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Service, Service, Service
By howard | April 21, 2008
At the URI GSLIS annual gathering Friday night Camila Alire reminded the assembled that service is the essence of the library profession. At first I bristled at that (maybe because I could hear in that the voice of one of my first library mentors at the University of Pittsburgh parentally exhorting me “service, service, service”) Isn’t ‘service’ much too broad a term to describe an essence? Sure, we serve our patrons (clients, customers), but doesn’t every store clerk, fire-fighter, dentist, even IRS agent? Certainly a profession devoted to providing access to information, steeped in language could come up with a better description of its essence!
Somehow, though, when I reflected, I kept returning to “service, service, service”. What is the subject of our service? Our product, information, after all is incorporeal; more and more, seeking to serve up our product, we cannot even predict what wrapper we will find it in – parchment? paper? clay tablets? something magnetic? something optical? something online? – let alone describe it in a word.
The essence of that we do is after all, service. On the one hand, it is undoubtably a librarian who serves the noble prize winners with the resources that underpin their achievement. On the other hand, Jimmy Durante found in the library “exactly what I was lookin’ for. It was 4,572 (est.) pages long. . .just the size to fit under the short leg of my pool table. . . .” Service.
Perhaps the most important thing for a librarian to be reading is the patron walking through the door.
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