrons need to know this, it becomes a logistical problem several orders of magnitude larger. So if fishing is just baiting a hook with a worm and sticking it in a pond (the equivalent of using Facebook for viewing pictures of cats doing funny things), then no extensive training is needed.  But catching a whole school of tuna is several orders of magnitude larger a job, requiring much more extensive equipment and training.  It would not be effective to have a whole bunch of people in rowboats with fishing poles trying to catch a tuna each.

This is not to say that it is not at all effective or reasonable to teach people about using the internet.  A recreational fisherman (my father was an inveterate amateur trout fisherman) can benefit from lessons in the ins and outs of types of bait, lures, and the like.  But there comes a point at which it becomes more efficient to leave it to the experts.  My father just fished for the fun of it -- he would give away his catches or do catch and release, but when it came time to make dinner, frozen fish from the supermarket served the purpose just fine, and no cleaning was required (I think my mother had something to do with that approach).

This is leads me to surmise that once the need for information becomes mission critical or the source is prohibitively expensive or elusive, then it needs the intervention of a professional, a librarian. Give a man a book, he reads for a week.  Give a man a library card, and he reads forever.