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Myths, by their very nature, defy any explanation of their origins. No one really knows how the Greeks came up with an elaborate pantheon of gods on Mount Olympus. Urban legends have the mysterious "friend-of-a-friend" as a source. Closer to home, does anyone really know why Raven coaxed Man out of a clamshell on Rose Spit?
Library myths usually take on the assumed personality of librarians. One myth holds that librarians are a bunch of old grey- haired women who continually shush people when the softest peep is uttered. Another, strangely, goes in the opposite direction: that woman librarians appear homely, but underneath they're sex fiends who wear kinky lingerie and look really hot wearing glasses, a single strand of hair cascading between their eyes ... but I digress.
Another myth propagated about librarians is that librarians hate the Internet. They're Luddites, quietly undermining the Internet with their smug stares and index-fingered shushing.
In fact, librarians were among the first people to use the Internet, even before it was called the Internet. Back in the 1960s, the Library of Congress started inputting its books into Machine Readable Cataloging format (MARC) -- this was the first time a database of books was created in electronic form. It allowed for keyword searching and multiple access points, meaning you didn't just need to search by author, subject or title. Today, MARC is still used by libraries all over the world to catalogue its books.
Over the last decade or so, when the Internet has become incredibly popular, librarians were enthusiastic to pipe telephone, modem and fibre-optic cables into their library computers. They must have seen the benefits to a giant network of unbound information accessed through thousands of interconnected databases, available for free.
But they must also have seen the drawbacks to this free-for-all as well. Today, the Internet is a gigantic schmozzle of information, most of it unorganized. If someone wants to find a certain nugget of information on the 'Net, he will either get really lucky and find it, or he'll get Google-whacked and spend the better part of a night trying to find out where to get parts for his Lada.
Really, the Internet is just a big, electronic library, with each website a "container for information", or, as it used to be called, a "book". If librarians hated and feared the Internet, they would therefore hate and fear libraries. Bit of a nonsensical statement, isn't it?
When not busy being a Bilbliofile RJ Daniels manages loads of hilarious and funny videos over at www.boomjrcomedy.com
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