Re:Librarians Are Dangerous
by elijahwright on Saturday April 19, 2025 @08:57PM
(#43740716)
Conflation is probably wrong. But librarianship is one of the most hacker-adjacent places I’ve ever worked. I fought pretty damn hard to keep UNIX tooling very directly in the information science curriculum at Indiana - circa 2005 or so. It was in serious danger of getting removed - I was just a graduate student but I got my butt on the right committee where I could articulate the need for tools and textual technologies to stay on the map there. Taking them away from the students would have been doing them a massive disservice.
Re:Librarians Are Dangerous
by gonzobonzo on Saturday April 19, 2025 @11:12PM
(#43741260)
Good point. One of the things that always strikes me as extremely dishonest about these conversations is when people pretend that libraries aren't curated collections. Usually with the librarians as gatekeepers, sometimes with others.
Out of curiosity, can you link some comments in this thread that suggest people think libraries are not curated collections? It seems to me that most people realize a librarian's role is indeed to curate it.
The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on.
Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.