First, it's important to realize there are many different kinds of librarians. Librarians are highly educated people with varied interests. Many librarians have more than one advanced degree in subjects ranging from anthropology to zoology and including business, law and Roman history. Because of this range, most libraries hire librarians by considering their institution's primary curriculum coverage. Library hiring committees look for people who will fill a specific need in a subject curriculum to aid in collection development, directly or indirectly, or with developing subject area information tools. Aside from the familiar support that librarians provide students by teaching them to use the catalog and helping them figure out how to use bibliographic aids, do you know what else librarians do?

In most institutions, there are librarians who organize resources, collect resources, evaluate resources and link resources. There are librarians who wheel and deal with vendors for the best prices for electronic as well as traditionally printed resources. There are librarians who examine resources and determine how best to provide access points for the item. They consider things like what department paid for the resource, what it's about, who will be using it and what's important to note so that people can tell whether the item will be useful to them. There are librarians whose major responsibility is not to know everything but to know how to FIND anything. In addition, of course, there are librarians who teach others not only where information is but how to evaluate it and convert it to useful knowledge.

Contrary to the librarian stereotype you may be familiar with, many librarians are very social or political animals. They have to be: their responsibilities revolve around many meetings each day with students, faculty or institution administrators to understand their needs, or in the latter case, the institution's needs and limitations. A facility with mind reading or a trade standard, "the reference interview", is necessary!

Librarians also have strong collegial relationships with librarians in other institutions in their state, in their country and in the world. This network of colleagues helps them remain aware of practical applications of new technologies; trials of solutions to common problems and new services other institutions offer. These relationships strengthen one of the most valuable services a library can foster, that of resource sharing.

Most people, if they think of resource sharing at all, think of it as interlibrary loan, that function of a library in which materials not owned by one library are borrowed from another to lend to a patron. Resource sharing is much broader however. The resource sharing practices of libraries during the last century have developed the largest bibliographic database in the world for providing both information about resources and access through interlibrary loan to those resources. Those same resource sharing habits of librarians have promoted technological developments that allow diverse automated systems, like the systems in the CIC (the big ten universities) Virtual Electronic Library project, to share information resources throughout the country.

Librarians' skills with the organization of information, how people look for and use information combined with their technical knowledge of computers and systems have made them increasingly important for work with the providers and publishers of electronic information. While some librarians negotiate deals with vendors to purchase products, others take on the role of helping vendors design usable web search interfaces. Librarians also help vendors organize the information in their databases in a logical fashion.

You're probably wondering about now why I haven't mentioned distant learners once in this article. I have a final point to make about librarians and access to information. Librarians have an intrinsic belief that information should be equitably available to everyone, regardless of race, wealth, education and all other common designators of human worth. Philosophically, a distant learner is no different from any other learner who may need library services. Librarians are certainly aware of the political and technical barriers. They are busy applying their formidable and shared problem solving skills to those barriers daily. But, to a librarian, the solutions to the issues of "your students, my students" and "but our network security will be compromised if we allow that" will apply equally to the student across the reference desk as to the student on the other side of the world.