Be the Guide

Walking into a library can feel overwhelming when you don’t know where to start. Especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for, if you are “just browsing.” What makes librarians indispensable isn’t that they can organize and catalog; it’s that they know how to navigate the complexity.

But a guide isn’t just someone who can help you navigate. They can also recommend what to look for.

Call it taste if you want. The word is doing too much work these days. What it actually is: a compressed history of judgment. A librarian who recommends the right book isn’t doing magic. They’ve read widely, watched thousands of readers react, noticed which recommendations landed and which didn’t, and built up a model that can’t be fully articulated. That model is what good taste actually looks like.

Algorithms try to approximate it from behavioral, consumer, and economic data. But they’re optimizing for engagement, not for what you actually need. A guide is optimizing for you.

And a good guide will tell you when it's time to go.