Bigger words don't validate whatever point is being made.

Nothing like the feeling of looking up words in a physical thesaurus. Digital ones don't give you that same sense of inflated intelligence.

Lo, the scourge of anti-intellectualism reaches HN! Looking through their comment, the only word that one would consider "big" might be "erstwhile". Even if they used big words, why use that to attack them instead of considering what they actually wrote (or taking a second to look them up)? This smug piling on is just toxic. People shouldn't revel in ignorance.

Never having used one, I'll take your word for it.

Librarians are custodians of knowledge and dangerous magical artifacts.

...According to TNT.~

Real librarians have become somewhat less prestigious as their previous roles have been automated. They are now little more than administrators of the information service provider of last resort for poor people.

> Real librarians have become somewhat less prestigious as their previous roles have been automated. They are now little more than administrators of the information service provider of last resort for poor people.

One of the reasons we still need librarians is that they understand that "information service provider of last resort for poor people" is a vital and noble service.

I'm having trouble responding to this without being unreasonably rude. It's just so smug and misinformed. Making information available to everyone, regardless of class, status, or wealth, has always been the primary job of public librarians, and computers and the internet give them more ways to do that than ever. It's never been about prestige.

I also feel it is a vital and noble calling. But fewer people share our views now, as compared to 1970. And like it or not, the prestige of a profession strongly affects the number of people who seek to enter it.

Fewer will choose to become professional librarians when municipal library systems employ less with formal training, and task those who have it with serving the prurient interests of transients and homeless people.

Sure, some of those people will also be helped to create electronic resume documents, and to access job boards, and to enroll in online education courses, and to generally make their lives better via access to information, and that is what librarians want out of the job, but they will also be crapped on--both by those who feel entitled to the services they provide, and by those who feel they are obsolete relics.