I have a confession to make: even though I’m a librarian and the first thing that people usually associate with my job is the Dewey Decimal system, I don’t KNOW it by heart. I mean, I’m good; a lot of the time, if you tell me what you’re looking for, I’ll give you the number right off the top of my head. Still, I will admit to sometimes not knowing where I can locate specific subjects. I get a silly rush of glee every time I do know something off the top of my head, but if I were back in my cataloging class and had a test on the Dewey Decimal system, I know that my score would not be perfect.
I guess my new goal is to know more of this off the top of my head, but it got me to thinking: what other professionals forget this sort of core knowledge once they’re no longer in school being tested? Doctors? Pharmacists? It’s kind of frightening; I know that if I forget where something is located, I can just look it up in our catalog. Despite what some impatient, huffy patrons think, a lack of instantaneous knowledge on my part is never a matter of life and death. If a doctor or pharmacist makes a mistake, somebody could die. I salute the medical professionals of the world for even entering that field, because I would not like to perform a job that had the potential to determine others’ lives.