According to a recent thread on the local What the F***, Tumbler Ridge? Facebook page (which I stopped paying attention to years ago, but every once in a while, something bubbles up that’s so ridiculous that it makes its way to me), Tumbler Ridge has the highest paid librarian in Canada, at $106,000.
Considering that the average salary for a head librarian in Canada, according to Glass Door, is $107,695 ($55.97/hour), we can probably dismiss that one right out of hand.
Also according to Glass Door, Chief Librarians make an average of $141,446, so now our head librarian is making almost a third less than the average Chief Librarian.
Of course, Glass Door is just one source of information. If we go over to jobillico, the average annual income for a head librarian is $37,440, or less than $20 per hour.
The difference between the two canonical rates for a head librarian is over $30/hour.
Which just goes to show you that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Especially if it is found on Facebook.
In order to become a head librarian, one typically needs a Master’s Degree, as well as eight to ten years’ experience in administration. While librarians might have once been little old ladies looking for something to do at some point in the distant past, that time is well and truly gone.
These days, librarians are information technicians, administrators, social workers, babysitters and sometimes magicians, and a good librarian is worth every penny they make.
So, how much does a librarian actually make? Well as board chair for the library, I can tell you the number is somewhere between the two, though slightly (ever so slightly) closer to the former figure than the latter. I won’t tell you exactly what the head librarian makes (you can ask her directly if you really care), but I can tell you if she was working for the District directly, she would probably be making $50,000 more than what she’s being paid right now.
Yes, you heard that right. She doesn’t work for the District. While the District gives the library operational funding, it is not a District position. Instead, the library is an arms-length corporation, established by District Bylaw, which in turn is based on legislation by the provincial government. While the majority of operating funding comes from (and is legislatively obligated to come from) the District, nobody who works at the library is paid by the District. And nobody who works at the library makes anything close to $106,000.
Indeed, not only is our head librarian not the highest paid librarian in Canada, she’s not even the highest paid librarian in Tumbler Ridge. There are librarians in town who work remotely for universities and other institutions who make more than our head librarian does.
Basically, all this is to say don’t trust everything you read on the internet. Even if it is posted by someone who claims to know what their talking about. Even me.
So, what can you do, rather than allowing someone to provoke you on the internet? Well, you could actually do your own research.
“Do your own research”, by the way, finds its roots with William “Bill” Cooper, who is also known as the Granddaddy of American Conspiracy Theorists. He’s the guy who argued that Kennedy was killed because he was going to reveal that extraterrestrials were taking over the earth, who popularized the theory that AIDS was a man-made disease (ahem) designed to decrease the population of blacks, Hispanics and homosexuals, and was an inspiration for Alex Jones.
Cooper said “Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing unless you can prove it in your own research.”
What qualified as proof, though, is kinda sketch when it comes to Coop, considering where it led him. It’s like, I don’t know, claiming that Tumbler Ridge has the highest paid librarian in the world, because someone once said something that you mighta misheard.
According to Sedonna Chinn, a researcher who became fascinated by the phrase, and who wrote a paper on it, “‘doing your own research’ is both a prudent and flawed endeavor. Informed and engaged individuals are widely considered normatively good in health, science, and politics. Marginalized groups who have legitimate reasons to be wary of institutions often benefit from outside research and expertise. Further, blind trust in experts can lead to politicization of science and policies that do not align with public interest, making healthy skepticism and independent research democratically desirable.”
Chinn notes that scientific research and institutions are not without problems, from news biases to structural discrimination. “However, the idea that expert institutions and mainstream news have nefarious motivations can foster distrust and influence information-seeking in ways that undermine democratic norms and values.”
I think the problem is that people don’t understand what research is.
Research is “the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.” That’s straight outta Oxford.
Part of doing research is identifying valid sources of information, eliminating worthless sources of information, and testing questionable sources of information.
It isn’t just accepting all information as factual. I can tell you that Albert Einstein is alive and well and living in Doig River, but that doesn’t mean that it’s accurate.
And repeating information that isn’t factual is called “spreading misinformation” in the mainstream media.
I call it something else, though.
I call it “lying.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.