> You and I can spend hours trying to hunt down a worthy well cited resource on a topic, whereas a good Librarian can find it in minutes.
This is kind of a silly question, but do just say to a librarian something like, "I'm looking for a book on implementing compilers." And they'll give you some? And when you finish those, can you say "Wow, I really liked so-and-so book, and I'm especially interested in so-and-so optimization. Do you know any books on that?" I've basically always worked out what I needed on my own, so I'm not sure how to talk to librarians.
Yes, and they'll find the authoritative books. Of course a general reference librarian is most helpful to a general audience. If you are a professional developer, you want a specialist reference librarian, for example, one in computer science.
IME the specialist librarians are generally at university libraries, but they will answer respectful questions from the public up to a point (they aren't going to do a research project for you), especially those in public universities. For example, I was looking for a history of a specific time period of a certain country. There were books available, but I couldn't discern the credible from the nonsense, the fringe from the consensus from the advocate for a specific theory or cause, etc. I emailed the specialist librarian for that region of the world at an Ivy League school; they had a PhD from Yale in the field, and of course could immediately tell me everything I wanted to know, and even generously shared more recommendations.
I think their skill lies in being able to filter the entire library's contents down to a handful of best guesses. If you ask them "give me all the books whose main topic is compilers", you might have too large of a result set, and maybe they would prompt you for a more specialized keyword that they can use to further narrow down the results.
I suppose it is better than brute-forcing an entire shelf of books :)
This is kind of a silly question, but do just say to a librarian something like, "I'm looking for a book on implementing compilers." And they'll give you some? And when you finish those, can you say "Wow, I really liked so-and-so book, and I'm especially interested in so-and-so optimization. Do you know any books on that?" I've basically always worked out what I needed on my own, so I'm not sure how to talk to librarians.