Something about everything or vise versa

Just to start blogging, let me write something related to word Miscellaneous which is a part of the Weblog's title. About one month ago, Mark and I went to a Mediterranean buffet to try their foods. We didn’t have lunch on purpose to be able to eat to death in the buffet in the evening! You might know that in buffets you pay a fixed amount and eat as much as you want. They usually have a range of different foods. A guy was sitting next to us and curiously watching our eating. We started talking to him. Whatever we talked about he knew and had something to say. He was originally from Russia but was American citizen and had lived some years in Egypt and at that time had come to work in UK for a while. I told him that it seemed he knew something about everything and he said “that’s a good point. It depends on what you prefer to know: Something about everything or everything about something”. I said “it depends on what you want to do. If you want to be specialist, you need to know almost everything about something, deep and narrow. If you want to do something like a managerial sort of job, preferably you should know something about almost everything, shallow and wide”. Of course if you have both it would be perfect. I think library and information science professionals need to have both properties in a sense, especially in high level of the profession. Because as professionals they need to be specialist in their own field, and also because of the nature of their profession they need to have a high level of general knowledge. Because of LIS curriculum many people including some LIS students think that the librarians are trained just to know something about everything, but this is not the case. They have their own expertise, of course at different levels.