Originally Posted by Unregistered

Its okay to be misinformed. There are different classes of librarians. The run of the mill book sorter in NLB is one type. Another one is the ones in academia, in tertiary institutes. These librarians are professional. They need to not only know what content is in what books, but they also need to know about research papers. Say if I need to do research on a particular field that is highly specialised, there might still be a few tens of thousands of research articles to pore through. The librarians help in sorting this out for you, choosing and selecting for you which papers might be relevant to your research. This means that these librarians may require some knowledge of anything between CMOS transistors in engineering and Ethical Egoism in Philosophy, because they have the entire university to serve.