Another question (no answers here, alas)

Rather than doing another "librarians and The Long Tail" kind of post, I decided to look at it from a somewhat different perspective. I decided to wonder about "authority."

My dad once said to me, when we were talking about opera, "If you're not obsessed, you're not paying attention." Or words to that effect. Opera is a niche that leaves many people cold, but many other people are totally enthused about it and, yes, obsessive about their interest (when I say obsessive here, I mean eagerly seeking out new information about an interest, not stalker-type bad behavior or OCD compulsiveness).

Having such a wonderful role model (and I do mean that sincerely), I grew up to be an obsessive about my own array of passionate interests (some of which I share with dad, others not so much). He introduced to the joy of stores filled with obscure and intriguing possibilities, mostly in the literary and musical realms. He also introduced me to the idea that if you were interested in something, it was always worth digging deeper and learning as much as possible about it. You didn't need a degree or a formal program of study: you just needed to go out and learn.

When the web came along, it was a godsend to obsessives of this model. It became relatively easy to set up a webpage or, later, blog about your very own passionate interests. Better yet, you could find others who cared as much as you. No matter how fringe your interest, your community was just waiting to find you (and each other) on the web.

So, how does a librarian deal with this?

When I was researching genealogists for a project in Human Information Behavior last semester, I came across a number of comments that could be reduced to the title of a paper in Oregon Library Association Quarterly by Anne Billeter, Ph.D., "Why Don't Librarians Like Genealogists?" Genealogists are very demanding library users, and for a librarian with no particular genealogical expertise, dealing with them can be daunting at best.

The social software trend puts more authority and power in the hands of users. For librarians who are seeking to create the next generation of libraries, this can be a mixed blessing. In a nutshell, is there a place in libraries of the future for the passionate amateur, and if so, where? Would there ever be a library where an obscure musical query got sent to the local musical maven with no library degree, rather than sent to a reference desk librarian?

I got to wondering about this after a historic house tour, when I asked a question of the guide, got an answer and then went home and researched it further. It turned out the guide's answer wasn't completely accurate. On one hand, erroneous information was being given out. On the other hand, it was an obscure topic. Is there a way to bring the amateur knowledge of the obsessive together with the professional knowledge of the librarian? Should there be?

It seems to me that both librarians and passionate amateurs/obsessives care about accurate knowledge on a wide range of topics. It would seem that there should be a way to bring them together, but given the fraught history of professional-amateur relations in many fields, that may not be possible. Still, librarians engaged in creating systems that give their users more of a voice in the library community may want to consider these concerns.