I am an FSU graduate. Dammit.

So my girlfriend gets the CCI Connection newsletter from the Florida State University College of Communication & Information. This is what used to be called library school. I hear they may change the name again to the College of Twitter and Facebook Social Networking Interconnectivity. Yes, to be fair, there is still a School of Library & Information Studies at FSU. Jeez, can't a guy make a joke?

I tell her that they never send me their newsletter even though I've told them who I am and gave them my blog address.

"You mean, other than the letter they sent asking you to NOT tell anyone that you are an FSU graduate?" she asks.

"It wasn't a letter, it was a court order," I remind her. "And, yes, other than that, nothing. Ever."

So I am currently looking at the library school website. And they have an option for alumni to "keep in touch" by offering to mentor a current library school student. I would love to mentor a student, I say when I saw that. And I meant it. I wasn't lying or exaggerating even though I'm currently legally drunk in all states except Alaska.

But yes, FSU, well pretty much any, library school students, the.effing.librarian could be your mentor! But what could I do for you? What are my qualifications?

These are true facts:

• I've been doing library stuff for over ten years and am currently employed as a librarian.
• I've worked at several public service library positions of increasing responsibility, mostly in computer instruction and reference.
• I have hired and supervised other library staff.
• I've served on committees, presented at workshops and/or discussions at state and regional conferences, won prestigious, major awards and have never been fired.
• I have no record as a felon in North America.

What kinds of things can I do for you? I don't know. I haven't given it much thought. I guess you ask me stuff and I answer. But with awesome mentoring powers.

Imagine the report you would turn in to your professor:

• Who is your mentor? The.effing.librarian.
• What does the effing librarian mean? I don't know. I found him online. He claims to be a semi-famous blogger... in Japan.
• At which library does he work? I don't know.
• How does your mentor communicate with you? Email only. And through anonymous classified ads in The Hartford Courant.
• Has your mentor ever borrowed money? Yes. But it was for a life-saving operation. Or a sex change, it wasn't really clear. But there was lots of crying.
  Did you know the emoticon for tears looks like this :'-( ?
  And the emoticon for killing three guys in prison looks like this >:'''-[
  My mentor taught me that.

Young vs. Old

There's been an from ongoing argument at LISNews about young vs. old librarians (or smartass vs. smart, if you will). And much of the fury was targeting this ass-crack: "Library Student Journal believes that in many ways the average LIS student today understands the average user better than does the average LIS professional. " I don't give a crap who is LSJ, but I believe in that statement completely.

When I was a library school student, I believed I knew all the shit. I was constructing huge nested Boolean searches to pinpoint exactly the information I wanted from my Lexis/Nexis searches. I could get in and out of that dial-up, six-buck-a-minute search and hit "print" in less than forty seconds. I kicked ass.

So what happened when I got my first job in a real library? I was given the task of cleaning up thirty years of collected crap in the vertical file. I was sorting old sex ed pamphlets with titles like, "It's called liberation, baby." So my dreams of online searching went away while I learned brick and mortar librarianship; desk scheduling, shifting reference collections, storing bound newspapers, all the daily crap that needs to get done. And it's the same with these library students. They believe they know the shit, but you don't really know until you get in it.

When I was young I was absolutely convinced that I knew every-fucking-thing that was useful to know. But inevitably, as you age and your world view becomes larger (see the glasses image for helpful visual aid), your view of yourself changes (or at least it should).
This is the arrogance of the arrogant (I was going to write "youth," but that's not true). If you say, "I wiki, you don't" and think you're better for it, you suck. And I would never hire you and I would let you rot in unemployment until you are blowing tourists for a sandwich. I feel the same way about those who have antipodal feelings, that you don't wiki and are better for it. You also suck. Your Us vs. Them position is going to get you stomped.

The longer you work in the real world, the more you learn about people and organizations. You learn that it takes lots of different people to make a team function successfully. I don't think anyone wants to work with lots of important people doing innovative research: who's going to staff the desk?
What the fuck is innovation anyway? Isn't it discovering a need and finding a practical solution.

Young vs. Old. You vs. Me. Your glass may be fuller, but mine's bigger. Lots bigger.