The Tower of Babel Problem

We will miscommunicate. It's a given. It's hard to say what we really mean because language is a bad medium for sharing our thoughts. Words mean different things to different people. Tone of voice can change the meaning entirely.

In the Bible, The Tower of Babel was to be built based on unity of purpose because we all spoke the same language and wanted to pay tribute to God. Genesis 11:6 says, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." By taking away a shared language, God challenged us to unify again without a common medium.

This story is fascinating. Though we lose the ability to do the impossible, we know how to regain it. Communicate better. Our language can't help us, it is meant to confuse. We must learn to relate to each other despite its failures.

Knowing this, acknowledge it and make sure you understand what the other person means, where they're coming from, how they arrived at their conclusions. Repeat back to them what you heard. "What I heard you say is...", "Do you mean...", "Let me see if I have this right..."

Don't assume, simply relate your understanding. It's contagious.

Thinking like a librarian

Librarians are curators. You ask them a question and they find you the best possible resources to reach an answer, often redefining the original question itself. They're not consultants, analysts, managers, decision-makers, engineers, logisticians, or artists. Their drive is to accumulate large volumes of information and categorize it effectively so it may be referenced at any time. Prior to Google or Wikipedia, they were the search engines.

And they are far from obsolete. In fact, librarian thinking is an incredibly necessary skill set when, everyday, we query search engines for answers to both mundane and extremely complex questions. How we search may have changed, but what we search for is still mostly the same.

"How do I...?"
"What is...?"
"Directions to..."
"Places to visit in..."
"Best..."

"Cheapest..."

We want quality answers quickly, but the #1 result may not be it. How do we know? What judgment skills do we use to evaluate whether the "best restaurant in Santa Fe is ___" or if "easiest way to hard boil eggs is ___" The answer doesn't matter, but the way you evaluate the answer does.

The essence of librarian thinking is curation. How would a librarian conduct a Google search? They would start by looking for something, get some answers, review those answers, ask the question in a different way, narrow down the answers, rate the answers, research each answer to qualify it, review the original question and see if the final answer is accurate. This process only skims the surface of what a librarian might do.

There are technical features that make the search process much more specific. The use of operators is one example. Using +, -, and, or, quotes, ~, and *, adds a level of specificity to your search. Using allin operators lets you manipulate your searches further by restricting where exactly Google will search for the word or phrase you entered.

These are tools, though, that are readily available for anyone to use. The key to librarian thinking is in the prefix, "re-": re-defining, re-searching, re-organizing, re-versing, re-evaluating, etc. It's not one step, but many. Much like the metaphor of peeling back the layers of an onion, librarians have a multi-layered approach to their searches.

The importance of a librarian's knowledge, experience and thinking can only grow as the volume of information available to us grows. We must all learn the basics of these skills to decipher, judge and better evaluate the answers we receive. We make medical, legal, business, and general life decisions based on these answers. Librarian thinking is a skill that will be invaluable in developing our foundational reasoning in the generations to come.