Librarian in 1602: The Bodleian opens at Oxford

The English word librarian comes from the Latin librarius, "of books" — but the job is older than books. The first people paid to keep and organize recorded knowledge worked with clay: the scholars of King Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, in the seventh century BCE, arranged some 30,000 tablets and fragments by subject and closed them with written curses on anyone who would steal or erase them. Every catalog, classification scheme and reading room since is a refinement of what they were doing.

The work has never really been about reading books all day. It is about building a collection with a purpose, describing every item so that a stranger can find it, and — hardest of all — turning a visitor's half-formed question into the question they actually needed answered. The route in varies sharply by country: a master's degree in North America, a chartered professional portfolio in Britain, a competitive state examination in France, a salaried two-year traineeship in Germany.

This page follows the profession from Nineveh and the Pinakes of Alexandria through al-Qarawiyyin, Panizzi's Round Reading Room and the trade's modern birth in 1876, to a present in which circulation and cataloging are largely automated while librarians defend collections in courtrooms and teach readers to navigate misinformation. It covers how people enter the work today, what the craft actually consists of, who reached the top of it, and how much of it a machine can take.