A local librarian told me my research was too narrow and it changed how I fact-check

I was looking into a local news story that got pulled from a town website in Ohio. The librarian said I only looked at the town council's minutes and not the state records. She pointed me to the county clerk's office where I found 3 different versions of the same public hearing transcript. Now I always check at least 2 government sources before I share anything. Has anyone else had a librarian give you a tip that broke open a censorship case?

2 comments

2 Comments

thompson.robin22d ago

Three different versions of the same hearing is wild. I've found librarians can be super helpful but sometimes they push their own assumptions about what's important.

piper_dixon4522d ago

Have you read that study from a few years ago about how librarians are trained to be "neutral" but end up filtering info based on their own biases? I remember seeing a blog post where someone tracked how three different librarians gave totally different recommendations for the same genealogy search, like one focused on census records and another pushed church documents instead. It's frustrating because you go to them for help untangling all those versions, only to get another layer of opinion mixed in.