There is no doubt that search engines are brilliant for finding information. You can sit in the comfort of your own home, and try different search terms until you find one that yields gold.

There are downsides though. For a start, general search engines will only be able to find items that have been uploaded to the internet. Secondly, you will be hard-pressed to find much that pre-dates the worldwide web.

On the other hand, a really good librarian is a repository of knowledge, especially about the items in his or her library. Sadly, these kinds of specialists are few and far between, no doubt because of the general dumbing down of libraries. By that I mean that they often seem to be regarded these days as somewhere that has to be “relevant” and “engaging” rather than halls of learning.

In the central library close to my home, around 30 years ago, there was a brilliant librarian in the Reference section. It didn’t matter what you asked him, he would know the answer.

For example, you could say to him something like, “Where might I find a collection of poetry written in the second half of the 18th century?”, and he would reply along the lines of:

“Yes, over on this shelf we have Gideon’s Repository of 18th and 19th century poetry in England. However, on this shelf we have Harpen’s Collection of Poetry of the British Isles prior to the Industrial Revolution. While you’re looking at those, let me get you Volume 4, Issue 5 of the Poetry Journal from 1955….”

And so it would go on. Even though now we have Google etc, I really miss his ability to demonstrate a kind of lateral thinking when it came to resources.

I was reminded of this when I read an article from The London Library on F. J. Cox, who was in charge of the issues desk for nearly 75 years, and seemed to know the location of every single book! It’s a great article, and a reminder of a bygone age when we could use a “human search engine”!

I realise there is no going back, so in that sense the search engine “wins”. But I miss the deep and unique expertise of librarians like the one in my library, and F. J. Cox.

The man who made Edith Sitwell wait in line