Friday, October 17, 2008

Friday Foolery #4: The 1947 librarian

We've come a long way, baby. I make sure I watch this librarian vocational film once in a while to remind myself that this was cutting edge technology and information about the field at the time it was produced.

What will librarians (or whatever the job title turns into) of 2069 refer to in their era about ours? My great-grandfather's cousin is 103 and still sharp as a tack and my grandmother's cousin in her 80s runs our family's genealogy website, so perhaps I'll be a ninety-somethingbrarian and get to offer my own perspective on whatever media we're using then!

(above is an embedded video which may not show up in RSS feeds, it's from the Internet Archive and not YouTube)

About 8 minutes and 10 seconds into the film is a perky medical librarian. I share an alarming similarity with her in that my medical terminology pronunciation is currently pretty awful although I'm slowly making progress.

I particularly like this quote that is 9 minutes and 25 seconds into the film.

You will derive satisfaction from a knowledge that your work is vital and essential in forming the kind of world in which you want to live.


I can only hope so. I'm doing my part and thankful that Brewster Kahle is doing the same on a much bigger scale.

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3 comments:

Alison Aldrich said...

Brewster Kahle is delivering the keynote at my alma mater's John Seely Brown Symposium on Technology and Society. I am told there will be a recording of the webcast...

http://www.si.umich.edu/jsb/webcast/

Nikki Dettmar said...

Sorry for delay in getting back to you, Alison, but at least you know exactly why! I saw him speak at the iSchool Lazerow Lecture back in 2007 and was very inspired http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/asist/Kahle.mov, That was just a month before he was served his national Security Letter too, hopefully he'll mention some of that experience at the keynote.

Jacque Doyle said...

Thanks for posting this video! I have share it a lot with colleagues and posted to our blog; will be interesting to see what new grads and current students think of it. Enjoyed it immensely! JDD