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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools
Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.
Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.
To those people who are suggesting that library science isn't a real thing, I have a simple exercise for you: Suppose you are managing a very basic, but busy archive that adds dozens if not hundreds of new documents per day. Each document is assigned a sequential number, and has several names associated with it. When each document is entered, an index entry for that document must be created. Without a computer, how would you organize such an index to make it quick and easy for someone to find documents associated with a particular name?
How many school libraries could this possibly describe? I think you and many others are conflating school libraries with public libraries. The latter are relatively large and provide all manner of community services and I could imagine a 2 year degree program could be necessary for managing such a thing. The former are small and often staffed by community volunteers or teaching assistants. I am not convinced that grad school or even a bachelor's is necessary for this function.
How many libraries of either variety do you think there are in US that don't any kind of computer or digital inventory management? Regardless, you could probably learn such an organization system in your bog standard 30 hour technical training class.
I'm not describing any library. I'm describing something much simpler than any library to illustrate a point that archival science is a lot more complicated than laymen think, largely in part because the professionals working behind the scenes have done such a good job that we don't notice them. And just because computers can handle a lot of our work now doesn't mean that the professionals in charge of these systems don't need to understand the underlying theory. Most people don't use 99% of the underlying theory they learned in school. I mean, why do we give a fuck if the kids can add when we live in a world with calculators?
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