Organize

While reading a textbook for a summer class I started today, the authors discussed the meaning of the word "organize" in the context of librarianship.  When I tell people that I study Library and Information Science, they often ask me, "But what does a librarian DO?"  My answer to this question usually involves a long, drawn-out discussion of the many and varied tasks that a librarian is responsible for, but this short section of my textbook really captures what I think being a librarian is all about.  The authors of the textbook took their definition from Merriam-Webster, but I'm partial to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  Here is what I found in the OED:

Organize, v. trans. To arrange into a structured whole; to systematize; to put into a state of order; to arrange in an orderly manner, put in a particular place or order, tidy.

This perfectly describes what a librarian does and why librarians are so important in the world of information and knowledge.

Librarians organize information in a meaningful way so that people can find and access the resources they need.  Several professors during my time in Library school have stressed the importance of creating access to library materials.  If a person can't access the information they need, that information is useless.  This is also connected to the AV Materials class I am taking right now as well, where I learned that even if you have the rarest piece of old video footage of an important event, if you don't have the carrier needed to play the footage, it becomes essentially worthless (although you should try to find someone who has the carrier that can play the footage for you if this happens, obviously).  Librarians provide access to things by making them easier to find.  We make sense of the chaos of information that we are inundated with in the world today and we "put [it] into a state of order."  We give it a place so that one day, another person can go to that place and make an important discovery: it could be a phone number or a crucial piece of evidence to support the main argument of a dissertation. 

What a great career and calling in life, librarians "tidy" up information so that it can be used in a meaningful way by the world.

P.S.  I love the word "tidy" and I love to tidy up things, so I guess I found the perfect profession.

P.P.S.  Here is the citation for my textbook if anyone wants to read more about information organization:

Taylor, Arlene G., and Daniel N. Joudrey. The Organization of Information. Westport, Conn: Libraries   
       Unlimited, 2009.