The Department of Everything
April 09, 2025 at 12:23AMBefore Google, before Siri, if you had a question about something, you had to go and look up the answer—often at the library. For The Hedgehog Review, Stephen Akey recounts his time working at the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library, where he and seven other colleagues took phone calls from an inquisitive public. Callers had five minutes with the librarian and were allowed a max of three questions per call.
Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.)
There was always psychology involved. In this case, the caller thought that by flattering me she might induce me to break or bend our rule of five minutes or three questions max, which we routinely disregarded anyway. The opposite psychological ploys—bullying, intimidating, insulting, threatening—were far more common. Contrary to the popular perception of librarianship as a serene, leisurely vocation for the bookishly inclined, the Telephone Reference Division was a high-stress environment, and most staffers, myself included, burned out within a few years. Now that reference librarianship is a shadow of its former self, psychological gamesmanship rarely takes place. You look up your information in a bland, seemingly (seemingly) trustworthy source like Wikipedia, and that’s that. Librarians have other things to do, principally programming a never-ending stream of ostentatiously unlibrary-like events, but none will ever be so interesting or so much fun as the kind of thing we did in Telephone Reference before the Internet swept it all away.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/08/the-department-of-everything/
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