Librarians! What Are We Hiding?

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Are librarians still relevant?

I’ve worked behind the circulation desk of my local public library for 15 years and I love my job. But that job has gone through plenty of changes. When I began, library work was all about the books. These days, while our patrons still check out books, they also come in to use our computers, borrow DVDs and audio books, and learn how to download “content” onto a staggering variety of electronic devices.

Meanwhile, staffing is being cut, and the public encouraged to use our automatic check out system, and to pay their fines and renew their material online.

So are librarians still relevant? Useful? What does being a 21st century librarian mean, really? Who exactly are we? And how does the world see us? I decided to perform a quick Google search and find out.

I typed in the phrase “Librarians are…” and here’s how Google’s auto-fill completed the thought:

Generals in the war on ignorance
Weird
Annoying
Novel lovers
Hiding something
Obsolete
Awesome
Hot
Great people
Heroes every day

Am I a novel lover? Absolutely. Hot? I’d like to think so. A hero every day? Well, I do feel a little heroic whenever I am able to intuit where a book that a patron is desperate to read has been mis-shelved, and deliver it safely into her hands.

Still, sensing that I didn’t yet have the complete picture, I decided to fine tune my results by running a few more librarian-related questions through my favorite search engines. (Yes, I’ve got favorite search engines. How librarial is that?)

Being a librarian is…
Great
Stressful
Hard
Boring

(I’d say it was all of the above.)

A librarian is…
A trained information specialist
Coming to dinner
Stacked

Librarians should…
Read
Rule the internet
Know
Know how to spell

How do librarians…
Choose books?
Use math?
Help the community?
Make money?

Librarians can’t…
Save the world
Buy me love
Help falling in love

Why Do librarians…
Love their jobs?
Make more money than teachers?
Make less money than garbage collectors?

Librarians Need To…
Know about math
Know about MOOCs
Know everything

Librarians can…
Help struggling readers
Change the world
Work from home
Have tattoos

Librarians enjoy…
The silence
Life
Shampoo
The ride

Sadly, when I typed in: “Your librarian…” the only result I got was:
Hates you

(Which, it turns out, is the name of one disgruntled librarian’s website.)

And finally?

Librarians never…
Die. They just check out.

So what can we conclude? We librarians are awesome. We can help struggling readers. We can have tattoos. We can’t help falling in love. But we can (still) help change the world.

Is any of this accurate? Who knows? If you want to talk about it, you’ll find me behind the circulation desk at the Bala Cynwyd Library.

Unless I’m at the tattoo parlor.

(First published by Newsworks.org.)

Roz Warren
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