Thanks for the defense. I used to put be one of those assistants, for over eight years. It helped pay my way through my first few years of graduate school.
I did two years as a student aid in the library. Even after two years of wandering the stacks, and being a pretty good researcher to start with, I could walk up to a librarian ask them where to get information on something and they'd come up with half a dozen ideas I didn't. I learned a lot in there, one of the things I learned is that most of the people you see working at a library aren't librarians and the actual librarians WILL get irritable if you bestow the title on the wrong people.