Librarians are rock stars.

Maybe not in the glamorous sense of the word, with pyrotechnics and screaming teenage girls. But in Wednesday’s Datapalooza event at the library, they brought excitement and reason into a world many students dread — research.

Red and yellow balloons dotted eight computer workstations on the main floor of Parks Library. The workstations varied in focus from engineering to sociology, each staffed by a library bibliographer with a specialty in that field.

Ed Goedeken, a humanities bibliographer, hosted the art, history, humanities and philosophy workstation in a computer alcove on the first floor. He explained the beautiful simplicity of searching a CD-ROM citation index, as opposed to “Googling” a topic.

“These indexes are organized carefully by people who know the topics,” he said. “Google is a broad-based search engine with nothing behind it but an algorithm.”

Instead of fruitlessly sifting through unwanted Internet information, he said, citation indexes, which are usually subject-specific, can find the information in a fraction of the time.

“You would get so much weird stuff you wouldn’t even know where to start from [when using an Internet search engine]. The citation indexes survey a certain core of respected literature,” Goedeken said.

Although most college students are familiar with computers and their operations, a small number of people are “flabbergasted” by the online catalogs and indexes, Goedeken said. “When I was in graduate school, you had to take the [card catalog] indexes out one by one,” he said. A few people miss the traditional card catalog.

“The tactileness of the card catalog was a comforting thing … but they don’t make buggy whips any more either,” Goedeken said. The catalogs took up a lot of space and the keyword searches of computers go far beyond the access points of author, title and subject provided by the card catalog.

The purpose of the event, said Rebecca Jackson, head of the social sciences and humanities department at the library, was to make sure students are aware of the electronic resources available at Parks Library. “I don’t think people on campus realize how much the library has grown in the area of electronic resources,” said David Gregory, associate dean of research and access services. “We have over 5,000 [electronic] resources, including journals, e-books and citation databases.”

If students, faculty or staff are looking for a specific index or trying to research a topic, they can approach the reference desk on the first floor and be referred to a bibliographer with a specialty in that area.

The library plans to host a Datapalooza each year, Jackson said. She got the idea from her previous job at the George Washington University Library, in Washington, D.C., which hosted a similar event.

And the name — Datapalooza?

“It came out of a general resource meeting,” Jackson said. “There were suggestions to call it a reference fair, a resource fair and then everybody started getting silly.”