Do librarians read?

It’s perhaps an understandable misconception that librarians are always reading books, and/or that their jobs somehow requires them to read books. But actually reading books — let’s say for pleasure — is incidental.  Or even coincidental.

For a moment, though, let’s set aside the reading time required to read books and book-like things that contain many pages — let’s say, things over 200 pages – aka monographs.  Reading monographs takes time.  You’re on your honour.  No tl;dr. No cheating. Well, of course there are ways you can reduce the time and we all do it — for example, pick up a book of essays. Repurposed/repackaged blog posts.  Big fonts.  Lots of white space. Wide margins.  Number of pages.  Thick paper. If we start getting bored or bogged down in excess, there’s always skimming, which technically is allowed.  But to be considered “reading a book”, let’s assume next-to-no skimming and no skipping of chapters.  Fine then. I wear my reading heart on my sleeve. 

Well, what about short things like articles? Professional articles?

In the recent past, articles published in the professional literature were read, circulated among colleagues, intellectually absorbed, discussed.  We professional librarians added penciled-in annotations, usually initialled (to identify author of the annotation), underlined parts of the text, questioned the statistics and data in tables and charts, looked at statements colleagues had pointed out, followed up footnotes.

The particular decline of these practices corresponded with the reduction in the journal print collection and increase in electronic access.  Colleagues stopped paying attention to the professional literature. Articles only seemed to matter in terms of attaining high-value “deliverables” and “output”.  

You might think that the reading, annotations, and discussions among colleagues followed over to the electronic versions in a big way, but it seems instead to have gravely marginalized practitioners from researchers. 

Recall the shock and awe when Steve Jobs proclaimed that “nobody reads anymore”? https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/

So yes, Nicholas Carr, in many ways, Google has made us stoopid.