No, I seem to be completely incomprehensible lately. I am certainly not saying the old ways were better – in fact, I said we are more exact now. And sometimes I can’t imagine how librarians found information before computers. But I don’t see it as an all-or-nothing. It’s not that the old ways are bad because we have it easier now. There were benefits to a more personal approach. There are advantages to the way things are now, too.

In library school, we learned that a great percentage of reference work is serendipity. I have often just seen the perfect book to answer a particular question, and I can’t explain why I was looking at htat particular book on that particular day. My professor called that “St. Melville [Dewey] smiling down upon us.”