I think I'm finally coming around to understanding what librarians actually do, and why people I occasionally see people arguing for hiring librarians at companies.
It's actually really simple: any formally organized group of people produces and consumes a lot of information. The job of a librarian is to organize and maintain that information.
What makes the job of librarians hard to understand is because if they do their job well, it becomes almost invisible. But the absence of what librarians do can be found because:
- information is hard to locate
- information is often out of date or conflicting
- information is outright missing
To me it's the other side of digital infrastructure, complementing what ops folks do.
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