Week 7 Reading Response

Three of this week's readings, "Teaching at the Desk," "Towards a User-Centered Information Service," and "Mom and Me" focus on how libraries should serve their users. Specifically, libraries should look at how the user views the world and conducts searches, and center their service strategies around these ideas. I found a couple of points in these articles noteworthy. "Teaching at the Desk" emphasizes that librarians need to shift the way they think about their roles: "As librarians, we are taught that our job is to answer questions. We must unlearn that definition of our job in order to teach at the reference desk." (459). What I think the author Elmborg is saying is that librarians should think of their role as that of assisting patrons in getting connected to the information resources they want. This ultimately means the user finds their own answer, with the librarian's help. I think this is a more effective way of providing library services, because what a librarian might think is a "good" or "correct" answer may not be satisfactory to the user asking the question.

The article "Mom and Me" by Wayne Wiegand also makes this point from a slightly different angle. The highly confusing sentence, "different people use different information differently to make sense of their worlds" is actually highly important for librarians to understand and put into practice. As Wiegand explains in his article, what one person values as an important source of information, as a librarian values books, another person may consider relatively unimportant compared to word-of-mouth information from family and friends. Librarians need to set aside their own assumptions of worth and consider how they can best assist a patron using the patron's valued information sources.

The final article "Museums, Management, Media and Memory: Lessons from the Enola Gay Exhibit" by Elizabeth Yakel stood out from the rest. It describes the controversial exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of the plane that dropped atomic bombs on Japan and information surrounding that event. I could expound on several parts of this article that interested me, but I particularly like the part about how museums have transitioned from only portraying one "accepted truth" in an exhibit to exploring different opinions and sides of an issue. I think this relates to libraries specifically in that libraries used to try to influence their patrons' reading habits by acquiring materials that they considered good or moral. Today, however, libraries are moving towards greater inclusiveness of materials by purchasing books that represent a variety of viewpoints, even those that the librarians themselves might strongly disagree with. I think this is a vital phenomenon in that it supports individuals' freedoms and rights to access of information.