Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Information overload - they quote statistics on how a modern person takes in as much information in a day as a medieval person knew in a lifetime. I don't know how they quantify this stuff, but I could find out. I could pull up statistics, quotations, research methods, and a fistful of works that have cited it, all in the time it takes for my tea to steep, using a free, nigh omnipresent tool that's so popular that its name has become a verb.

Human beings are different than we were in the Middle Ages. I would argue that we're different than we were when I was a little girl. When I was in grade school, what an ordinary person could learn was limited by what you could walk or drive to, or get mailed to you. By the time I got a job in my college's computer lab; I found most of my materials for research papers on JSTOR, and used search engines to find answers to questions that I would never have bothered to investigate before. With hypertext, one tidbit might lead to infinite tangential strands of inquiry. What was disparagingly called surfing let me see worlds of information - broadly, if not deeply - that would have been beyond my access or even awareness before.

Brains, like muscles, grow to meet the demands we place on them. Psychology and culture shift to accommodate new ways of thinking and doing. We are a new race, but incompletely evolved to fit our niche.

I have certain advantages: fast reader, fast typist, fantastic memory for facts and "where I found it." A degree in library science. Also, I came of age as the Internet did. I don't feel overloaded.

Many are still flailing in the ocean, not drinking from the stream. Their senses aren't yet tuned to this environment; their skills aren't yet honed for it. In this provident habitat, they feel at a loss, threatened, overwhelmed. What I am as a librarian, what I do and know, boiled down, is what we all need. My job, as I construe it, is to do that boiling down, find ways to make "information literacy" not so much a discrete skill set as an integral part of the way we think, read, listen, watch, and learn.

It can't be a degree, or a course, or a quick how-to. At least not just that. How we handle our relationship with information can't be as isolated as it's been because it has too significant a bearing on every aspect of life. And yet, it can't be as much as that either, because there is so much equally crucial matter to cram into an education, to fit into the day.

Issues of equity, motivation, andragogy, issues of time and resources... How am I supposed to figure this out? I'm just a librarian!

I'm a librarian - it's my job.

Hello world.